Statement of Purpose

In the second year of my high school, I started to volunteer in my school library. There was a Pentium II in the library which I took over and spent all my free time on. I started to rewrite the library’s old dos-based book collection manager software using Borland Delphi®. I got it to work within few months, but I had plenty of time so tried to improve it and make it more enjoyable to work with. Two years later, before entering university, I sold 35 packages of ‘Librarian’ to other schools with the support of my school.

The pleasure of the process of designing and implementing a neat solution was very inspiring for me. Beside Librarian, my friends and I developed two other pieces of softwares and presented them on Khwarizmi Young festival and were honored by the jury. The first one was an optometrist assistant software, a package of 8-test eye examination and pure tone audiometry. My friend and I spend 3 weeks of our summer holidays in school of rehabilitation sciences (iums) finding out which tests can be reproduced on the screen of an ordinary pc and modifying some of them with the help of the teachers to make them suitable for the package.

The other project was a software omr which I started with another friend during the third year of high school. As a preparation for the national university entrance examination, we had a lot of multiple choice tests and the marking was a painstaking task for the teachers. As we needed an inexpensive solution feasible for high schools, we worked on a flexible algorithm to overcome the distortion of camera pictures and make them usable with cheap webcams. Meanwhile I passed the entrance exam of National Olympiad in Informatics and had the opportunity of learning variant methods of problem solving and different design patterns from some of the best teachers in the country during summer of 2002.

I was accepted in the best science and engineering university in my country, Sharif University of Technology, and started to study computer science in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. After my first year at the university, the lecturer of Advanced Programming encouraged me to apply for a part-time programming job in Sepehr Mehr, the software company which had implemented the enrollment system of the university. There, I learned about some methods of professional software developing, and was introduced to the newest tools of software developing like subversion and apache tomcat, as well as alternative philosophies about software licensing like Free Software and Open Source.

I joined GraphLab project, working on an open source tool for implementing, visualizing and testing graph algorithms. I participated in development of Sharif Linux, a localized distribution of Linux. I also co-administrated a linux club for high school student under the support of Science and Art Foundation. I finally cofounded my own company, Zeerak, working towards building a successful e-business.

Through these years, I have learned that algorithms, although important, usually aren’t the most important part of software developing. cpus are getting faster and storage is getting cheaper. In most cases, designing a better user interface plays a more important role in making the user happy.

Sharif university lacked many of these parts of software engineering in its curriculum. For example there wasn’t any professor or lecturer to instruct the 3-unit user interface course in my university nor in nearby ones. So I educated myself using books like The Inmates Are Running the Asylum and articles written by experts like Joel Spolsky and Aza Raskin. We designed most of our uis in Zeerak according to user-centered design guidelines.

I’m applying to academically learn the professional process of ui design, how the experts decide the arrangement of the elements, how they prototype a piece of software, how they measure how pleasurable a product is to use, and how they find new methods to improve it.

—	Reza Mohammadi
	January 25, 2010