Posts by sillygoose

sillygoose

Jan 4, 2011

Graduate / "a top-tier Mechanical Engineering program" - My Umich Engineering Transfer [2]

For me, the University of Michigan is no exception, possessing a top-tier Mechanical Engineering program that is unrivaled compared to my current school, Oakland University.

Michigan is all about excellence, and it is becoming increasingly obvious to me that Oakland is not. While a great school, most of the student body possesses a certain "get in, get out" attitude towards academics. This is to be expected from a commuter school, but not at all what I anticipated for my college experience. Therefore, I am finding it difficult to find and collaborate with individuals who share my constant press for improvement

I would prefer not to compare the prestige of my current school to UM, even though my current school may be a very crappy one. Avoid giving the impression that you are putting your current school down. In stead you may want to tell why you think UM is a top-tier one, is there any famous professor you want to work with? any class there that you've attended (even before applying) and found interesting and Oakland is not offering any similar one...or you've contacted some students in UM to find info about UM, and received a lot of support and helpful advice (and this led to your confidence in the collaborative culture of the UM community, for example).

Can you please also have a look at my essays as well? Any critique will be highly appreciated!

sillygoose

Jan 4, 2011

Graduate / "experience with this Ukraine case" - time in your career when you were frustrated [3]

Thanks Joanna for your comment! In fact i mean "last remaining"! :-(

Could you please advise how else I can improve my essay to make it more natural English? I am not a native speaker and thus I am very much afraid if my essay sounds too foreign!

sillygoose

Jan 3, 2011

Graduate / "experience with this Ukraine case" - time in your career when you were frustrated [3]

Dear All,

Could you please proof-read for my below essay?

Many thanks in advance!

BRgds

--------------

Question: Describe a time in your career when you were frustrated or disappointed. What did you learn from that experience? (500 word maximum)

ring ring ring brrrrring....brrrrring...
It rang again, angrily, impatiently ...
Resisting the temptation to mute the sounds, I picked up the phone and spoke with my most gentle voice" Good morning, Nhien speaking..."

It was the fifth call asking for the shipments of our 20000 tons of wheat contracts from Ukraine to Vietnam. The previous night, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced Russia's ban on grain exports to protect its national food security. The remained largest wheat exporter of Black Sea region, Ukraine, didn't copy its neighbor, but unofficially it ordered its customs department not to let any grain shipment through. In a very short time, the world wheat price shot up nearly 100 usd/mt.

The total claim we would face, if unable to deliver this 20000 tons, could mount up to 2 millions USD. My personal and company's reliability were challenged by buyers in our every conversation, as there had been Ukraine contracts defaulted by others. Many suppliers whom I trusted refused to answer phone calls or bluntly replied they wouldn't honor their contractual commitments. That feeling of loosing faith was devastating, until I realized that I had been focusing too much on my problem: shipping the cargo out of Ukraine. Trying to put myself in others' shoes, I started looking at the difficulty from differently perspectives.

Internally, I held meetings with my team to sketch the whole picture of the situation, and provided guidelines on how to tackle different clients in specific circumstances. This preparation helped our people confident in explaining this out-of-control incident to clients, and consequently relieved the pressures from frantic complaints, threatens and false accusations of aggressive buyers.

Instead of answering the question "When will the shipment be made?" raised by all buyers, I started working with them on practical solutions for their production plans in different scenarios. Out of expectation, we found the possibility to substitute Indian corn (with similar nutrition content and same price) for Ukraine wheat. For factories which could not adapt their production formulas to corn, I convinced them to postpone the shipments and join us in sending protests against Ukraine government's unlawful export blockage to WTO and GAFTA.

Under intensive pressures from international community, two months later Ukraine finally freed its export. Nevertheless, no one wanted to deliver at such a high price difference then. Despite my great disappointment, I kept the conversations with my suppliers warm, offering them a way to keep their names clean and wash out their contracts legally with compensations. It was a hard battle, but we managed to get a settlement of nearly 400000 USD, which fortunately was enough to pass onto the buyers who could not switch from wheat to corn and successfully closed a challenging chapter.

The experience with this Ukraine case provides me with a great lesson about coping with adversity. I realized that we human are often self-centered, and tend to see our loss bigger than that of others. That is why at the beginning I only felt myself trapped, disappointed and frustrated. However, when not taking thing personally, I was able to fight against stress and see through others' concerns. That was the very first step for me to put myself in others' shoes, solved their problems, and helped me out of mine.

sillygoose

Dec 30, 2010

Graduate / "Nature's revenge + Travel to Angola" - Significant event of my life - MBA essay [3]

just my two cents:

1/

However, after working for few weeks, I realized that it is "defining moment" of my career.

It is not very precise to use "moment" here, as it took you quite a while to change your mind.
I would rather say, after the first few hard weeks, strangely i gradually changed my mind.

2/

Besides work, I learned many words in Portuguese and got familiar to diverse African cultures. Furthermore, I interacted with colleagues from more than 20 different countries, enhanced my cultural tolerance and socially associated with them to build global relationships.

Suppose you may want to give some very special examples that makes you stand out more. Even though it is very interesting to be in far away countries, meeting the locals, learn a few new words or work with colleagues from 20 countries, I would say a lot of travelers or employees of multinational corp. may have the same experiences. Ad-com would expect to see something unique from that experience, imho.

For example, you can tell how you broke the language barriers to communicate with the locals...what your learned and how you changed your mind after that...

Or maybe you can tell about your teamwork or leadership experience in a multicultural environments...

sillygoose

Dec 23, 2010

Undergraduate / My mother; strong influential person. [5]

I love the way you write about your Mom with full of affection.

She advised me to work with the other students in the classroom and to use my differences as a strong point to bring something new to the table instead of making it a barrier to entry.

I am just curious about how an eight year old kid knew how to use her differences as a strong point? Maybe an example here can make it clearer?

Btw, could you please help to look at my essay as well? I wish i had the same fluency as yours.

sillygoose

Dec 23, 2010

Graduate / My passion for making changes in the world (what I'm passionate about and why) [4]

Hi Rajesh,

Thanks a lot for your reply.

Basically the first paragraph is about changing myself. The second one is about changing others.

What I mean in the second paragraph is explaining about another motivation for me to make changes, which is I want to make changes because I want to see the result that my community getting better. I elaborate this point by explaining that I have developed the care for others, how my impact to others have been growing, and that I have the ability to bring changes to my community.

Wondering if it's clear to you now? I have been staring at this essay for days and I almost have no idea of what I've written now.

sillygoose

Dec 23, 2010

Graduate / Do the experiences written in my personal statement reveal my academic ability? [4]

I am also not a native speaker, so actually I can not help you much on the grammar/ style side. However,IMHO, i have some suggestions for you as follow:

In terms of interest in advertising, it has to track back to my second year at university. In the summer holiday of that year, I was helping my aunt to hand out leaflets to promote her newly opened hair salon.

My interest in advertising dated back to a summer in my second year in college while helping my aunt promote her newly opened hair salon.

Since she urgently needed to get more customers and reduce cost,

This is not very clear as reducing cost may mean many things. I guess what you want to say is just that your aunt didn't want to spend too much money on other means of advertisement. I would write it a lit bit differently:

Understand that for a small new business, it is vital to approach potential customers in the most cost effective way, I took the initiative to hand out the salon's leaflets in different blocks of our city.

Having failed to bear the sweltering weather on that day, I eventually fainted after two hours standing on the street.

when applying to business school, I suppose we should not say anything like we failed, especially just after two hours standing on the street. I think the only circumstance when you can talk about failures, mistakes, is when you offer a very meaningful lesson you've learned from that.

Keeping this in mind, I have decided to study the related subjects of advertising, such as advertising management and operation.

Keeping this in mind, I have taken several courses related to advertising, such as advertising management and operation.

Because there are several outstanding subjects in advertising at your university, getting admission to your university is my top choice.

Having talked to some of [school] alumni/professor/adcom about the many very interesting/inspirational advertising classes of your communication MS(?) program, I concluded that getting admission to your university is my top choice.

In my four year academic career, I have had a wide range of contact with advertising.

During my undergraduate years, I had a lot of exposure in the field of advertisement.

First of all, I believe studying advertising could benefit me in different ways, like gaining media planning, communication and information processing skills. ...

Secondly, I have experience with matters related to advertising publicity. In my second year of university, an annual basketball game was held during April. I was the charger of the basketball team and publicity committee of our class, one day I was notified that our basketball team players have always passed the ball on to our opponents by mistake. .... Consequently, I had successfully defeated my opponents and recaptured my sales markets.

You may want to combine these two paragraphs into one and try to avoid using "first" and "second". About the courses: In my opinion, the reader would not need to be explained more about the courses you took as this is already implied in the courses' names.

Learning these two courses lead to my increasing interest in advertising as well as some relevant knowledge.

These two courses enhanced greatly my interest in the advertising industry.

"some relevant knowledge": you should either say specifically what knowledge, or delete this.

sillygoose

Dec 23, 2010

Research Papers / Paragraph about "Cause of Unemployment in Cambodia"- feedback [5]

I think you may try to use some structure other than first/next/third/last.
Perhaps you may want to try some different leading phrases such as: The most/least important is..., Besides, we need to mention about..., To be more precise..., it goes without saying that...

sillygoose

Dec 23, 2010

Graduate / My passion for making changes in the world (what I'm passionate about and why) [4]

Dear All,

Could you please help to proofread my essay? I am not a native speaker and I feel I tend to overuse spoken language in my writings.

Plus, I have a word limit of 300 but my essay is 330 words. Would much appreciate your suggestion on how make it shorter but more coherent.

Many thanks !!!!

What are you most passionate about and why? (300 word maximum)

When I was a little girl, I wanted to become somebody who can change the world, like the Wright brothers, who invented the airplane and conquered the sky. Growing up, having seen when I saw the immensity of this world and perceived my own limitations, many times I wondered wonders if my childhood dream is just a fancy imagination. I'm still looking for an answer, but I've also learned realized that "no good change is too small to make this world better".

Why changes? Strangely I feel I'm more myself as I'm changing. I find happiness in overcoming the intellectual and emotional challenges to bring about improvements, such as dropping overcoming or casting off a bad habit or setting up rectifying a procedure to increase my team's efficiency. The passion for changes allows me to constantly redefine myself and push the boundaries of what's possible. Who am I if I'm no longer my past, and the present's "me" will not be the same in future? I am the one who always looks for the better.

Also, it's the fulfilling moments seeing the impacts I bring to others drive me to make changes At the age of 18, I moved out seeking independence from my parents. Now 28, I am leading a business line of my company and back to the family as the sole breadwinner. Taking higher responsibilities, I gradually see more tighten links with people around me: family, friends, colleagues, etc. I feel a desire to be an active element of an expanding network, I've gained confidence on my ability to make differences, and I take it as my mission to bring impacts to my community.

Is changing the world too big an ambition? Everyone has her or his his or her own influence to the world, and what I've seen is that influencing power can grow stronger with willingness and efforts to change for better. I may not take the path reach the distance the Wright's traveled traversed, but my passion is leading me on the right track to pursuit pursue my dream, I believe!