personal statement for PhD programme application

My first contact with computing was during my secondary school days when I learnt GWBASIC as a member of the Computing Club. It sparked my passions to learn more about computing and drove me to enroll in the Computer Science program at the School of Computing, NUS. The four years I spent at the school was both enriching and eye opening. For my honors year project, I took up a Bioinformatics research project supervised by A/P Leong Hon Wai (School of Computing) and Dr Guillaume Bourque (Genome Institute of Singapore). Informal conversation with my supervisors and my own background readings for my project show a vibrant and exciting field of research in the area of Bioinformatics, with interesting theoretical and practical results which influence the way we understand and interpret the large amounts of data generated by biologists. A somewhat counterintuitive observation I made when studying is that the more you learn about a subject, the less you know about it as you discover new areas of research. Graduating this semester with a Bachelor in Computing, the logical step for me to learn more about this field and to make my own research contributions is to enroll in a graduate program in the School of Computing. Unlike the traditional field of theoretical Computer Science that are still many undiscovered problems in Bioinformatics. No one put this more succinctly than Don Knuth when he said, “Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on, it’s at that level.”

Besides fulfilling the coursework requirements during my undergraduate study, I was involved in extra curricular activities in the School of Computing. In my second year, I was invited to join a special training program for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). I was selected to take part in several regional contests. The team of 3 students including myself obtained the first place in the Kanpur Regionals in 2004 and represented NUS in the world finals in Shanghai in 2005. After the world finals in 2005, I left the competition to focus on my honors year project but I remained in the ICPC group as a mentor to guide and train the newer batches of students and as the system administrator for our own automatic contest server. Besides the ICPC, I also helped out in the training program organized by the school for students selected to represent Singapore in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). In recognition of my contributions, I was invited to accompany the Singapore Team to the 17th IOI held in Poland as an adjunct to the team. My experiences in both the ICPC and IOI have given me a strong foundation in problem solving and the systematic analysis of algorithmic problems and their solutions.

The School of Computing is in a unique position for research in Bioinformatics due to its proximity with other research institutes in Singapore in this field such as the Bioinformatics Institute, Genome Institute of Singapore and the Institute for Infocomm Research. The school also has a number of faculty members who have contacts with well known research groups in Bioinformatics such as Dr Pavel Pevzner’s group in the University of California, San Diego. Besides working on my research I hope to continue to contribute to growth of the ICPC and IOI community in NUS and to share my experiences and passion in computing with the student community. I hope that I will have the privilege of continuing my education in the School of Computing.