Since I haven't yet quit my job, I anonymized myself and my company. Please feel free to throw me your thoughts, comments and editing tips. The instructions from LSE are:
You must submit a personal statement with your application form. This should be between 1,000 and 1,500 words. It should describe your academic interests and your purpose and objectives in undertaking graduate study.
And a link to their guide on personal statements: lse.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/howToApply/makingAnApplication/personalS tatement/whatMakesAGoodPersonalStatement.aspx
Thanks!!
On Monday March 10th, 2008, I started employment as an Assistant Trader with the convertible bond arbitrage desk of Company X in Sydney, Australia. By the following Monday, Bear Stearns had sold itself to JP Morgan Chase, representing a dramatic acceleration of the ongoing financial crisis. The following four and half years was perhaps one of the most interesting times in economic history, and I consider myself lucky to have witnessed it from behind a trading desk. However, all that I learned from observing the causes and consequences of the crisis only led me to discover the limitations of my own economic education. This is what I wish to address by pursuing a Masters of Economics with the London School of Economics. For as our world's leaders grapple with challenges ranging from unsustainable sovereign debt, trade and competitiveness imbalances, environmental degradation and rising unemployment and inequality, economists will be called upon to provide modelling, analysis and policy recommendations. My career goal is to be involved in these policy decisions, and I believe that LSE can provide a solid academic base for a future career in shaping economic policy.
My interest in becoming part of the policy making process is rooted in my experience working for Company X. I was hired for my ability to think through issues and problems in a probabilistic and quantitative way. Building on this foundation, I learned about the structure of capital markets, stock, bond and options pricing, and how macroeconomics affects the capital markets over two years as an Assistant Trader. This was followed by a promotion to Trader, where I have since managed Company X's stock option market making operations. I was responsible for devising and implementing proprietary trading strategies, managing my portfolios risk, and mentoring Assistant Traders. Since volatility is a key input into any options pricing model, I was keenly aware of events that led to spikes in global volatility, such as the failure of Lehman Brothers, the ongoing European debt crisis, Japan's March 2011 earthquake and the downgrading of US sovereign debt by S&P in August 2011. As a market participant, I witnessed how effective - and ineffective - policy could be in influencing economic outcomes. I am particularly interested in monetary policy and central banking, since managing today's unprecedented environment of zero interest rates and quantitative easing will require keen foresight by central bankers for years to come.
Indeed, one of the worlds most influential central bankers is a former professor of LSE, Sir Mervyn King. His name is but one of many in long lists of distinguished students and faculty of LSE who went on to meaningfully affect the world around them. This focus on real world change is the primary reason I wish to attend LSE. A Masters degree will help build on my existing knowledge and provide an academic framework for understanding some of the concepts that I absorbed during my trading career. The international environment of LSE is ideal for fostering broader views on the dynamics of the global economy. I wish for my worldview to be challenged and questioned so that I may better understand it. I have always been curious about how the world works, and I feel myself pushing the boundaries of what a trading desk can teach me. Graduate study at LSE is where I believe I can continue my education to its full potential.
Though I did not take economics in my undergraduate courses, I majored in statistics (with honours) and history which I regard as a singularly useful combination of fields for understanding the economic state of the world. Statistics, for its power to interpret the models that simulate our world, and history for providing a sense of context. In my statistics component, I gained an appreciation for how stochastic models work by constructing a model of infectious disease transmission and analysing simulated data using a novel statistical technique called Approximate Bayesian Computation. This work later contributed to a scholarly article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (The epidemiological fitness cost of drug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Authors A, B and C (2009). PNAS, 106, 14711-14715). In my history component, I was a keen student of Early Modern England, Weimar Germany and the Great Depression, all of which were periods of profound economic change. More recently, I have kept up with contemporary literature on economics and finance as part of my employment, such as "Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise" and "Finance and the Good Society". Indeed, I believe that what I have learned over the course of my employment will be particularly useful in contributing to the economic debate at LSE.
To best utilise my education with LSE, I have a number of potential employers that I plan to apply to upon graduation. These include the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Reserve Bank of Australia, the Australian Treasury, and independent economic policy advisers. Irrespective of who I am eventually employed by, I intend to advocate for sound economic policies that will moderate inevitable business cycles and promote sustainable prosperity through free markets and trade. I will count my career a success if I can look back and point to ideas and actions that potentially prevented an economic crisis such as in 2008.
For while I have greatly enjoyed my time with Company X and have been shown a whole new way of perceiving the world, I have reached the limits of what I can learn there. One of the most valuable lessons that I have taken away is that trading is a reactive job. A trader constantly reacts to events around them, and their success is largely determined by how well they react. I wish to instead be part of the forces that act for the economic betterment of society, and measure my success by the quality of my ideas. I believe that a Masters of Economics at LSE provides the best avenue to that success.
