Essay Update Again

Many thanks to all of you that contributed. Even the "need more emphasis on desire to be mad scientist" comments proved helpful. So here is the latest update, again with instructions include so you all know what I have to do with this essay.

Applicants are asked to provide a 3 - 4 page, double-spaced personal statement which includes the following:

* Why do you want to undertake graduate work?
* What do you expect to derive from your program of study?
* If you have a concentration in mind, briefly outline your interests in this area.
* What do you expect to contribute as a student and subsequently as a member of the profession?

Since the 19th Century Electrical Engineers have changed the world more than any other group of professionals. Almost all of the advances of the modern age are in some way based on the work of Electrical Engineers, including the use of electricity, radioes, and computers. I have experienced some of the cutting edge of this group during my work in some of the research labs at Virginia Tech. I have so far worked in both the Autonomous Systems Control Lab at Virginia Tech (ASCL) [check name] and the Center for Wireless Telecommunications at Virginia Tech (CWT). Each lab focuses on a different aspect of the broad and influencial field of Electrical Engineering. The ASCL workes on autonmous aquatic vehicles, where the CWT workes on cognitive radios.
In my work at the ASCL I worked on developing a submarine that sensed its environment to decided how to move through it based on a set of mission goals, as discribed by the operator. At this lab I worked more as an outsider offering help to Graduate Students, but the level of inaction with the Graduate students was enough to pick up a falvor of Graduate student life. Most of the work I did her was support of the research projects going on in the lab by mantaining and reconfiguring the hardware of the submarine, however in this work I saw first hand the sort of research projects that were going on within the lab.
In the CWT I take on the role of a "Junior Graduate Student" in many ways. Once again I am working in support of the various research projects of the labs, but the nature of these projects is different. There is not a heirarchy of work in CWT; rather, all the work done in the lab is of a higher level. I am more connected to research done in this lab, more involved in the research. I have already started to consider taking on my own research project within the lab, much in the same way that the true Graduate students of the lab do. Within the CWT I have advanced the experience gained from the ASCL to come closer to life as a Graduate student, with a little more freedom and responsibility that than of an undergrad.
In both of these labs I was experiencing life as a graduate student, but more importantly to me I was advancing a life long dream. In both cases of my lab work, I was helping to design systems that sense their environment and react in a useful way. This is what I wanted my life to be about for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I viewed Engineers as the people that made science useful to people; since then I have not experienced anything that would make me reconsider this view point. As I continued my education I discovered Electrical Engineering, a profession that has made the largest impact in research history and certainly has the potential to continue reshaping the world for decades to come. I became enthralled with the idea of creating systems to take care of the work that I didn't want to consider.
This combine with my interest in working a research lab on the leading edge of knowledge, drives me to my goal of acheiving a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering. I know that this is the best way to achieve my goals of changing the world. Already in my work in the ASCL and CWT I have experienced systems that have the potentail to impact the entire world. The implications of developing even a submarine that can autonmously map waterways or a radio that can intelligently navigate a wireless specturm are endless. Beyond even that, though, I see the possibility of extending the knowledge gained through these endevours to impact everything. If I can help to master the techniques required to design systems that can dynamically access various bandwidths to provide efficient and durable usage of the wireless specturm, I believe those same techniques can then be extended to design a system that, given a clearly defined task, can go on to gather all the required information and provided a efficient and reliable way of completing its goals.
These systems will certainly change everything that they can be integrated into, providing a more "optimal" outcome with least effort from humans. This will allow humans to spend their time and effort on more difficult problems or tasks that are less clearly defined. Naturally all of this is decades away, but these are the exciting possibilities of the work I would like to do in Electrical Engineering. Part of the sucess of computers is based on a concept know as abstraction, the separation of outcome from implementation; I believe abstraction can be applied to some of the cutting edge research being done in communications and controls to provide general thinking systems.