Personal Statement

Program Applied: Marketing Management

    In a highly competitive environment, the ability to create competitive edges over one’s adversaries and to achieve ultimate victory in fierce competitions depends not so much on materials resources as on the mental factors of intelligence and concepts. Those concepts that can lead to new visions and perspectives and those approaches that can effectively solve problems will have the greatest value. The overriding factor which ensures the eventual materialization of new concepts and gives rise to effective approaches is management. As a branch of applied science, the science of management has crucial value not only for developing countries like China which are making uttermost efforts to catch up with the developed countries, but also for the leading multinational giants in the developed countries themselves. For a person like me who has decided to pursue marketing management as my career objective, to sharpen my intellectual caliber, to understand the essence of management and to grasp important skills of management have become my greatest aspiration.

    As a Master’s student specializing in marketing and enterprise strategies, I am very proud to report that I have made some encouraging research achievements. Of the two research papers that I wrote concerning strategic development of enterprises—Enterprise Strategic Alliance Based on Resource Complementarity and The Strategic Orientation and Countermeasures for Chinese Enterprises in International Operations in the New Millennium, the former has been published by Economic Tribune in Sept. 2002 and the latter has been accepted for publication by China Economists in Feb. 2003. These two research papers are the fruition of my active involvement in a research project named Study on Chinese Enterprises’ Cooperation-Competition Models in Hyper-Competitive Conditions, which is sponsored by China State Natural Science Foundation (Foundation Project No. 70140132). Another paper entitled Brand Marketing: A Competitive Mode on a Higher Level in Modern Economics has been published by Contemporary Finance & Economics in November this year. Those research achievements can unmistakably indicate my tremendous potential to perform much more ambitious researches in my future degree program and I am determined to develop this potential to the fullest extent.

    I completed my four-year systematic studies in Engineering and Management Science as an undergraduate at the School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. It is precisely this undergraduate education that has reinforced my determination to pursue marketing management as my lifelong career. Although as an undergraduate my understanding of some courses cannot be described as profound (some might even be said to be rather superficial), my learning of those courses nevertheless widened my ken of knowledge and broadened my vision.

    In order to further enrich myself, I availed myself of every opportunity of academic exchange both on campus and off campus. I shuttled among Peking University, Central Finance and Economics University, and China Renmin University on my bicycle in order to attend lectures delivered by the country’s leading scholars and entrepreneurs. Those lectures constituted an important supplement to my in-class training because they were immediately connected with the realities of Chinese society. I also benefited importantly from my extracurricular activities. As minister of the Department of Social Practices of the School’s Students Union, I planned and organized the School’s Festival of the Art of Management. I also canvassed Pepsi Company to sponsor our university’s basketball league match. In launching those activities, I improved my organizational and managerial skills. In retrospection, my undergraduate program was most strengthened by my self-conscious attention to various applied subjects—higher mathematics, statistics and probability, linear algebra, operations research, etc. It can be said that my undergraduate education (in which my overall scholastic performance ranked top 4th in my class consisting of 30 students) enabled me to make some basic preparations in theoretical knowledge and in the application of mathematical tools.