Below is my personal essay I submitted together with my admission application for the Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science in Ateneo de Manila University. Hope this essay would give me a chance to be part of the PhD in Computer Science program.
Computer Science is a field of marvel where computers play a vital role by propelling businesses, education and entertainment into something productive and exciting. Truly, it made our lives easier, more productive, and profitable.
However, in the emergence of information technology, it created a wave of shift which creates a decline of incoming students for the computer science as a course. The direction the students made is merely on its application and, whether we like or not, research and development among the younger generations now is not as important as it was before.
One of the reasons why I chose to be part of this exciting course, PhD in Computer Science, is to get deeper understanding of the course and higher level of appreciation towards it. I see beauty in data abstraction through classes or object orientation, formal languages, computer architecture, the semantics of a programming language and many others. These exciting topics are not basically appreciated; in fact, my years of teaching experience in different higher educational institutions in the Davao region made me conclude that students only appreciate how the technology works through its application and not on the underlying principles as to how these technologies are put together. Thus, being an educator and at the same time the Dean of the Computer Science department of DMMA College of Southern Philippines, it is my duty to impart not only the knowledge and skills a computer science graduate must possess but also impart appreciation while learning the course. I see computer science as a dying course; many HEIs in the Davao region create an influx of graduates in the information technology year after year and only a very small percentage of computer science graduates are produced annually. It is my mission to increase the number of students and graduates in the said course. Another reason for taking the course is the need for the department to be aligned with the CHED’s requirement that at least one teacher must be an MSCS or PhD CS graduate. It is a sad reality that only schools in Manila offer MSCS/PhD CS. It is high time to enroll in PhD CS since the instructions will be delivered here in the region.
I have always been fascinated with programming languages. In fact, my graduate thesis was on “Assembly Language as Machine Instructions in Selected High-Level Programming Languages”. It was a compiler involving strings of hexadecimal numbers fed as instructions to create an executable command file. The same content written as a dynamic link library (DLL) file can become part of other programming languages to solve the problem of backward compatibility.
As a college professor, I see to it that students will always find better ways through concepts and methodologies by creating better algorithms that run faster. Someday, I might be able to improve existing algorithms to make it run faster through notations and produce higher degree of reliability and accuracy.
A plethora of fourth-generation programming languages may be emerging right now in the software development market, but challenges it will bring forth as I forward through PhD in Computer Science may not be easy as it will deal modern concepts in software engineering, bioinformatics, mobile systems and different practices involved as these are not present during the time I graduated from my course. The track I am going to pursue should this application be accepted is to write a dissertation that provides best algorithm practices for the android operating system. I noticed a big decline in the runtime when applications are migrated from the iOS to android. There are still so many things to be done with the open-source operating system, the android. I believe tweaking the operating system could create speeds at par with the Apple’s iOS. This, I believe, will be my contribution to the Ateneo graduate education and to the growing billions of mobile users around the world.
2 comments:
Nice blog sir! Very inspiring for graduating, non-graduating and for those who are still paving their way up. Wish you success in this journey towards making things much better as what it was before.
Good luck sir!
thanks, lanz.
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