These are the instructions from the Grad School Program:
Academic Statement of Purpose
Please write a statement that answers the following questions (recommended length: 1,000 words max):
a. How has your academic and professional background, including any professional training, prepared you for graduate study?
b. How will our program help you achieve your intellectual and professional goals?
What are your academic interests and why do you wish to pursue graduate studies in this specific program?
c. (Optional) Are there any personal experiences, achievements, strengths, or circumstances you would like to include or that you believe will help you succeed in our program?
A) Should talk about my career at UW-Madison and my Computer Science Degere which was moderately successful with a 3.11 GPA. It should explain that it was not more successful because I went through some severe personal hardships after my exgf committed suicide between my third and fourth semester (the difference can be seen on my transcript, I got a 4.0 the semester before and withdrew the semester after and struggled for a few semesters after that before rebounding) for which I blamed myself before realizing it wasn’t my fault. I also had an extremely succesful career at Wells Fargo as a software engineer for 8 years from 2000-20008 and was promoted four times in my first four years on the job and served as Web Developer 5 and Assistant Five President for the last 4 years and was team lead of my team for the last 5 years and had many responsibilities including even advising my managers on hiring decisons.
B) I lost the Wells Fargo job because I developed some pretty severe substance abuse and mental health problems. I am actually on social security disability to this day and I want to get off of it and get back my independence and regain gainful employment and be able to support myself and not rely on government benefits anymore. My resume has not been getting any bytes on the market and I believe more education is path to not only getting employers to notice me and be willing to hire me again but to learn current technologies as my knowledge is a bit stale as I have not been active in technology beyond what I did for Smart Recovery on a System Administrator level to facilitate setting up two chats for them (I set up one chat on Discord and another which is called Rocket Chat for which I taught myself Ubuntu Linux and evaluated and taught myself Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform and ended up going with AWS). The Rocket Chat is still running for Smart Recovery right now and helps many particpants in their substance abuse and other addiction recovery to this day and has been running for 2 years and 4 months. I want to laern more about Data Science (and also artificial intelligence) if possible because these subjejcts have always fascinated me and I’ve never really had the chance to learn it or had access to a program that could teach it to me.
C) What should probably be included is that I volunteered for Smart Recovery between August 2015 to November 2022, I stepped down to focus on myself and getting employment. I was a technical advisor and set up two chats for them as well as a Chat Volunteer (counselor), Chat Moderator, Co Chat Liason (vice Manager of Chat Voluneers and Moderators), and Chat Liason) for Chat. I was also a member of the Online Leadership Team for a period of time. The letter should also tell how I’ve been free of substance abuse since December of 2014 and how I believe I work harder on getting better from substance abuse and mental health than anyone I know and I believe I am in a good position mentally and physically to do a program like the u niversity of Illinois program and it’s time to improve my life.