As a youngster growing up in a small town in central Iran I used to have a vague picture of pursuing a PhD degree in America.
Most everyone with whom I shared my dream of studying in USA used to volunteer an opinion that I would stand no chance to achieve such a purpose. All along there was only one single prominent person in my life who always supported me in my quest to excel in learning: My Mom.Inspired by my Mom’s support and the burning desire to prove to others that I am able to make my dreams come true I decided to draw a road map to success where first step winning admission from Allame Tabatabaei High which is the best high school in the province. It was at Allame where one of my first turning points of my life occurred; I got familiar with one of the most attractive branches of Natural Science, Physics. My admiration grew by day towards scientists like Albert Einstein and Stephen William Hawking, leading me to the point which I decided to participate in Regional Olympiad of Physics.Though I passed the first level, the lack of a well designed training program in the province prevented me from a successful attempt in the national level.
However, I did not lose faith. In fact, it made me stronger and also ever firmer in my belief in this saying: “if there is a dead-end, then go through it”. With this attitude I could manage to achieve an excellent result – and also got to the second major turning point in my life – in the National University Admission Exams. In 2007 I attained the rank of 311 in my local region and 835 nationwide, among approximately 500,000 participants.
This gave me a wide spectrum of options to choose my desired field of study as well as my university. Due to my solid background in mathematics as well as my high interest in engineering and mathematical sciences, I chose Industrial Engineering at Sharif University of Technology -the top ranked Technical University in Iran- as my field of study. The most significant achievement in my life has been winning admission from Sharif University of Technology which offers programs of study in Science and Engineering Leading to BS, MS, and PhD degrees.The quality and standards of undergraduate programs at Sharif are comparable to the very best programs in the world. Now that I am at Sharif, I believe that fulfilling my dreams is quite within reach like never before.
In fact, I am at the top of my class of 80 outstanding students with a GPA of 18. 45/20. All this assures me that I can succeed. The third turning point came about when I was just a sophomore; I passed the course “Probability and Applications” with the highest grade. This course planted the seed of my great appreciation for uncertainty in the real world problems.During the fourth semester, by passing “Engineering Statistics” I became certain of what I wanted to study in the future.
After passing this course I started self-studying in more advanced Probability and Statistics and further on, tried to take as many electives related to this area as possible, such as taking the “Regression Analysis”. In my junior, by passing “Production & Inventory control I” and considering my experience of Probability, I decided to take several courses related to Probability Models and Stochastic Processes such as “Production & Inventory control II” and “Queueing Theory & Prob.Models”. Furthermore, because of my interests in Stochastic Processes, I decided to audit “Financial Engineering” which familiarized me with this area, and I am determined to take courses in “Real Analysis” and “Financial 1 Soheil Sadeghi: Statement of Purpose School of Operations Research & Information Technology Engineering” to strengthen my background. It is worth mentioning that I have passed several graduate level courses to pursue my interests such as Simulation and its applications.
I have always tried to find answers for the questions that came to my mind.So I have worked with Professor Mahlooji on a topic entitled “A New Approach in Fitting Linear Regression Models with the Aim of Improving Accuracy and Power” and this work has been published by the Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The main contribution of this work lies in challenging the common practice of inferential statistics in the realm of simple linear regression for attaining a higher degree of accuracy when multiple observations are available, at least, at one level of the regressor variable.We derive sufficient conditions under which one can improve the accuracy of the interval estimations at quite affordable extra computational cost.
A numerical example has been presented to fully explain how our approach works and to compare the results of our approach versus the results obtained from three of the well known statistical software systems. During my academic career in Bachelor of Science, I learned about a unique characteristic of Industrial Engineering comparing to other engineering fields. While other engineers work on how something could work, Industrial Engineers are working on how something could work more efficiently.It seems that there are some criteria in different problems that are hidden and only a systematic mind can realize and analyze.
Therefore, I have decided to choose Operations Research and Industrial Engineering program for my graduate studies to fulfill my desires and talents in parallel. Since Undergraduate studies are not deep enough to provide all the unanswered questions in my mind, I strongly believe that by enrolling in Graduate Program, I would be able to improve and deepen my scientific knowledge and have more opportunities to use them.I profoundly believe that the very best way of pursuing my goals in the future is by attending university and accomplishing PhD program. Despite having admission for post-graduate studies at Sharif University of Technology, I still am determined to continue my studies in the USA, at a top ranked university.
After searching in different institutions and research areas I readily realized that due to the high quality of research executed in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, Cornell is certainly the best fit for my goals. The Probability and Statistics labs execute projects that I can contribute to via my background.In addition, The Financial Engineering and Data Mining areas could also be a perfect logical extension of what I have gained as an undergraduate student. Therefore, due to areas of research interests, several professors such as Prof. Gennady Samorodnitsky, Prof.
Sidney Resnick, Prof. David Ruppert, Prof. Shane Henderson and Prof. Bruce Turnbull fascinated me In addition, the program of studies in Operations Research and Information Technology provides one with a wide range of areas of concentration to choose from such as Statistics, Probability, Stochastic OR, Data Mining and Financial Engineering.
In essence, the quality of the professors and the variety of projects in fields which deeply fascinate me have made me completely certain that Cornell -and the opportunity to work in its research areas- is definitely the best choice for my graduate studies. It is my dream to reach the highest levels of academic achievements. I am confident that by employing the full abilities of my mind I am capable of primarily accomplishing immaculately what is anticipated from me in graduate school, and secondarily, serving the society of Industrial Engineers as an active and dedicated member, striving to better the world.
