My fascination for Electrical Engineering arose from a growing awareness of the technological advances permeating the world around me. The invasion by radio, television, telephone and cellular technology has transformed the face of communication and, in a sense, shrunk the globe. The mind boggling pace of this transformation has galvanized me into taking up communication and signal processing so that I could be an active participant in this exciting field.
During my undergraduate studies, I was introduced to a whole range of fields like communications, signal processing, VLSI, image processing, control engineering, devices, power systems. I was spellbound looking at the trail the field of communications has left behind, in the process of the technological advancement. It has made efficient real-time communication across the globe a practical possibility.
Undergraduate education emphasizes mainly on the exposure to various fields in the branch and also helps one in making a judicious decision about his field of interest.The broad based and well-balanced undergraduate program at the Indian Institute of Technology;
One of the turning points during my undergraduate studies was a lecture by Dr.Ashok Jhunjhunwala (an esteemed faculty member and head of Electrical Engineering Department, IIT Madras).During this discussion he drew an analog signal waveform, susequently chose some points on the waveform and then made a striking statement,” The set of points represent the complete analog signal and no information is lost by such a representation". I came across this later as the well-known Nyquist Sampling Theorem for band limited signals. This undoubtedly intensified my curiosity in the communication field. My excellent analytical skills and strong aptitude for mathematics are the added qualities I possess, that are required to be successful in research in the field of communications and signal processing.
After having gained enough academic and practical experience in my undergraduate education, graduate studies were my obvious choice as it is an opportunity to extend the breadth of education and training in the area of my interest. It is also a chance to hone my creative skills that are essential for me, to be in the forefront of the highly competitive world of research in this field. After all, I want to contribute my own bit to the existing body of knowledge.
My inclination towards communications and signal processing turned into a deep-rooted interest mainly after I came across the courses, "Analog communications", "Principles of Communication" and "Communication systems” in my junior year. The courses were handled in an excellent manner. In these courses, I learnt about the mathematical power of "Transforms", about the kinds of "Modulations" and the reasons for their use, about “Quantization" and its applications in telephone networks, about frame synchronization etc. Subsequently, in my senior year, in the course called “Digital communications", I learnt about the kinds of digital modulation. In addition, the course on Digital Signal Processing which I had taken in my seventh semester gave me an idea of the power of signal processing in the reduction of the number of computations and in hastening the speed of calculations. The powerful FFT algorithms were fascinating to learn. This and the use of DSPs in many high speed applications impressed me.
Indian Institute of Technology,
My communication with my friend at the
Given an opportunity to participate in the graduate program of your university, I am confident of contributing substantially to the ongoing research and teaching activities of the
I am looking forward to becoming a part of the wireless communications research group at your university.
