Norberto Vera Hincapié

Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Department of Chemistry

Phone: +57 301 2697597

E-mail: nverah@unal.edu.co

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

Dear Sir/ Madam (To Whom it may concern)

When I was 10 years old I realized that I wanted to be a chemist. I used to watch all kind of
documentaries and read informative books about the universo and how it Works. I remember that
all the authors and people that I admire at age where chemist and I wanted to be like them in order
to untangle the mysteries in nature. When I entered to high school and took the first courses in
physics and mathematics, I confirmed what I knew since I was a little girl. I fell in love with the idea
that a sophisticated language as mathematics could be used to describe the behavior of the universe
and that every calculation made in paper can be reproduced in the laboratory.

I decided to go to the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the best university in my country, to be

fulfill my dream and become a physicist. While I started to make progress in my studies I realized
that all this beautiful and complex calculation describe, in a good way, an ideal world where a lot of
approximations where needed. But in order to understand real systems, with a big number of
degrees of freedom, with a big number of interaction, and so on, it was necessary more powerful
and interesting tools like probability and statistics. That is the moment when I discovered the
wonderful world of statistics, I took all the courses that I could and I decided to do a master in
physics using stochastic processes to characterize the behavior of less ideal systems, and that has
been my topic of research for the last four years.

I dedicated the last six years of my life to study really fundamental theoretical problems. I have
spend days after days in front of a computer making simulations of physical systems and I realized
that I love to program, but I don’t want to spend my life doing something so abstract that has not
applications in real life so I want to make change in my career path, applying all the knowledge that
I gained during my studies and my research to the industry, to something more useful and relevant
to the daily life, and I am sure that data science is the perfect way of doing it because of the vast
amount of applications, in economics, science, technology, commerce, gaming, advertising, etc.

Looking at the web page of NYU, I noticed that this is the right place for me, you offer an excellent
program that help students to learn the necessary tools to work in the industry, and great
connections with possible future employers. Also I am sure that I can bring different and interesting
features to your school. I have a really strong mathematical and statistical knowledge, I have
experience programming, and analyzing real life data and finally, although I come from scientific
background all the education that I received during my undergraduate and master studies can be
easily translated to a different work environment, so at the end it is and strength not a weakness.
I have a lot of motivation and I hope to be accepted to the 2017 fall program for the master in data
science.

Sincerely,

Norberto Vera