Essay for MSF in Carey Business School - Business with humanity. Need your advices

Business with humanity in mind

Hi Everyone,

I am applying the MSF program at the Carey business school of JHU. I have drafted the first version of the required essay, and will appreciate any advices of yours.

1st required essay
Business with humanity in mind means many things to different people. Please explain what business with humanity in mind means to you and how you will apply your knowledge, skills and abilities to advance this ideal over the next five years. (500 word maximum)

My belief that 'business with humanity in mind' means 'to create business sustainability' has been solidified through my internship at the ESG Research Department of Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI). ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance, which summarizes topics including emission, waste, product quality, community impact, and human rights that we produce evaluation reports on. These reports focus on both potential business risks and how companies manage these risks.

At MSCI I have been in charge of following Tokyo Electric Power Company for the aftermath of Fukushima nuclear crisis. It is such a typical example to reveal how business sustainability is associated with humanity. The problems of dealing with the radiation waste, newly discovered exposure of Tokyo Electric employees, and subsequent protests against the restart of the nuclear plant sound the alert that high profit companies may cause severe disasters and even threaten people's life.

Fortunately, nowadays more and more companies begin to realize the importance of business sustainability. An increasing number of phone calls from listed companies in China seeking advices on our evaluation system and hoping to establish communication channels with the international capital market indicate this positive change.

I plan to contribute to this great change by securing a position in a consulting firm in China after graduation from Carey. In coming years, I would like to bring back brilliant business ideas, provide effective managerial advices, and help more companies make strategic determinations while support their business sustainability.

This career plan is well supported by my knowledge, skills, and abilities gained through my internship experiences. Before MSCI, I interned at Hejun Consulting Group, through which I discovered my career aspiration in financial consulting. Taking responsibilities in an equity incentive project for a listed company, I had done the job of helping the company improve salary competitiveness, which is, in nature helping the company develop its business sustainability in the long-run. By accomplishing productive interviews with people from the very top of the organizational hierarchy down to the very bottom and managing to proficiently switch between technical and non-technical terms when investigating from the macro-strategies to executive problems encountered by first-line employees, I also discovered my strength in communication skills, one of the most important professional qualifications required for a successful consultant.

The MSCI internship further endowed me with improvement of research and analytical skills while equipped me with methodologies of evaluating companies' business sustainability and their social impacts. More importantly, this internship has changed the stereotyped image of the finance industry to me from profit-driven to shouldering more social responsibilities. It is again through this internship that I have been cultivated the strategic thinking ability for considering companies' long-term interests and from the perspective of their social impacts.

I am looking forward to advancing my finance knowledge and skills from the MS Finance program at Carey Business School. By taking advantage of Carey's perfect location at Washington, faculty's strengths in both academia and industry, and curriculum focus in managing financial risks and quantitative analysis methods, I will become a well-rounded finance professional, bearing Carey's value of emphasizing humanity deeply in mind.

Wei, since this is a forward thinking essay, you don't need to speak of your internship prior to working at MSCI. The reason you don't need to do that is because, upon close comparison, it is your experience at MSCI that more reflects the motto of "Business with humanity in mind". That is because of the existence of the Fukishima disaster in your presentation. That makes it very clear that you are a practitioner of this motto already and therefore, you know how to integrate that mindset into your workplace on a daily basis. What you should be focused on is the presentation of your 5 year career plan with the mission and objective of the Carey Business School in mind. It would be nice if you had a more solid career plan that indicates the development of say, your own company with "Business with humanity in mind" as the driving force behind its success. How do you plan to integrate that ideal into you future career? It isn't really very clear in this current essay version.

@Holt
Thank you so much for your advice!
I agree to what you've said about my past experience prior to MSCI. I guess I will shorten it down to no more than two sentences just to consolidate my professional skill as a consultant.

As for the career plan, I was thinking to advance this ideal by helping more companies building long-term sustainability through consulting work. But do you mean that it has to be my own company or a company I join that benefits from this ideal?

Also, I'm not sure how to showcase my 'knowledge, skills and abilities'. Do you feel it's necessary to separately demonstrate them? Or that's just not the essential part of this essay?