My Reasons for Pursuing Graduate Study and My Academic and Professional Interests and Goals - Essay Example

Describe your reasons for pursuing graduate study and your academic and professional interests and goals. My desire has been to pursue my education in the field of Electrical Engineering and in keeping with this; I am undertaking a decision towards graduate study which will provide me with the knowledge of specialization and the experience in Power and Energy Systems. I have the belief that this would keep me in nice stead with the provision of a direction towards my goals. I have an objective to make my career strong as a research professional at an academic and a commercial, research-oriented organization. With the same idea in mind, I pursued my studies in Electrical Engineering at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi Ghana. My undergraduate degree project work was focused on Energy Efficient Office Equipments. This has provided me the right idea concerning the related needs of the area of study. I have worked on this project and hence it has offered me a chance to understand the knowledge in line with the needs of the usage of electricity by the office equipments and as to how the same represented a significant portion of electricity which was being used in the commercial buildings and data centers, not to forget their environmental and economic benefits to add to this. All this while, my research has emphasized a great deal on the energy star office equipment, user education, energy-efficiency strategies, estimating potential energy savings and evaluating technology performance and reducing leaking electricity. What this experience has taught me is to facilitate myself at developing my research skills in addition to my quantitative and analytical skills on the same token. It is after completing my graduation that I got recruited to take up an Electrical Engineer position with the Electricity Company of Ghana, ECG – a power utility with a focus on distributing electricity to customers. At the ECG, I gained the opportunity to learn as well as analyze problematic electric transmission protection failures by researching fault occurrence history and then coming up with the recommendations which helped a great deal on stabilizing the network as well as towards the reduction of the occurrence of faults in essence. Thereafter, I was provided with a chance to work with the premier Internet Service Provider, NCS in Ghana, which made me pursue a Masters degree in Information Technology at American InterContinental University – at Fort Lauderdale in Florida. As part of the Masters program, I have undertaken a project to design a Java web based online shopping mall and this played a centric role at making me comprehend the intrinsic details related with programming languages. At the moment, I work with ISI Telemanagement Solutions Inc., in the capacity of a Lead Test Engineer where I am assigned to develop test plans which enable my team regression test software and ensure that it meets the specifications and does not breakdown no matter what the circumstances are or the environment it is working under. I also get the opportunity to interact with diversified clients to see how best we can tailor the software as per their liking and needs. In that respect, I see myself to be a best fit as I am involved in data collection, surveys and data analysis which essentially play its part at helping to collate this information in order to design UI (user interfaces) and also write out specifications for new developments which can be incorporated into software. This applies to the competitive and marketable regimes of the software in the long run, for the benefit of the organization nonetheless. I aspire to go back to school in order to get an advanced degree in Power systems engineering which would facilitate me at finding practical solution to power and energy system problems. Research in areas like Electricity system analysis, operations and planning entice me endlessly and the opportunity to find solutions regarding the system problems as a result of expansion and dispersion of the populations in our cities and towns would outline a way towards more efficient use of energy in the visionary sense of the word. Add to that, another area of interest is in Power Electronics where I would like to research towards better and more reliable ways to design, analyze and control switching power converters. I am very flexible and remain open to other topics in addition to these. It is my utmost wish to undertake a research leading towards a PhD in Electrical Engineering. Here I may add that I would like to be considered for a graduate research or teaching assistant-ship. I feel confident as I possess the necessary analytical ability and research skills to conduct detailed and comprehensive research studies. My diverse work experience is what I bring to the program and I would like to say that a graduate study at University of Texas at Austin with a research faculty that is into the study of microgrids, development of fastest computer simulator and research facilities like the new nanoelectronics research center, will be a major step towards achieving my academic pursuits and career goals. I would request the authorities at the helm of affairs to lend me a chance to prove my worth in the long run. Yours truly, Kwame Word Count: 874 Read More