Whatever the mind can conceive, it can achieve - this is the driving force behind my academic and personal life so far. I firmly believe that, to be able to work on challenging academic pursuits, one needs a positive mindset, strong acumen and prior training which I was fortunate to nurture right from my school days. With my growing interest in chemical engineering, urge to solve complex & stimulating problems and passion for teaching, I resolved to take up a career oriented towards research. I am thus applying for the Graduate Program in Chemical Engineering for Fall 2009 at the University of Michigan (UMich) at Ann Arbor and I am confident that it would provide me the crucial training in terms of rigor and depth of knowledge; which are the essentials for a career in research. My undergraduate courses and experiences in research are my main motivators towards this decision. My research activities include electro-convection in poorly conducting fluids, modeling shear flow of granular media at the Indian Institute of Science and Brownian dynamics of polymer solutions at UMich Ann Arbor.
My excellent academic performance in school helped me to get into the bachelors program in Chemical Engineering (ChemE) at National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli (NITT) – rated amongst the top 10 undergraduate schools in India. At NITT, I grew into a person with an overall balanced career in academics, research and extra curricular activities.
As a sophomore, with the guidance of Mr. M. Arivazhagan, Department of ChemE, NITT, I developed a novel scheme to remove Chromium (VI) from synthetic effluents using Electro - coagulation (EC). Later, we developed an Artificial Neural Network model that successfully captured the kinetics of this system and this was presented at the International Conference on Modeling and Simulation at Coimbatore Institute of Technology, India. The experimental work using EC was published in the Indian Journal of Environmental Protection. I...