Economics and Business Personal Statement Example

Born in the post-communist state of Slovakia with Vietnamese roots, from my early age I was wondering why we were generally living in better conditions than our relatives in Vietnam.

As I grew older, my dad explained me the benefits of policies supporting private property rights and foreign investment to the Slovak economy. On the other hand, the Vietnamese centrally planned economy was holding back the country's development.

Since then, I have observed significant steps done in Vietnam towards economic freedom, as well as the threat to social stability due to growing income inequalities. For this diversity of economics and its social
relevance, I am very attracted to solving such issues and that's why I want to pursue my further studies at university.

Besides being very active during Economics classes, I have extended my scope to include many non-academic activities, too. Last summer, I was chosen to participate at the Summer school of Economics organized by the F.A.Hayek Foundation. At lectures, I was very inspired by the Austrian school views on business cycles.

For example, I agree that the cause of business cycles lies in artificial setting of low interests by central bank.

A good evidence to this is the 2008 US real estate bubble and subsequent global recession. This demonstrates how important the knowledge of economic theories is in order to prevent such catastrophes and that's why I'm so motivated for an extensive study of economics.

At this event, I also realized how much my mathematical background helped me to analyse economic articles and evaluate them in a broader context using the statistics. In addition, the workshops provided me the opportunity to develop my managerial and strategic planning skills via many simulated modules solving social problems such as industrial pollution in developing countries.

As a talkative person with the ability to speak 4 foreign languages, I have always found discussion a good way of gaining different insights into economic issues. Hence, I took the position of a chairman at the Bratislava Model United Nations 2010 discussing the Eurozone Crisis.

What intrigues me is how the crisis resulted from inefficient fiscal governance, and issuing common bonds to solve the credibility problems of less disciplined countries cannot be the long-term solution. As a member of the school debating team, I was able to use the skills I gained from debates such as creating convincing arguments.

They particularly helped me to present my solutions to the issue and defend my views against counterarguments of the audience. Moreover, I have also realized how countries may interpret the data differently.

This illustrates the challenge of dealing with information bias faced by economists when making general statements which I consider an inevitable, but exciting part of economics.

Apart from the projects of economic theories, I have also been involved in a real market analysis. As the part of a mandatory project for Economics, I decided to assess the loss-making business of a local cinema. For the sake of this project, I made a survey among potential customers via questionnaires and created a Facebook fan page in order to gain insight into a declining tendency of cinema's attendance.

The result of my research showed that one of the crucial factors was lack of promotion, and it taught me how important a continual interaction with customers is for keeping their loyalty. This experience has motivated me to study business at university to better understand how firms operate.

I believe that my genuine passion and natural curiosity for both economics and business will make me a suitable student for this course, and I also look forward to being able to positively contribute to the international community at a highly ranked UK university.