Personal Statement
Program: MBA

Just like Helen Keller who attempted to attain the summit of her life through her incessant perseverance, I have also been doing my best efforts to achieve constant self-improvement and to work toward my maximum self-actualization. Both Helen Keller and I share one thing in common, that is, we adhere to the same spirit of perseverance and self-perfection. Nevertheless, there is one essential difference. What Helen Keller was trying to do was to overcome her physical predicaments and constraints so that she could behave and do things like a normal person. Being a normal person, I would like to tap my potential to the fullest possible extent so that I can achieve academic and professional excellence necessary for becoming an elite of the emerging young generation.  The rapidly growing Chinese economy seems to be providing us with an unprecedented opportunity to our personal fulfillment. Under such circumstances, what we should do is to become fully prepared to embark on our journey of life, to venture into deep waters. As a matter of fact, I have already been making some of the most important preparations for my ambitious undertaking in the future.

I completed my undergraduate education from 1998 to 2002 in the specialty of marketing at the Business Administration Department of Institute of XX. Although the Institute is by no means the most prestigious one in China, I have been one of the best students in this Institute. Drawing inspirations from Einstein’s assertion that diligence accounts for 99% of a person’s success, I have endeavored to prove this doctrine through my concrete action. At the very outset of my undergraduate program, I decided that I must make maximum use of all the educational resources available to improve and perfect my knowledge. By the time I graduated, I proved that my undergraduate life was a very rewarding one, embodied in my satisfactory academic performance, important extracurricular activities, a spate of honors and awards, well-developed personal qualities, and recruitment by my Alma Mater.

As part of my personal development, my undergraduate career was characterized by constant improvement in academic performance. By the time I became a junior, I was ranked top three in my class. My diligence, sound analytical ability and strong interest in my chosen specialty, all those factors contributed to my sustained scholastic success. Marketing is a subject that encompasses knowledge in economics, management, psychology and other disciplines. This interdisciplinary nature of marketing, plus the challenges of creative thinking that it poses to its learner, helped to strengthen my interest in it as I delved deeper into this subject. As a result, I managed to achieve quite satisfactory scores in all the core courses—Business Psychology, Marketing, International Marketing, Modern Enterprise Management, Public Relations, Market Survey and Prediction, etc. Meanwhile, benefiting from the systematic and rigorous training in economics and management, I have considerably enhanced my analytical skills, which gradually permitted me to grasp the essence of the matter amidst apparently complicated business issues. I also started to reflect on some basis but specific problems in our economy, such as “Why none of Chinese enterprises have so far failed to enter the world’s top 500?”

During my undergraduate program, my academic commitment did not in the least affect my extensive extracurricular involvements. On the contrary, those involvements served to develop my management capacity, interpersonal communication and teamwork. I was a journalist of our Institute’s Journalism Association, reporting on major campus events. I was the chief debater of our Department’s Debate Team and by working closely with my tem members, we won the first prize in our Institute for two consecutive years. My other extracurricular positions included assistant director of the Study Department of the Students Union, director of the Social Practice Department of the Institute’s Students Union, and a member of the Institute’s Students Committee. One thing that should be stressed is that, as director of the Social Practice Department, I successfully launched the final match of Miss Network in XX Province, which was part of XX The match, designed to popularize Internet knowledge and show the charm of the learned women students, produced quite a local sensation. As the main planner of the event, I met and overcame major challenges. I believe I will derive lifelong benefit from this experience.

To be engaged in high-level business management has always been my professional objective. As far as I am concerned, this challenging profession is what I am most interested in, one which can allow me to apply my knowledge and expertise to face challenges. With China’s reform toward the market economy, a large number of big enterprises have been created, but over the past two decades, no Chinese enterprise can be found in the world’s top 500. An important factor is that we lack true entrepreneurs and effective ideas of modern strategic marketing and management. This situation calls for well-trained business administrators with international perspectives. An important purpose of your MBA education is to provide systematic theoretical support for solving various business problems while equipping future enterprise administrators with all the necessary managerial skills. In addition, I am deeply fascinated by your MBA program’s competitive and international character.  In my proposed program, I will continue to focus on marketing, with special emphasis on studying the advanced marketing strategies and concepts of the world’s top enterprises. It is my conviction that, against the background of economic globalization, an international education can give me far more than the mere knowledge and skills of business administration.

As a necessary foundation for my prospective MBA program, I will have accumulated two years of work experience (from 2002 to 2004). Upon completing my undergraduate program, due to my distinguished performance in academic, extracurricular and moral conduct, I was recruited by my Alma Mater to take up a teaching position as a teaching assistant while concomitantly serving as student councilor. For more than one year by now, I have been managing more than 700 students in an entire grade in XX.

Although my responsibilities are not those typical of an enterprise, I have derived much pleasure of successful management in ensuring the smooth operation of student life and activities, in addition to promoting my sense of responsibility and managerial expertise. Admittedly, there are important differences between the management of students and the management of employees in an enterprise, I have consciously and creatively applied my knowledge of human resource management that I learned in my management courses. This makes me realize that many theories and approaches of commercial and industrial management can be equally effectively applied to the management of non-profit organizations to improve their operation efficiency.

As one of the best-loved XX universities, XX University enjoys a very high prestige for its MBA education. What this University really attracts me is that your university attaches great importance to group research and small-class education whereby students are allowed to collaborate with senior professors to undertake various interesting projects. I believe that this highly interactive and competitive educational model will be very appropriate for me in that it can fully draw out my potential in business management and lay a firm foundation for me to become a business management elite in China. In my proposed study, I will stick to my usual way of self-development—constantly transcending my former self in pursuit of a life of sustained personal development. Just as what Helen Keller said: “The result of each attempt is a success, and along the ladder pieced together by each individual success, I will ultimately reach the grand altitudes in the deep of the azure clouds—the summit of my hope. ”