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Personal Statement
Program: International Marketing
As a 23-year-old aspiring student who has grown up and received his education
in pace with the evolution of China’s market economy over the past two
decades, I deem myself in possession of many professional qualities for
undertaking a career in advanced marketing and business management. I believe
that I have demonstrated more creativity, management skills, English language
proficiency, and the courage to accept challenges than most of my peers on a
number of important occasions—being selected from a large number of
competitors to study at XX University of XX on an exchange program, winning
prize in the XX for University Students, launching my own company upon
completing my undergraduate program. My interest and my demonstrated abilities
show me unmistakably that to take up a lifelong career in high-level marketing
management will be very appropriate for me because that is where my potential
lies. In order to scale new heights academically and to lay a solid foundation
for my later-day career development, I would like to apply for a Master’s
program in international marketing at the prestigious Business School in XX
University. For me, this is a self-conscious attempt to face challenge and to
transcend my former self. I expect to be initiated into a first-rate academic
environment in which my academic foundation is consolidated and my business
potential is strengthened.
It was in XX Technology and Business School that I completed my undergraduate
education, majoring in marketing. As an academic discipline, marketing
fascinated me for its increasingly important strategic role in modern management
and for its interdisciplinary character, as it encompasses management science,
psychology, sociology, statistics, etc. From the very outset of my undergraduate
program, I realized the importance of seeking a comprehensive development, on
both academic and personal levels, in order to become a senior management
professional in the future. Therefore, throughout my undergraduate program, I
endeavored to make full exploitation of all the available educational resources
of my university to improve my academic performance. An examination of my
academic transcript will indicate that I have maintained a year-by-year
ascendance in my study. Apart from that, I have also been very active in
extracurricular activities and learned German and XX languages besides English.
My ability to perform independent research was cultivated and improved through
writing my internship treatise and graduation thesis, both of which were given a
95-point score, the highest score in my class. In particular, my thesis On the
Marketing of Hi-Tech Products, by focusing on the major business risks involved
in the marketing of hi-tech products and on the short and uncertain life cycle
of those products, was rated “Excellent” for detailed analyses and novel
perspectives that I offered in it.
The most important part of my undergraduate graduate program is definitely my
short but memorable stay in XX. As a junior, I was selected through a
competitive screening test to embark on a 4-month exchange program with XX’s
XX Polytechnic on the strengths of my distinguished academic performance,
English proficiency and computer skills. This exciting and memorable experience
proved extremely beneficial to me—I gained marked improvement in my English,
was exposed to a totally different life style and educational system, and
achieved new understanding of the concept of marketing. Plunged into a new
academic environment, I demonstrated a creative and a critical spirit rare in
Chinese students, and won appreciation from my XX professors. In attending the
course High Tech Marketing, my team members and I spent the entire semester
verifying the plausibility of a business proposal that I raised but was rejected
by my XX advisor. Under my insistence and through my continued refinement, my
business proposal achieved eventual success and has been incorporated into the
overall business plan of XX Company. In another course International Business
Plan, my fruitful collaboration with my XX classmates led to our team’s
winning of the unprecedented full mark in the final evaluation of our course
project. I also accumulated important experience of performing group research in
the eAcademy project headed by Dr. XX, in which I was responsible for the
marketing planning of the enterprise.
Upon completing my undergraduate program, with the support of my friends and
family members, I launched my own XX Trade Company that deals in medical
equipment and provides hospital management consulting service. In doing this, I
became one of the few Chinese graduates who established their own business. My
business impulse originated from two sources. The first is my participation in
the XX for University Students in which my team won Excellence Award (my
responsibility was to formulate marketing plans for our “Optimum” Company
and to conduct market surveys). Another is my internship as a senior student at
an e-commerce company during which I planned and organized market investigations
in preparation for the marketing of the company’s latest product—Hospital
Management Information System. I saw myself as possessing necessary business
management skills and marketing potential.
Managing my own company, making real business plans and designing real
marketing strategies, all those have allowed me to apply my knowledge and to tap
my business potential. In making this bold move, I wish to develop a clear
understanding of what I am good at and to chart the course of my future career
development. My present application for a Master’s program at your esteemed
university is motivated by my need to receive further academic input that will
enable me to develop my company into a major enterprise.
According to modern management theories, successful enterprises must be
highly customer-oriented and marketing is no longer the job of a particular
functional department of an enterprise. As a developing country with a planned
economy for many decades, China lacks a well-developed science of management and
marketing, and the current marketing practices are far from mature as marketing
as a standard academic discipline is only of recent origin. Yet this may prove a
blessing in disguise for me as I am located at the crucial point of China’s
development in marketing theory and practice and I will enjoy greater chances of
success. In my proposed degree program, I would like to focus on the marketing
of Hi-tech products and on the marketing of multinational companies under
cultural pluralism. The relationship between marketing and cultural pluralism
has long been my major research concern and during my study in XX I have already
paid special attention to the impact of cultural differences between East and
West on marketing. In my future studies, I will be exposed a greater cultural
diversity, which I believe will further facilitate my study and research. It is
an art to deal with the subtle relationship between culture and marketing and I
need to gain more understanding and experience in this regard.
Young as I am, I am fully aware of the transitory nature of life and all that
I can do is to race against time to maximize knowledge and expertise and to
enrich the value of my life within the limited span of my life. Through my
future study, I wish to develop myself into a marketing specialist. This is an
objective, and I am in possession of the necessary foundation, academic and
professional, and the potential for realizing this objective.