To pursue a Masters in Computer Science at Tufts University.
The desire to pursue a masters in computer science at Tufts stems from my interest in languages, mathematics and computer science. In the course of this essay, I will both relate experiences that have shaped my academic interests, and describe the skills which I want to gain. It is my hope that this degree will both strengthen my background in computer science, and help me hone in on an area for further research.
For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in languages. In High School, I studied Latin and developed a passion for systematic languages. This curiosity led me to pursue the classics in college and learn Ancient Greek. By sophomore year, this love of languages also led me to two other types of languages, mathematics and computer languages. While I appreciated the rigor of mathematics, computer science seemed to be a discipline that lent itself to interdisciplinary work. Through computer science, I could view the fractals I encountered in mathematics, create optical illusions to study vision, and try to develop and XML-notation that captured the semantics of Ancient Greek mathematical diagrams. The variety of research I could do drove me even further towards computer science.
My experiences at the Perseus Project further strengthened my conviction that computer science opens the door for interdisciplinary work. While at the Perseus Project, I have seen how computers are used to enable humanists to pursue entirely new areas of research. I have met with a professor who reconstructs missing sections of Ancient Greek texts from their Arabic translations. He accomplishes this feat by using a training set composed of sections from the same texts where both Greek and Arabic editions survive. This past semester, I took a class in computational biology and I was intrigued by how data was obtained, organized, and distributed for research. This is precisely what Perseus seeks to do with its data for the humanities. At the same time, I was auditing Arabic and finished the SCALE Project at Perseus.
The SCALE Project exemplifies how computer science facilitates interdisciplinary work because it is a customizable reading environment that lets the user choose the disciplines for which they need more information. For example, if a biologist and a computer scientist were told to read a paper for their computational biology class, then they could put the PDF paper into SCALE to get a list of terms occurring in the article that reflected their knowledge. The biologist could opt to see only computer science terms, the computer scientist could opt to see only biological terms. The term list would then link them to several definitions as they occur in glossaries loaded into SCALE.
At Holy Cross, I majored in classics and mathematics and minored in computer science while rowing for a Division I crew team, serving as a resident assistant, and fixing computers in my residence hall. This past semester, I finished the programming involved in SCALE, a grant funded by the NSF and NSDL while auditing Arabic and taking computational biology. If given the opportunity, I will continue to put forward my best effort as a graduate student at Tufts University.
The opportunities at Tufts for a computer science student interested in the humanities and other disciplines are abundant. The Perseus Project provides an amazing resource as a testbed for computing in the humanities. The ideas which come from Perseus can often be applied to other disciplines. For example, SCALE arose from a link generation feature used to link classical texts to various secondary resources such as encyclopedias. Tufts is an ideal place to develop the skills necessary to apply computer science to a variety of disciplines. Another skill set I hope to develop is the ability to find patterns within huge quantities of data while developing visualizations that enable people to explore these and other relations within the data. Tufts also provides me with the opportunity to develop this skill through its research in data mining and Human-Computer interaction. Through data mining, I would learn how to extract patterns within huge amounts of data from many different disciplines. HCI would help me to learn how to present the data so that users could visualize and explore these patterns on their own. Speaking of presenting data, the final skill I want to develop is the ability to present and publish my research on a consistent basis, in a clear manner. The Department of Computer Science at Tufts, in combination with the Perseus Project provides the perfect venue to learn and hone this skill, for both organizations are research oriented and encourage publication.
My previous studies in classics, mathematics, and computer science combined with the Deparment of Computer Science and the Perseus Project at Tufts University make the masters program in computer science an ideal match. At Tufts, I can acquire the skills needed to apply technology to a variety of disciplines, to extract patterns from large sets of data, to create powerful visualizations of the patterns inherent in the data, and to present and publish my research. Language, whether ancient, mathematical, or computer-based, enables communication. If allowed to pursue a masters in computer science at Tufts, hopefully I will become a better communicator while developing the skills and technology needed to facilitate interdisciplinary research.