Personal Statement

Applied Program: Economics

I graduated from Beijing Foreign Languages University and have obtained two Bachelor’s degrees, one in Spanish Language and Literature, another in International Trade and Economics. I am interested in both of those specialties. However, an accidental event triggered my choice of economics as my ultimate career objective.

It was an interesting and memorable experience. During a summer vacation, I went to spend my holiday with my parents at a local fishing center which was a tourist resort. A talk with the owner the Center revealed that it was suffering from heavy loses. When he learned that I was a student of economics, he hoped that I could give him some suggestions to help him out. I agreed. In the following two days, I studied its environment, facilities, advertising measures, and the psychology of tourist consumers. The plan that I drafted centered around the idea of rural ecological tourism. Specifically, the measures included: a) increasing expenditures on facilities, purchasing more nice-looking sunshade umbrellas and leisure chairs; b) intensifying advertising efforts by hanging over nearby highways streamers to attract the attention of tourists and putting up advertisements in peripheral towns to publicize a new way of spending leisure times--the weekend fishing excursions; c) increasing service items to open a fishing restaurant where tourists can ask the restaurant cook the fish they have caught so that tourists can enjoy the pleasure of eating the fish caught by themselves. The owner readily adopted my business concepts and to my delight I later learned that the fishing center had been making profits since implementing the measures that I originated.

This success gave me immense encouragement. For the first time in my life, I saw how my knowledge of economics was put into successful application. This also constituted the motivation underlying my choice of economics rather than my studies of Spanish as my major academic and career objective.

However, another factor which contributed to my interest in economics has been related to my studies of Spanish. My knowledge of Spanish brought me many opportunities to serve as interpreter for Spanish businessmen who came to visit China. Those opportunities exposed me to the fundamental knowledge of economics and management. This knowledge was first quite strange to me but as I gained more understanding of it, I came to become increasingly interested in it. This growing interest led me to chose International Trade and Economics as my second major.

Our university has a strong tradition in International Trade and Economics. The faculty include many senior professors with international backgrounds. Their unique and lively teaching methodologies ushered me into the fascinating world of economics. For example, the teacher who taught me the course Marketing was a visiting scholar at Britain’s Lancaster Business School. He made significant efforts to make his classes truly interactive by involving students into heated discussions and debates. These provocative discussions not only aroused my serious reflections on the issues raised but also directed me to further readings in the related fields. Such a process of learning permitted me to develop a good command of fundamental knowledge in marketing on one hand and taught me how to analyze specific problems on the other. In addition, it developed my ability to devise appropriate marketing strategies in response to complicated market circumstances.

My efforts in coursework, plus my interest in what I studied, resulted in impressive scholastic performances, with straight A’s in the majority of key courses. Never contented with classroom knowledge, I have been more concerned with improving my skills in dealing with practical problems by applying my theoretical knowledge. As I have pointed out, my good command of Spanish language enabled me to act as interpreter in many important business activities, which allowed me to learn valuable knowledge about foreign trade and relevant business procedures. In this sense, my Spanish trainings have considerably facilitated my studies in International Trade.

My 5-year undergraduate bi-degree program bore important results. By making much greater efforts than the rest of my classmates, I completed theses for both specialties. One is entitled Study on the Issue of Immigration in Mexico over the Past Decades while the other An Analysis of Foreign-Oriented Township Enterprises in Guangdong Province. In the latter, I examined the historical evolution of township enterprises in Guangdong Province, analyzed the problems they face in their future development, and discussed how those enterprise can make opportune adjustments in their market strategies to meet new challenges after China’s accession into the WTO. Highly rated by my supervisors, both of my theses received the honor of the University’s Outstanding Thesis of the Year.

I worked at Agricultural Bank of China (Chennan Branch) after my graduation in 2001. For the past year, I continued to deepen my studies in international finance, economics, banking, etc. I passed the test in the subject of economics as part of FECT (Financial English Certification Test) jointly launched by China People’s Bank and Hong Kong Institute of Bankers. In the subsequent one-year internship, I underwent rigorous but systematic professional trainings in finance and within a short period of one month I became a qualified banking accountant. With good performance evaluation of the training program, I was promoted to work at the bank’s Comprehensive Management Department where I have been responsible for preparing a number of surveys and reports on how to perfect the bank’s mechanism of operation and its future development strategies. The most important report is Making the Loans of Medium- and Small-Sized Enterprises Become a Major Part of the Bank’s Business Growth.

In retrospection, I have been most concerned with the industrialization of China’s rural areas over the past two decades. Despite the fact that China is a major agricultural country, its agricultural economy is still rather backward. Excessive agrarian population (80% of the country’s total population) and backward mode of agricultural production have severely restricted China’s development of agricultural economy. How to liberalize the rural labor force effectively and to develop modernized large-scale agriculture is the key to China’s economic growth in the future. However, the development of agricultural economy is a project determined by many important factors. As a complicated undertaking that involves ecology, natural environment and human society, it requires concerted efforts in many fields. As far as the present-day China is concerned, efficient agricultural development necessitates the solution of many crucial problems in government policies and administrations.

It is precisely the existence of such important challenges, plus my long interest in rural economy, that has motivated me to pursue advanced studies in the United States where I can seek answers to the problems that have long interested me. The United States is a country with highly developed agricultural economy and in accordance with this there are many world-class agricultural economists and researchers. I hope that through my studies in the United States I can understand the mechanisms underlying the successes of the agricultural economy of the United States, which may serve as guidelines for China’s own agricultural development. In my prospective program, I would like to study agricultural economy on both macro and micro levels. My professional trainings in economics during undergraduate program, my first hand-experience in banking finance, my knowledge in management, and my solid academic foundations all endow me with full confidence to complete my proposed degree program at your esteemed university.