Required essay of the application to Washington University in St. Louis---choosing my career path

I am applying for WUSTL's Master of Customer Analytic. The topic of the essays is as follow.

1. In one or two sentences, please describe your immediate career plans upon graduation from Olin.

2. At Olin, we pride ourselves on our close-knit community and aim to know every student by name and story. In an essay of no more than 500 words, please introduce yourself as you would to your future Olin classmates.

Below is my essay. Please feel free to give me advice in the content or the usage of words. Thanks a lot!

In my conception, customer analysis is a quantitative analysis for customers based on data and market research. My immediate career plan is to put to practice what I've learned at Olin, when I start work in a consulting company. I would be able to help customers evaluate their business plans and develop a market strategy by aggregating and synthesizing massive amounts of data.

I am Huang Shiyun and this is my story about how I find my path to my future.
I have been unclear for years on where my path would take me. From a professional piano learner to an athletic and inquisitive college student, I finally learn from my undergraduate experiences that my desire is to pursue further study in the area of financial data processing.

Started when I was four, I began playing the piano and after being selected by a famous piano profession in China, becoming a professional pianist was the path I had planned. However, I gave up on piano even though I passed the exam into affiliated primary school Central Conservatory of Music when I was 12. The major reason behind why I chose to stop was because students who were focused on arts took fewer literary classes. Along with me mainly focused on genres which involved work by Bach, it took away the flexibility and variety to encounter other fields. I soon know that piano was not my best career choice, therefore I chose to keep it as a hobby and return to an ordinary high school to study science.

Afterwards, I excelled on the college entrance exam and ranked top 1.4% among 720,000 students in my province. When it came to choosing my major, I was limited to accounting although I chose finance originally. To find my real interest, I felt I need to learn more about finance and economy, so I audited many classes at Peking University including Chinese Economy by Justin Lin, Game Theory, Basic Psychology and the History of Buddhism in China. I came to realize my interest was in the Chinese financial system after auditing Professor Lin's class. With limited channels of capital raising, the Chinese financial system has yet to hit maturity to balance out the labor-intensive small firms，which have a great comparative advantage in the world. This drawback is enlarging the wage gap in China as bigger firms have greater chances to raise money from banks. Thus, I am eager to learn how a perfect financial market works by continuing my study in America.

Another reason I choose to study in US is that US universities think highly of sport ability. In China, I seldom had advantage over others when receiving scholarship even though I won many prizes as member of my university's badminton team and swimming team. I believe it is important for me to choose a university with similar values.

Shiyun, there is a continuity problem within your essay. It is very disjointed and erratic to follow as an introductory story. You need to develop certain portions of the essay and delete some portions in order to create a more interesting and truly informative introduction essay. Let's start at the beginning.

When you answer the first prompt in two sentences, try to integrate it into your introduction. Don't leave it hanging as a stand alone part of the essay. It would really be more interesting to read such a flawless integration of your career plans in relation to your public introduction. You can still keep it at 2 sentences, you just need to make it feel like a part of the essay in order to make the essay feel more fluid when the reviewer reads it.

You don't have to go all the way back to elementary school in order to introduce yourself. Jump forward to the reasons why you were inspired to pursue studies in accounting and customer analysis instead. Stories from such a young age will only serve to drag your introduction down since it is in no way connected to your current course and career plans. The tendency will be to bore your classmates with irrelevant information. The most interesting part of your essay as I see it is the following portion:


This is the portion that I believe you need to open your introduction with. Doing so will immediately gain the interest of the listener / your classmates and also inform them about your plans after graduation at the same time (with the proper paragraph development). I would continue to discuss the influences I had in the field of finance both from China and the U.S. and segue that talk into the conclusion as to why I chose to come to the United States to study.

I realize that this is still an essay draft on your part and it has room for improvement. I suggest that you work on developing the story of the essay for now. Don't worry about the grammar corrections that need to be done at this point. It is useless to address those issues if the essay is not ready for finalization yet. Good luck!

Thank you very much for the detailed advice. I have shown my essay to some of my friends but they did not find it hard to follow as they had already known my experience I guess.

I am planning to put the "With limited channels of capital raising, the Chinese financial system has yet to hit maturity to balance out the labor-intensive small firms，which have a great comparative advantage in the world. This drawback is enlarging the wage gap in China as bigger firms have greater chances to raise money from banks. Thus, I am eager to learn how a perfect financial market works by continuing my study in America." part immediately after answering the first question, and be more detailed in why I like to study in this major. And then write the part that talks about my piano experience with fewer words, maybe just let it works as introducing my hobby. Please tell me if my thoughts on the revision is on the right path. Thanks!

You have the right idea. Don't forget to that information into your response for the first prompt. Basically, You can write the response as one paragraph with the first two sentences answering the first prompt and then use the succeeding sentences to set up your plans for your stay at Olin. Try to talk about your academic and social plans within 500 words. You should also aim for a more casual tone in your writing since this is not supposed to sound too formal if you will be presenting it to your classmates on the first day of school. Use a tone of openness.

For the academic plan, inform your classmates about your academic background and the economists who have influenced your way of thinking. Describe how you view the current status of the Chinese economy in relation to its rising profile on the world stage. Then explain how you hope the lessons you learn at the university will be able to help you gain further knowledge that you can use to create an even more stable world economy starting with the Chinese financial system. Highlight that you would are looking forward to an exchange of intellectual interests with the class.

After the academic introduction, you can then tell your classmates about your piano hobby. Try to add another hobby into the mix so that your classmates will come to know you as a person with diverse interests and hobbies. It will be very beneficial to you to introduce yourself as a person who has a particular interest in an exchange of culture and traditions. Remember to let them know that you are open to participating in all student activities both on campus and off-campus. It can help you make friends from your circle of classmates.

Good luck with revising the essay. I hope to read the new version when you feel it is ready for review. We will be here to help you :-)