Personal Statement
Program: Marketing/ Ph.D. in Business Administration
As an undergraduate, there are several factors to my disadvantage in my present application for a DBA program in Marketing at the XX University. I do not have any formal work experience, or formal research experience in major research projects, with no formal publications. My understanding of marketing as a scientific discipline is but tentative, and may be confined by my Chinese perspectives, lacking a global vision.

This self-knowledge is painful. But a realistic self-assessment is always a good starting point and having a starting point almost automatically ensures one’s knowledge of the direction and of the destiny. This is exactly what happened to me in the first stage of my undergraduate program. In the first semester, I failed to perform well enough in the course Calculus and this spurred me to resort to whatever resources available on campus, including auditing at the Mathematics Department, in order to catch up and surpass my classmates, as I realized that mathematics is so vital to business administration. As a result, since my sophomore year, I have excelled not only in all the courses in mathematics such as linear algebra, probability theory and mathematical statistics but also in those mathematics-based specialized courses like statistics, market survey, microeconomics and industrial economics.

“Never predict about XX ’s future based on her past and present performance as she possesses unusual potentials.” This is the comment my head teacher at the high school once told my mother. I am by no means the most intelligent and diligent student in all the classes I have studied in but when I have always emerged as the top student through a perfection combination of the two. To achieve breakthroughs by transcending the apparent ultimate limitations and to eventually succeed where I have failed has become my active discipline of life. Indeed, constant self-appraisal and charting out visible objectives has informed my entire undergraduate program, both in academic education and in extracurricular practices.

In my undergraduate program in business administration at the Business School of XX University of China, my pursuit of academic excellence through sustained efforts has resulted in a 3.64 overall PGA, ranking top 2nd in my class (41 students) and 5th in my grade (83 students). Achieving straight A’s in almost all the specialized courses, I secured the highest specialty GPA in my grade. Among a spate of accolades, the one I prize most is the “XX” Scholarship I won during the academic year 2003-03, the highest honor for academic excellence of XX University available to only 10 among a total of 20,000 students of the University annually. I was the sole winner of the scholarship in my School.

The greatest benefit I derived from my undergraduate education is the training to perform case analysis. In many of our specialized courses, group discussions consisted of case study and students are divided into teams. As team leader, I would organize team members to discuss a case and prepare for presentation by searching for relevant statistics, performing in-depth analysis, looking for theoretical backup and even doing field trips. As a result, the presentations I have delivered tend to win the most positive rating from our instructors.

As business administration and marketing are more applied than theoretical, I have integrated coursework with field trips in order to improve my analytical and problem-solving skills. When learning Regional Economy and Planning, Introduction to Enterprise Management, Market Survey, either independently or in team, I made field trips to local companies, enterprises, government organizations, and manufacturers to gather first-hand materials, conduct sampling and interviews, investigating the management mechanisms, doing feasibility study, designing the focus of the advertising campaign, devising marketing strategies and planning corporate strategic development. On completing each field trip, I would submit a course paper to my teacher. In addition, I have served as a research assistant to Prof. XX in the project XX.

My active practices in other fields has considerably deepened my understanding of marketing. I took part in China first water pricing survey in which I applied my knowledge of economics and statistics. The report I presented provided important references to local government organizations. In a comparative study of the environmental problems of XXand XX, my home province, I came up with an innovative approach to treat pollution and my paper, XX, was collected in XX. This study called my attention to the relationship between environment protection and marketing, between consumer concept and behavior. My reflections on those and other issues have resulted in three important course papers—XX, XX, and XX.

My concern for consumer behavior, multinational marketing and environmental protection has led me to undertake research on one of the most important issues in modern marketing. In the thesis I am working on, entitled XX, I propose that green marketing will become a central factor in enhancing the international competitiveness of Chinese enterprises. This is because green consumption will become the ultimate trend in consumer behavior and that green manufacturing and marketing conform to the long-range interests of the consumer, the society and the manufacturer itself.

The study and research interest in my proposed program will be in line with my current research. Marketing in non-profit organizations, green marketing and experiential marketing are three little-studied areas in China. In addition, the expanded application of marketing in diverse fields, and the new characteristics and modes of marketing under the conditions of New Economy, they also fall under the scope of my interest. I am particularly interested in studying how pricing, as a necessary step in product design, can accord with overall social interest.

The underlying reasons for my choosing XX are extensive yet specific: the School’s emphasis on teaching methodology centered around case analysis, my determination to seek original well-guided research, and the University’s and the School’s international scope and global vision. I am most encouraged by the fact that your program welcomes collaboration of doctoral students with the faculty. The program also instructs students on how to draw on economic, behavioral, psychological and administrative theory to focus on marketing problems and through a combination of discipline- and field-based methods, your curriculum enables students to master concepts and research skills directly relevant to business problems. I would like to identify Prof. V. XX as my potential advisor whose knowledge and expertise in social marketing and managing multiple channels perfectly accord with my interest.

“Why do you practice compulsory selling?” “Because we must sell what we have produced.” “Why did you produce those unwanted products in the first place?” “God knows that consumers should be uninterested in our products!” This is a dialogue that I once had with the manager of a manufacturing company and it is typically indicative of the marketing reality in many Chinese firms and their management. It is precisely this reality that makes me believe that marketing research should be my proper mission.