STATEMENT OF PURPOSE My undergraduate major is Instrumentation and Control Engineering.

The courses offered in this discipline dealt with instrumentation techniques in diff erent areas like electrical, electronics, mechanical etc. and control in process industries. Right from my second year of college, I took an instinctive liking to courses related to my major and strove hard to understand the fundamentals o f instrument design. I learnt how their applications to different systems requi red adaptation of the same underlying concepts. The hours of hard work and effo rt I put in for these courses enabled me to secure good grades in all of them. I averaged 78.9% in coursework related to my undergraduate major (an equivalent GPA of 3.38/4.00). Towards the end of my third year in college, my good academic record and encouraging words from my teachers made me decide to study further in my field, beyond my undergraduate degree. I wanted to complete my graduate studies and p ursue a research career in instrumentation design. However, my priorities chang ed last year when my father suffered a heart attack last year. An angiogram reve aled a triple vessel coronary artery disease and a dilated left vehicle dysfunct ion. As a result, his daily activity is greatly reduced compared to his 12 hour s a day work schedule earlier in construction sites. I have always had a deep s ense of empathy for people suffering from various ailments and I started wonderi ng how I could do something to help others like my father, in my capacity as an instrumentation engineer. When I enrolled for "Biomedical Instrumentation" in my previous semester , it opened up before me new vistas for application of advanced engineering tech nology to complex problems in health care. Electronics and measurement techniqu es play a crucial role in developing devices used in diagnosis and treatment of diseases. I was excited by the prospect of working with living systems and usin g my engineering knowledge to be of service to people. I realized that I needed to increase my knowledge in life sciences, far beyond w hat I studied up to twelfth grade in high school. For this purpose, I decided t o enroll in a graduate program in biomedical engineering. In addition, graduate study in this field would offer me an ideal platform to pursue a research caree r in instrument design and apply this knowledge to alleviate suffering and impro ve medical care. As research in this field is ia, I looked towards universities in ical engineering. I visited the BME the various research activities with still in relatively incipient stages in Ind the US offering graduate programs in biomed web-site of your university and read about great interest.

Besides a strong undergraduate record, I possess a good working knowledge of pro gramming languages like C, VC++ and Java, which are increasingly important in co mputer control of instrumentation. I look forward to pursuing graduate studies in the biomedical engineering department at your university.

(Kamana Navaneetha)