一篇优秀申请硕士文书的分析

My road to mechanical engineering began with my dad unceremoniously kicking me out of the kitchen. By the time I was in kindergarten, I couldn’t resist rummaging through my family’s cupboards, trying to find something to take apart and rebuild it. This became a running joke in my family that, rather than knives or other sharp objects, I had to be kept away from screwdrivers, lest I end up taking the whole house apart. This all changed when I discovered desktop computers, and specifically GPUs, which I found endlessly fascinating in their ability to be easily disassembled and modified.

用小时候喜欢拆解东西作为开头，突出了自己对机械的兴趣。另外，作者这句话“This became a running joke in my family that, rather than knives or other sharp objects, I had to be kept away from screwdrivers, lest I end up taking the whole house apart”，意思是“必须让我远离螺丝刀，而不是刀子或其他锋利的东西，以防我最终会把整个房子拆掉。”，也突出了自己对拆解东西的喜欢。作者用了一种幽默的方法表达出来，也就是家人更担心自己使用螺丝刀，胜过担心使用刀子，可见自己有多么地热爱拆卸东西。这种有趣的表达让人的印象更加深刻。

Although my free time during high school was indeed spend huddled over computer hardware much the way my childhood was, I became interested in the capabilities of redirecting the work capacity of hardware, and in particular the ability to reorganize the way hardware acceleration can be optimized to assist in Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) tasks in manufacturing. During my undergraduate work at X University, I developed an interest in machine learning while working on Dr. Cheboygan’s ongoing research in augmenting GPU software to better optimize their performance in general-purpose computations. In both my senior thesis and independent study blocks, Dr. and I studied a number of potential workarounds for latency bottlenecks relating to DDR5 infrastructure.

高中的学习使自己对硬件加速产生了兴趣，大学的学习使自己对机器学习产生了兴趣，并且参与了Cheboygan博士的GPU性能提升研究。

这段主要强调自己的学术和研究能力。

This phase of my research cemented my desire to continue on with both machine learning and CAE, and it’s precisely around these points that I’d like to develop my MSc thesis. Specifically, I want to build on the considerable research on GPU acceleration I undertook during my BS in order to further expand upon shifts in both manufacturing and product design. As abstract as this work has been in many ways, its end result would be to streamline workflows for product engineers that will greatly speed up the process of dealing with intractable problems relating to bottlenecking by physics computations.

这段主要写了自己未来的学术兴趣， 有点类似于职业目标。

I’m motivated to address sophisticated problems like this for a fairly non-academic reason. Throughout the last two years, I’ve participated in organization drives with X organization, my region’s largest manufacturing union. Admittedly, I came to this work with quite personal motivations, having seen my mother’s engineering positions often under attack by naïve or even ignorant efforts to automate various aspects of product design. My work with this union sought to argue, from a scientific perspective, the need to improve both software and hardware using human-supervised machine learning and not wholesale robotic automation. Rather than downsizing and eliminating human positions in the manufacturing process, I offered data to union leadership that showed how a minimal investment in technological upgrades at the level of product implementation could preserve job security for product engineers and implementation supervisors while vastly speeding up the manufacturing process to deliver an increased output of nearly 80% in some cases.

本段叙述了一段实习经历，自己如何在一家实习企业里推行人类监督下的机器学习，而不是批发式的机器人自动化。我向工会领导层我提供了一系列数据，表明在产品实施层面上，对技术升级进行投资，可以保住大部分产品工程师和实施主管的工作，同时大大加快制造过程，在某些情况下，可以实现近80%的产量增长。通过这一举措，从而让之前的全方位、天真、大规模地将产品设计自动化的行为得到遏制，确保了员工的工作保障。

This was immeasurably satisfying, and although not every negotiation was a success, I was able to contribute something unique to a class of workers who I felt had suffered under an outmoded and overly aggressive model of automation for nearly 20 years. In short, I would like to pursue graduate work in mechanical engineering at Z University because I think my work can have an overwhelmingly positive impact in aspects of labor tensions relating to instrumentation and automation. I think that through careful work in machine learning and deep learning, we can target specific aspects of the manufacturing process that have proven to be flashpoints of conflict between engineers and administrators.

本段陈述了自己想在Z大学学习机械工程的原因，那就是因为我认为我能够在仪表化和自动化相关的劳动关系紧张方面产生积极影响。并且，我认为通过在机器学习和深度学习方面的工作，我们可以帮助解决制造过程中工程师和管理员之间的冲突。

The department's emphasis on teaching throughout the graduate program is also a huge draw for me. I tutored privately throughout my undergraduate years, and volunteered at my school's learning center to help students not only with introductory engineering courses but also calculus and linear algebra. Reconnecting to this passion for high-level mathematics, I would seek to work with Dr. Muskegon and Dr. Flint to both participate in and utilize their research in computational methods to clarify the mathematical dimension of my proposed thesis. Dr. Muskegon’s recent publications in the International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering are especially relevant to this work, as I believe my course of study would benefit greatly by implementing her utilization of novel approaches to principal component analysis.

这段主要写了两点：

1. 讲述了自己做的一些课外活动，比如进行私人辅导，并在学校的学习中心担任志愿者，帮助学生学习工程入门课程，还帮助他们学习微积分和线性代数。
   

2. 由于我对高等数学的兴趣， 我希望在研究生阶段在贵校的Muskegon 和Flint 博士指导下学习， 利用他们在计算方法方面的研究， 进一步撰写我的研究生论文。另外，Muskegon博士最近在《国际计算机理论与工程杂志》上发表的论文与我的这项工作也特别相关。

从这段可以看出， 作者对于目标学校、专业和老师的研究领域和发表论文有深入的了解。

Lastly, on a simpler note, I’ve always been drawn to the West Coast, and would love to explore the wilder, mountainous areas North of Vancouver during my free time. Growing up in the flatlands of the Midwest seeded a very strong desire for the “big landscape” areas of Western Canada, and I can think of no better compliment to the abstract and small-scale work I’d be undertaking in the mechanical engineering program than to spend my free weekends hiking and camping in places like Coquitlam mountain. Which is to say, simply, that I believe UBC is an ideal location for my next phase of scholarship not only because of its academic innovation and integrity, but because its surrounding environment is both beautiful and inspirational. I would arrive and continue to be an enthusiastic and incredibly engaged student in UBC’s MSc program, and I would be honored to assist in the incredible work being undertaken by both faculty and fellow graduate students alike.

陈述了自己被目标院校UBC吸引的其它方面， 比如对加拿大西部“大景观”地区的强烈渴望。我相信UBC是我下一阶段学习的理想地点，不仅因为它的学术创新和正直，还因为它周围的环境既美丽又鼓舞人心。

总而言之， 这是一篇理由充分，叙述生动，幽默有趣的一篇由母语学生撰写的一篇PS。其结构、逻辑和用词非常值得我们借鉴。本文特将一些比较地道和优美的词汇和搭配高亮了出来，供读者参考和借鉴。