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Name: Venkatesh Inguva School: Purdue Mechanical Engineering

Statement of Purpose

In the three years that I have spent as an undergraduate engineering student, I find myself left with lingering thoughts of dissatisfaction about what I have learned. Throughout my studies, spending time in the pursuit of mastery of various subjects such as fluid mechanics, heat transfer and system controls, I have learned numerous mathematical models to model behavior of systems which give me predictions of how systems change when subject to external influences. But I question the validity of such mathematical models, from the numerous labs that I have taken where I sought to see what the professors taught in classes align with the actual physical world, I have not come across an experiment that I have done with care and precision where the results align well with the theoretical models, in some cases I have seen errors exceeding 100% compared to the theoretical model. This leads me to ponder two points about my education thus far, the first being that what I am taught in the undergraduate school is inadequate in predicting how nature behaves and the second being that there is no replacement for experimentation in gaining knowledge about how systems behave for the very simple fact that mathematical models are limited to the imagination and the intelligence of the person observing them, they only show what the observer can perceive and not what is actually happening on the physical level. It is for these two reasons that I wish to pursue my education into the graduate school. Given the complexities of systems, it is impossible for anyone to gain complete mastery in all fields of engineering leaving me to decide a particular field of interest. I hope to further my understanding of fluid flow and combustion. I have taken graduate classes as an undergraduate pertaining to statistical thermodynamics, gas dynamics, combustion and two-phase heat transfer and would like to work on an experiment to see how well these more encompassing and rigorous models apply and align to experimental data. Ultimately, perhaps what I seek most from the graduate school is to learn how to define a problem, plan the experiment to tackle the problem and learn how to analyze experimental data and find the appropriate mathematical framework that predicts the experimental data that I collect. I also hope to use computational tools to aid in the development of my experiment. I have been at Purdue University for three years and will complete my undergraduate degree this summer. I have grown to love the halls of the mechanical engineering and have built relationships with some professors who I know will provide the highest quality guidance should I stumble upon an impasse during my graduate work. I have also found a research project to work on for my thesis here working with Professor Galen King on the N+4 variable geometry mixer for gas turbine engines. Purdue University appeals most to me because of the people I have met here and I hope to contribute at a higher level to the school. With the analytical skills that I learn during my graduate studies, I hope to be able to translate them into other areas of interest during my career. I do not plan on taking a managerial role in any company that I work for acknowledging that I do not know what the future holds for me preventing me from going into specifics. I wish to remain in the technical side of operations working on engineering problems and applying my mind to come up with novel and elegant solutions. It is for this reason alone that graduate school appeals to me because I will be learning what is currently being used by academia and industry to understand and analyze problems along with the appropriate solutions where known and how to the find the appropriate solution where unknown.

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