At the end of the GCE Advanced-Level in physical science stream, I was fortunate to get admitted to the Faculty of Science, University of Peradeniya, and I could be able to select a professional four-year degree program called Statistics & Operations Research in 2016. It is interesting to note that only 50 students were allowed to take this degree program in the whole island, and I became one of them. I did my studies in Statistics, Mathematics, Operations Research and Computer Science. Ever since, frankly, I might say “I feel the taste of the Statistics.” The thrill and the satisfaction through the curiosity of discovering intangible theorems with mind-blowing techniques are undeniably excited me. The elegant proofs and exquisite theorems filled my mind with infinitely many questions and gave a clue of the inherent passion for Statistics. I always encourage myself to learn new things. Therefore, it gave me a chance to learn beyond what is evident and a drive to study more than what was needed my university requirements. When I was trying to decide which subjects to chase in my university studies, there was always one question in my mind. What types of things can be more fascinating than the usual pattern of the unique study passion around us? I asked the answers from myself. With my mindset, I knew that statistics was the key feature that I needed to discover, to achieve my interests and skills into the workings of nature and eventually it became the deepest desire of my heart. As a result of this, I decided to choose statistics as a major key area of my undergraduate life at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka, and unsurprisingly, ended up with a superior GPA and became the best in my class. I completed my B.Sc. degree in February 2020: with first-class honors in “Statistics and Operations Research”. I was rewarded with the “University Award for Academic Excellence” for my undergraduate academic performance. Also, I was appointed as a Teaching Assistant at the Department of Mathematics at my university in March 2020. This enabled me to gain experience in tutoring, grading tutorials and conducting discussion classes for undergraduates. I believe the skills and knowledge that I am gaining now would be a strong foundation for my future ambitions. During my bachelor, I was involved in a research with the title “A model to predict depression of undergraduates in faculty of dental science, University of Peradeniya”, in October 2019 and the abstract was published in the Conference Proceedings of the Postgraduate Institute of Science, University of Peradeniya. In this research, five major classification methods namely Naïve-Bayes method, Neural Network, Support Vector Machine, k- Nearest Neighbor Method and Bagging CART method were implemented to build statistical models for depression-related data. To select the best model, several accuracy measures such as model Accuracy, Misclassification Rate, Specificity, Sensitivity, and F1 statistics were used. That's how I made my self- comfortable with the research work in the field of Statistics. Moreover, I did a project under the topic of “Reducing Unit Cost Per Minute In A Garment Manufacturing Process Using Goal Programming Techniques” and the abstract was published in the same conference. The purpose of this project was to find a method to reduce the “Unit Cost Per Minute“of a leading manufacturer in the garment sector.
