Statement Of Purpose Of My Career Plan

“The Oakland A’s never claimed to have discovered sophisticated statistical analysis. They claim to be ramming it down the throat of an actual big league baseball team.”

“Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game By Michael Lewis”

Moneyball made me realize how we can do performance analysis in baseball and lessons learned from it can be applied to organizations that are data-driven. I was fascinated to find how Billy Beane used computer-generated statistical analysis to form a baseball team on a limited budget compared to the super-rich groups. I could see how statistical data analysis applied in the field of baseball, made my decision that one day I have to be an expert in analytics.

I have always been a fan of mathematics and science from my school days, and that reflects being the school topper in high school and ranked 3rd in the entire city of Kharagpur, India. With my desire to excel in computer science and analytics field I got admission in Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology, B. P. Poddar Institute of Management & Technology affiliated to the West Bengal University of Technology, India. I received Grade C in 2 subjects during my fourth-semester exams. Once a city topper, now not even in the top 20 in the college department. Although this came as a shocker to me, this was bound to happen as I could realize becoming too complacent — that very moment I realized that I have to get it together. I pioneered a group of us hostel students who were struggling like me to maintain a grade to start a group study to help each other after college hours in the hostel. I scored 8.56/10 next semester finally being a topper in the fourth year with a grade of 9.19/10. If I look back at that moment, those couple of C grades were a game changer for me. Rather than taking it as a fall, I made it as a trampoline and jumped right up.

While studying information technology during my bachelor’s degree program, I learned the power of data, especially on the internet and e-commerce fields. Online comments contain rich information about consumers, including user experience and attitude towards a product or service. The numerous textual reviews can primarily affect the divisions of potential users, also providing business with the opportunity to improve their processes.

My first involvement with data analytics during my full-time professional job was analyzing the utilization metric data of transactions vs. response time for the last seven days comparing to the previous year of a fortune ten company every week and visualize the report to send to the officers. It was for the world’s second-biggest courier company that I analyzed the daily transactional data for all the users and prepared a daily report, only to be consolidated weekly for sending to VPs and SVPs of the organization. This work gave me a lot of exposure, and as an appreciation, I was offered a promotion in my job although not being eligible as per timeline guidelines.

It was a winter night I could remember being awake at 3 am at client location in the severely cold winter of Michigan doing some deployment of a mission-critical project for a big fortune 50 automobile company. I remember working at a stretch for 36 hours solely relying on popcorn and caffeine. This effort of myself did result in being awarded the Best SME in the manufacturing domain by my then employer, 3rd largest services company from India. But I realized this is not for what I am here. I could know I was getting diverted from my goal of being an industry leader in the field of data analytics and science.

While engaged in my full-time professional work I could realize that there are much more to learn in this field and higher academic will help me to be an industry leader. The master’s degree will provide me a very steep learning curve and also accomplish my short term goal of utilizing the best tools available with a technical mindset and acquire the required skills to become a data scientist which has always been my long term goal.

USF being a preeminent research university and also famous for being loved by sports enthusiasts is an ideal choice for doing my graduate studies. USF’s MS in BA-IS offers the perfect combination of courses that would equip me with the technical skills to fulfill my career plan. USF’s choices of classes provide the opportunity to specialize in data science track which is my dream. To further prepare myself to dive in this exciting field I have gained a certificate in R for data science, and D3.js for data visualization.

I am eager to add value to the class profile of Fall 2019 and pave a new way for my professional advancement.

I see 40 years old of myself standing in the conference room of world renown Sports Franchise to present the scientific report crafted on the statistical and analytical algorithms developed by me based on which the franchise is going to draft players for the upcoming season. I always had the career vision to work for sports and the pursuit of making a difference in the organization, in fact, has been a goal of mine.