Personal Statement - Brown

[memnus]

Four years ago, as I was selecting an undergraduate institution, I had very little idea of what I wanted. To call my criteria for schools 'arbitrary' would have been generous; in fact, I may have done better with a dartboard. That spring, it crystallized for me exactly what I needed - far too late, of course; applications had been due months previously. Fortunately, I lucked out, and matriculated at Harvey Mudd with every intention of going on into Artificial Intelligence.

Of course, selecting the field and getting into it were two very different matters. Two years later, after finally completing Mudd's core curriculum, I had a summer research fellowship in Machine Learning. I had hardly been introduced to the field, yet there I was with only a computer and a vague description of the problems that I was supposed to be investigating: unsupervised clustering of discrete-valued data. Weeks and months passed, and even though my code - a Matlab implementation of EM-based clustering - generated the desired results, I had very little idea of the ultimate goal. Numbers went in and numbers came out, and other numbers would say how similar the sets were, but that was all that I ever saw in them: numbers. By the end of the summer I'd realized my mistake: I'd jumped straight into a highly theoretical research field with no foreknowledge of what it involved, and realized quickly that what it involved was not for me. Foolishly, I set aside the idea of research altogether, and spent the next year preparing myself for the day-to-day drudgery of the software industry.

A summer internship writing document management software (about as thrilling as it sounds) opened my eyes to how much of a mistake that was. I knew that I wanted to do something more than anonymous coding with my life, but there were no obvious options for what that could be. That was until the second project in Professor Sweedyk's Computer Graphics class, where I was assigned to build a ray tracer. Within the first week of the project, I was fascinated by just how high the quality of the images I produced could be, even with relatively straightforward code changes. Two weeks through the four-week assignment I had finished the base requirements, and rather than focus on other classes, I kept thinking and reading about further possible improvements I might make. How many geometric primitives could I include? Beyond primitives, how could I effectively use polygon meshes to make realistic models? What could I do to soften up those polygons' sharp corners? Beond simple texture mapping, how could I liven up large, flat surfaces? I had to set the project aside in favor of other classwork, but I found myself looking forward to breaks, when I would have nothing more pressing to do and I could go back to the ray tracer and simply see what more I could do.

Even after I had to leave the ray tracer behind, I still tended to be preoccupied with it. However, it was only when I found myself explaining ray tracing to a curious chemist at two in the morning that I noticed that I'd discovered a potential long-term academic interest. I realized, though, that much like four years previously I'd reached a critical decision too late to really act upon it. With only a single full semester remaining, I hardly had time to get any more of the undergrad research experience that is so often touted as a prerequisite for graduate work. In looking for opportunities to continue related research, I discovered Brown's Games Group. I was intrigued by the idea of studying graphics problems under the auspices of games and entertainment, but always keeping in mind the other potential applications of any results, the applications that will have a much more profound effect on humanity. I want to feel that any research I do has a broader scope than merely a collection of pretty pictures, and I believe that Brown's program offers a unique opportunity for this.

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