University Of Rwand Personal Statement

I grew up in a country where living conditions were very harsh and exacerbated by the tragedy of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Being born in a refugee camp in the neighboring country of Congo, I have watched my parents work their way up from not being able to provide for our family to being owners of a small business. That automatically instilled in me the spirit of hard work and motivation despite the circumstances. At only 12 years of age, I started helping my parents as a distributing agent at their small shop. It helped me discover my passion for applied numbers and working with people from different venues of the world. At the end of my high school I excelled in my national examination and was awarded a scholarship to pursue my college

Despite both my parents not having a high school education, I was privileged to have them fight for me to pursue my education because they saw potential and believed in me since a very young age.

In my country, Rwanda, there is a Presidential Scholarship program that seeks to motivate outstanding and high performing Science students. In this program, the president of Rwanda awards scholarship to the best students who score high in the national exam that is taken at the end of high school. Since I come from a large family with a small income, I could not rely on my parents to support my College studies; therefore I aimed at the scholarship. I passed the exam with a high grade and I was awarded a scholarship to pursue College in the

It was an honor to meet women who are like minded and determined to succeed in the business world. The connections that I made through that conference developed into long term mentorships for me. Through those connections, I was made aware of the Goldman Sachs’ summer analyst program to which I was admitted and joined the Finance division. Throughout the duration of my internship, I gained a hands-on experience as I was handling normal analyst duties in the Controller's department. Not only did I learn from the world’s top subject matter experts in the field of Finance, but also was able to give back to the community of New York City through different volunteering projects with Hope for New York. My internship at Goldman Sachs raised in me the certainty that I wanted to pursue a career in the financial industry not to mention the amount of knowledge that I gathered including but not limited to better communication, team working, Excel and other internal financial software products, sharp critical thinking, and analysis. Certainly, I was able to accomplish all of these thanks to the networking opportunities and diversity within the finance