Personal Statement: My Pursuit Of Rationality

The achievement I am most proud of is my pursuit of rationality.

I believe that it is the seeking of happiness that makes my life meaningful. Having a clear idea of what I am pursuing, I have explicit criteria on my behaviors and never feel regretful about anything, since I make most judgments based on facts and reasoning rather than intuition. Therefore, I can live a life for myself, with a rational mind enjoying the happiness and an inner strength seldom plagued with vexation.

The pursuit of rationality also drives me to make the most of my life, for revenue maximization is an eternal goal for a rational person. I attach great importance to efficiency, which enables me to gain a relatively richer life experience than my peers, and fortunately,

Mathematics, with its beauty lying in rigor and certainty, meet my appetite to a great extent. With an extraordinary memory which can recall detailed information in most interesting or meaningful things happened in the past decade, and a brilliant logical reasoning ability which helps me win first and second prize of national math competition in Beijing from primary school to high school, I became a top student, successfully enrolling in RDFZ, the best junior high school and high school in Beijing, and Tsinghua University, one of the top two university in China. In the undergraduate study, I aced all mathematics and math-related courses including econometrics, and went on to self-study some advanced courses such as partial differential equations to meet the prerequisite of MFE program. Since courses about financial engineering are not available in Tsinghua University, I managed to participate in an exchange program to the University of Manchester with full scholarship from China Scholarship Council and studied with students major in Mathematics with Financial Mathematics, and the achievement of all first class grade, I believe, may well prove that I have both a keen interest and a strong qualification in the financial engineering

The program attaches great importance to students’ placement and the career team is helpful and dedicated to assisting students. Relevant courses about risk management and computational finance and assistance on job-hunting in the program are exactly what I need; and I hope that by consulting the career placement officer I can get reliable information and professional advice about the financial engineering industry, translating my strengths into a rewarding next step. Furthermore, the program embodies a large student group with diversified background, providing me with a fantastic chance to learn from others and establish my social network. I think it is the courses, the career team, the location, and the strong contacts within the financial community that help students guarantee their placement. In conclusion, participation in the program is an efficient way for me to receive a systematically training about the utilization of quantitative skills and computer programming in risk management with the help of insights in the relationship between derivative markets and the macro