Personal Statement

Program: Finance

The transitory nature of life requires us to make it as wonderful as we can. There are many different ways in which life can be made wonderful. My way of making life wonderful is not by making it sensational but by choosing a proper course of action that befits me and by persisting in pursuing my prescribed goal of life. In this regard, my greatest esteem goes to Madam Curie who, as a female, chose a course of life that was unique for her age. By withstanding the pressure exerted by the secular world around her and by persisting in the pursuit of her ideals, she was inevitable to achieve her successes. To possess a well-defined life objective, to be able to challenge difficulties and persevere in life-consuming efforts, those are the qualities that I appreciate and self-consciously require myself to develop.

Before entering university, I had already cherished a strong interest in mathematics and in finance. This could be legitimately attributed to the influence of my father who, by loaning me some amount of money, encouraged me to invest in securities. By the time when I graduated from senior middle school, I participated in the highly competitive nationwide university entrance examination and managed to enroll in Fudan University (located in Shanghai, China). But unfortunately I was arbitrarily assigned to study at the Department of Trade (where I majored in the Trade and Economy) instead of at the Department of Finance as I had desired.

Nevertheless, I was not in the least discouraged. My usual academic initiative kept prompting me to make ever greater efforts in my studies. I was further encouraged by the fact that as Trade and Economy major had a lot in common with the Finance major, the courses offered by those two departments were virtually the same during the first two years. Among all the courses related to finance, I was especially fascinated by Monetary Banking, Finance and Taxation, Financial Management, Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, etc. Those courses attracted my greatest attention and energy because they represented the application of mathematics in economics and in finance. The most important about the curriculum design of Fudan University was that the university attached great importance to the width of knowledge horizon and encouraged students to cultivate a multifaceted academic background for the development of their comprehensive and interdisciplinary qualifications. Due to this reason, I was able to transcend the arbitrary limits posed by the specialization of different majors and came to acquire a fundamental and macroscopic understanding of a diversity of interrelated academic fields such as trade, finance, accounting, and management. This broad-based foundation proved beneficial when I further undertook studies of other subjects that interested me.

My undergraduate studies are characterized by a solid foundation. I achieved almost straight A’s in all the courses in my major and in those courses related to finance. For this distinguished scholastic performance, I was awarded first-class scholarship for two consecutive years. Apart from doing excellent coursework in my specialty, I immersed myself in the reading of many classical works of economics, both by Western and Chinese scholars and economists. The works by Western authors include those by Smith, Mankun (?), Xiong Peter(?) and others, and the works by Chinese authors are those by Gu Zheng, Fan Guan and Wu Jinglian, all of whom are the most accomplished economists of the day. I was an active participant in various academic events on the campus, attending lectures and seminars and I won the first prize at the university-wide academic paper contest on economics.

My thesis for the bachelor’s degree, entitled On Virtual Business Operations, focused on various forms of business operations, their advantages and the conditions for realizing such operations. This subject has been rarely touched on in China and I completed the thesis by reading a large amount of technical literature published in English. My thesis advisor gave very positive ratings to my thesis. In addition to completing my formal education successfully, I have been actively involved in extracurricular activities. I was the director of Social Practice Departmental of Students’ Union and as such I organized many important and meaningful events such as art performance, donations for the disaster-stricken areas in inland China, and environmental protection campaigns. I designed the flag for our university’s sports meet, for which I was given a first-class award. All those involvements not only ennobled my mind but also enhanced my awareness of social responsibility.

When I graduated in 2000, I found employment first with Hua Rong Technology and then with Beijing Runnet Communications Co., Ltd where I have been primarily involved in financial matters. Over approximately two years of my work, I have accumulated much important experience and made some achievements. In the first company, I was responsible for launching its Information Center and participated in planning the company’s financing project, which succeeded in securing an investment of 20 million RMB. I was one of the initiators of the second company and was responsible for personnel management and, again, for enterprise financing. Within six months the company was launched, I helped to procure a government loan worth 2.5 million RMB. I have been fairly excited by those undertakings because they have been pioneering and innovative. Most of those projects are extremely challenging and, as a young university student newly graduated, I have derived much useful knowledge of practical financial operations that my undergraduate education could not possibly gave me. Apart from developing a strong sense of achievement, I have become all the more interested in finance. By now, I have received the professional title of assistant engineer and secured the certificate as ISO9001 Enterprise Internal Examiner.

Recently, an idea has occurred to me that, to arrive at new professional heights, it is necessary for me to further my professional trainings in finance. This is because, on one hand, the limited amount of finance I have acquired from my undergraduate studies has proved apparently insufficient. The financial world is in rapid change and my existing knowledge needs to be updated. On the other hand, the practical two-year work experience is heavily empirical, lacking a systematically theoretical guidance. This hampers me from developing a overall framework of financial perspectives. Finally, it is most important that I develop an international perspective in finance because China’s WTO membership will inevitably force Chinese financial institutions to conform to international conventions in finance.

Now I file this formal application for admission into your most esteemed graduate school. Even as an undergraduate I have already heard about your prestigious university. The essential difference between now and then is that I am a changed person in the sense that, apart from my undergraduate knowledge, I have two-year work experience in the field of finance and nearly 10-year experience in securities investment. The development of China’s financial market, as well as its education in financial science, faces a considerable gap compared with advanced international levels. The financial specialty offered by your reputed university enjoys a very high status in Australia, which makes your university my first choice for my application. At the same time, the multi-cultural background of your university is also what fascinates me because it will strengthen my pluralistic cultural awareness, an awareness which will prove crucial in my future experience of dealing with international clients from various cultural backgrounds.

My work experience has made it clear to me that finance is an erudite but interesting subject. It enjoys an increasingly essential role in this modern world and will be further applied on an ever widening basis. With China’s entry into the WTO, first-rate financial talents will be badly needed. By undertaking a systematic Master’s program in financial theory and practice at your university, I can expect to be equipped with all the necessary qualifications to embark on more ambitious financial undertakings when I return to my native country whose fledgling financial industry will develop on a most unprecedented scale in several years to come. It is my conviction that my intelligence, my diligence, my fundamental knowledge of finance, and my experience as a financial practitioner over the past few years will all contribute to making my prospective program at your university a major success.