Personal Statement

I come from a deeply intellectual family and since childhood, I have not only been encouraged to think in a scientific manner, but also develop independent opinions. This has helped shape up a personality that can distinguish between right and wrong and take sensible decisions. Ever since I remember, I have been highly inquisitive of my surroundings and things that happen around me and always tried to make connections between them. The continuous change in environment that I experienced as a result of studying in over 13 schools at over 10 different places, definitely aided in developing a holistic view of the world in me. I have had a first hand experience of the wonderful yet delicate matrix of cultures that India boasts of. This taught me how to appropriately interact with different types of people and gain as much as I can from them.

The thirst for knowledge persists in me owing to the conscientious efforts of my grandparents and parents. Right from my 5th grade, I solved advanced level mathematics and physics problems, usually 2 grades higher than my level and owing to my success at academics, I found myself taking particular interest in this activity. The will to have an in depth understanding of what I studied, irrespective of the difficulty involved, was something that began to characterize me.

Working under Prof. Murali P on mobile ad hoc networks was a good exposure to the process of research. I had originally set out to develop an entirely new algorithm from scratch, to carry out multi hop routing through ad hoc networks. Having constrained the problem to static nodes, I thought of grouping the nodes according to spatial proximity (using a Gabriel graph on each node to check for connectivity) and then implement the divide and conquer policy. To my surprise, this led to the very famous graph coloring problem, and using the standard methods to solve that did not help in making the algorithm any more efficient than others. I had to then revert back to using existing methods and improve upon them. This experience, however, did not suppress my ability to come up with original ideas. Instead, it taught me a lesson in the trade-off between theory and practice, and has strengthened my resolve to better myself at it as I pursue further research.