Rewrite statement of purpose
Rewrite/edit the below written statement of purpose discussing on the experiences on computer science course.
I have always believed it is never too late to discover a new passion. Since I was 10, my main one has been mathematics. Always willing to try new things, I took an internship organised by INSEAD to learn the Python programming language during my first year of high school. This was a turning point in my life: I was so euphoric about what I learned that I decided to dig deeper into the exciting new field which is computer science. I immediately started learning new algorithms and paradigms to make my code more efficient and readable and was amazed to see how one data structure was more adequate than others to solve a particular problem.
To learn more concepts and practice, I then set myself an ambitious goal: create and publish an automated bot that would connect to Discord, and interact with users to facilitate community creation, moderation, and administration, as well as providing miscellaneous, voice, fun commands, and small games. This was one of my first major group projects, which was in collaboration with two friends (another programmer and an artist for logo designs). As the creator of the project, I learned project and group management, as well as the importance of deadlines. I also learned a lot of knowledge in Python, database systems with SQLite and PostgreSQL, asynchronous tasks, use of APIs, code optimization and security. The bot was free of use, but we made a premium version that would enable the use of advanced commands for the community owners who purchased it. We made a bit of money (although not a lot) thanks to our advertisement to server owners.
As the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down all schools, our high school online service’s servers could not handle the massive user throughput and were regularly down. A friend and I therefore created a discord server, such that all teachers in all classes were able to continue to give online classes and students to attend them. Students and teachers were very grateful: around two-thirds of them joined and used it every day. As organizing such a huge server was tedious, the bot that I finished creating was a very helpful tool that helped us finish setting it up in less than two weeks.
Thanks to my third rank at the National Mathematical Olympiad, I then had the opportunity to do an internship at the Wolfram company in Oxford, England. After getting knowledge in the new Wolfram language, I created a game that allows anyone to learn simple vector operations in a fun and visual way using bricks to represent vectors. This motivated me to continue learning software development via games for some years with C++ and the SFML library by taking multiple online courses and creating small games like the Asteroids Game and a Conway’s Game of Life engine simulator using those technologies.
Last year, as I went to my High School’s Anglophone Section yearly play, I spoke with the teachers who wrote the play and learned about a problem they had. Writing the play was a time-consuming task, as formatting the play in a readable way was long and repetitive. It also led to some logical errors which the professors didn’t notice before finishing writing the play: for example, a character could already be on stage and the script asked for him to enter again. I therefore created a Java application that allows playwrights to format plain scripts with no format to output a nice-looking PDF, allowing several customization options, and checking for every possible potential logical error. As a result, the section’s director and the professors were very grateful and will continue using it for their next plays.
During my junior year at McGill, a friend of mine made me discover the beauty of chess – I already knew how to play but wasn’t very interested up until now. After learning some chess theory in openings, middle and endgames by joining the college’s chess club, I was eager to learn even more and master the game as much as I can. But we faced a problem: there were no free chess apps that allowed user to analyze deeply a game with move save, history, variations, annotations, and analysis by the Stockfish chess engine. This is the reason why we developed a complete chess app to include all the above, also being free and open source.
My brother was doing an internship at the “Koober” startup when he realized something: the customer archive was unordered and unindexed. As a result, the searching for documents for a particular customer was convoluted and time consuming. He noticed that the company would perform around 10 customer document queries per day, and an average query would take around 10 minutes to accomplish, due to the lack of organization. This meant more than 33 hours were wasted every month (4 business weeks). Around 20% of the employee’s time is wasted: this represents one-quarter of an FTE. In terms of financial waste, this represents around 500€ per month or 6000€ per year. I also asked my father if the company he works for (Alphabet, BMW Group) has similar problems, to which he responds affirmatively. I therefore started thinking about a Python script to automate the scanning, ordering, and renaming of files to better order the archive, such that querying the files of one customer becomes very quick. I have contacted people at the firm’s computer science department, with aim to enter the enterprise and help them process their document archiving system with an automated solution. After updating my script to their requirements, my test was successful, and I was able to deliver ahead of time. Since document archiving where pretty common for companies, in startups like in bigger ones, and my successful test, my brother and I decided to industrialize our creation to sell it to other companies, whether as a simple product (the script), or as a service to implement it and customize it for the company.
Through my graduate studies, I expect to finish the project led by my brother and I, as it matters a lot for us. We expect to become, and will work hard to be, entrepreneurs by commercializing our project.
