An essential part of your application, the Reason Statement is used to determine the appropriateness of your educational and professional goals and serves as an example of your ability to express yourself in writing.
In the statement:
- Explain your reasons for pursuing graduate study;
- Describe specific interests and your background in the field;
- List any relevant skills or training you have acquired;
- List relevant academic awards or honors you have received.
When I completed my undergraduate program with my degree in hand, I was excited to begin a career in software development. I was by no means finished learning, but I was looking forward to spending my days finding simple and effective solutions to real-world problems and learning along the way.
As a Management in Computer Systems major at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, I had the opportunity to decide between receiving a Bachelor's of Business and one of Science. I participated in the Future Business Leaders of America club in high school and its collegiate counterpart Phi Beta Lambda during my time at UWW, so I opted to follow the business track. I wanted to combine my concrete skills in computer science with the softer business skills required to succeed in workplaces and business regardless of industry. I completed many upper-level business courses that are required for all business majors, as well as every computer science course that I could fit into my filled 18-credit schedule each semester. After completing my fourth year I was ready to apply all of the soft skills and theory that I had been studying, and I began working full-time.
As the only software developer in the department of Anesthesiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, I’m fortunate to have a job where I’m given the autonomy to decide how to solve problems. I speak directly to stakeholders and users in the department, and implement tools and solutions from scratch on my own, using both the soft business and hard technical skills I learned during my time at UW-Whitewater. I use my freedom to decide implementation details as best as I can; I try to utilize a new language, framework, or ideology in each project to broaden my knowledge. On top of improving my skill set and gaining different ideas of ways to solve problems, I truly loved every minute I spent learning new things.
In addition to learning on the job, I attend technology meetups and conferences as often as my schedule allows. I've attended Milwaukee's JavaScript, React, Python, and IOT meetups, and Chicago's React and Node meetups so far with plans for more, and I attended the two-day Chicago Coder Conference in June 2017.
Because the majority of my projects are user-facing websites and tools, my primary focus during my career thus far has been on the web. To attempt to summarize, I have created or worked on:
- A 200-user business-critical web application that has evolved from hand-rolled PHP and vanilla JavaScript to Laravel and Vue
- Web apps using many of the popular frameworks of the last few years like React, Meteor, and WordPress
- A web app made in Java using enterprise tooling such as GWT and Tomcat
- Responsive static HTML sites using static site generators
- Progressively enhanced websites using Preact and Svelte
- Conversion and computation tools using Rust for speed and efficiency and Python for simplicity and flexibility
- Containerized web apps and services using Docker
Because I don't expect the trend of quickly-evolving web apps to change soon as far as my career is concerned, I am very interested in focusing again on theory and lower-level systems during my schooling. I co-authored a research paper and proof-of-concept implementation during my undergrad program, Version-Aware Word Documents, which was presented at the 2014 ACM DocEng conference and published in the post proceedings. I am also very interested in an opportunity to return to research and publication during my graduate education.
Two years later, I've completed many different projects and learned as much as I could along the way. I am confident in my ability to pick up and use the best tool for a particular job, and my set of tools continues to grow. However, after my brief respite from the study of theory and the inner workings of computers and the software that drives them, I'm ready to return to do just that. I will continue to as learn as much as I can during my days while devising solutions, but I'm excited to once again spend time focusing fully on the advancement and deepening of my knowledge.
I've never stopped learning, but I'm ready to broaden my scope and continue being a lifelong learner from as many angles as I can.