Graduate / Essay for CMU MSCF---Describe your background in finance, computer science, math and statistics. [4]

Describe your background and preparation in the four concentration areas of the MSCF program - finance, computer science, math and statistics. In particular, please detail your background in calculus-based probability.

Hi guys. This is one of the strangest essay topic I have met. I don't think it looks like an essay at all... I am not sure if I should just list the classes and related skills in the essay.The number after each lesson is my mark, I am not sure if they are necessary so I just keep them for now.

I am losing some format when I paste my essay here, please refer to the picture I attached

Finance:
As an accounting student, I attended all the required class as follow:
- Macro-Micro Economics: 88
- Financial Management: 81
- Management of Corporate Financial Risks: 91
- Advanced Accounting: 85
- Intermediate Financial Accounting: 87
- Cost Accounting: 87
- Practice of Accounting: 94
- Introduction to Finance: 87
- Business and Economics: 84

I also attended other universities' finance-related class as follow:
- The Economy of Money Banking and Financial Market at University of International Business and Economics: 84
- Game Theory at Peking University
- Demystifying the Chinese Economy at Peking University

Computer Science:
I have learned Visual FoxPro, MATLAB, STATA, SPSS, MIS, Note Express, Yongyou accounting system and the Office Pack in the following classes. I am also familiar with the use of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere and an Oracle-base accounting system.

- Management of Corporate Financial Risk (base on SPSS) :91
- Database and VF Programming Design: 81
- Management Information Systems: 85
- Applying Excel to Financial Management: 93
- Data Processing of Accounting Research (base on STATA ): 95
- Principles & Application of Computerized Accounting System (base on Yongyou accounting system) :82
- Experiment of Mathematics (base on MATLAB): 80
- Computer Application Practice (base on the Office Pack): 85
- Document Retrieval and Computer Application (base on Note Express) : 80

Math:
My university has rigorous requirements for math and science study even for business major students. I have been exposed to the following classes:
- Operations Research: 95
- Linear Algebra A: 80
- Advanced Mathematics A I: 85
- Advanced Mathematics A II: 80

Statistics and Probability:
- Applied Statistics: 84
- Probability & Mathematical Statistics A: 82
covering:
- Random events and probability（classical probability and conditional probability）
- One-dimensional random variable and its distribution（including discrete random variables and Continuous random variables
- Multidimensional random variables and their distributions（including joint distribution function for two-dimensional random variables, marginal distribution, conditional distribution）
- Figure characteristic of random variable（including expected value，variance, covariance and coefficient of correlation）
- Convergence of random variables (including law of large numbers and central limit theorem)

As an accounting student, I have a well-rounded finance background especially for microeconomics. I gained a comprehensive mastery of fundamental principles of finance from courses including Macro-Micro Economics, Financial Management, Management of Corporate Financial Risks, Introduction to Finance and Business and Economics. To have a deeper understanding of finance and macroeconomics, I attended some famous lessons in other university including The Economy of Money Banking and Financial Market at University of International Business and Economics, Game Theory and Demystifying the Chinese Economy at Peking University. They were very beneficial for my analysis of economic events and I was lucky enough to grasp some cutting edge economic theories.

Meanwhile, I actively engaged in the learning of programming and statistical software. Other than the required programming lesson of Visual FoxPro and basic introduction into MIS, I attended many elective lessons related to data processing softwares to upgrade my programming skills. So far I have mastered MATLAB, STATA and SPSS. I also learned the use of MATLAB on SVM and the basics of R language by myself to solve some academic problems. From my experience at the Student Television Station of my university, I proficiently managed the use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere. My second internship also thought me to work in a Oracle-base accounting system efficiently.

Furthermore, thanks to the distinctive science and engineering characteristics of my university, I kept a good sense for scientific researches in learning Chemistry experiment and College Physics. I also built a solid foundation in mathematics and statistics under the rigorous requirements for mathematics and science study for business major students. To enhance my mathematic background, I chose "level A" for all my mathematic classes although doing so would lower my grade. Through such courses as Operations Research, Linear Algebra A, Advanced Mathematics A I, Advanced Mathematics A II, Applied Statistics and Probability & Mathematical Statistics A, I paved the way for understanding quantitative analysis.

The topics covered by probability are as follows
- Random events and probability（classical probability and conditional probability）
- One-dimensional random variable and its distribution（including discrete random variables and Continuous random variables
- Multidimensional random variables and their distributions（including joint distribution function for two-dimensional random variables, marginal distribution, conditional distribution）
- Figure characteristic of random variable（including expected value，variance, covariance and coefficient of correlation）
- Convergence of random variables (including law of large numbers and central limit theorem)
Supported by my firm foundations for the four specialized fields above, I believe I met with all your academic requirements for a MSCF student at Tepper School of Business.

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Letters / The most outstanding trademark of Ms. X is her creativity. Letter of Recommendation from my teacher [4]

Comments on the content or grammar are welcomed! Thanks!
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Dear Sir or Madam:
It is my pleasure to write this letter of recommendation to support Ms. Huang Shiyun's admission to your program. I have been acquainted with Ms. Huang since I taught her Management of Corporate Financial Risk, where she got 91 in the exam and left me with deep impression of her passion and intellect for the subject.

The most outstanding trademark of Ms. Huang is her creativity. In my class, she successfully demonstrated Support Vector Machines (SVM) with an application and showed her excelling programming skills and a profound understanding of classification and regression. She surprised me by using a whole new method on MATLAB, different from my own based on SPSS. After adding the factorial analysis of SPSS to her application, her final thesis was good enough to be included in my teaching materials to help instruct other student.

Moreover, Ms. Huang demonstrated her solid foundation of mathematics by understanding probability and statistics at an advanced level in the learning of correlation tests, regression and other principles of the risks-assessing methods I introduced. She also dug in to the details and presented her unique view of risk management in case analysis. For example, when we were discussing risk control for fund raising, she challenged the traditional idea which said small firms with limited ability to bear high debt ratio were more suited for equity financing than debt financing. She contended that privately raised company bonds could also be a choice as Chinese government is aiding small firms by enriching China's bond market now.

In addition to her academic success, she is a cheerful and cooperative member of her class. She won the respect of her peers through her willingness to help and encouragements of others.

Therefore, I sincerely give my full support and highest recommendation to Ms. Huang's application for admission to your program. If you need any further information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely
xxx

Letters / Recommendation letter from my internship supervisor [2]

Hi. I am translating my recommendation letter into English. The content can still be discussed with my supervisor so please give your suggestions on the content and the usage of English. (I hide my recommender's information.) Thanks a lot!

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As the Finance Assistant Manager of Millwork Trading (Shenzhen) Limited PanYu Branch and Ms. Huang Shiyun's internship supervisor, I am honored to write this letter of recommendation to support her application for admission to your Graduate School.

I first met Ms. Huang when she applied for the internship in July, 2014. At first, I thought that a sophomore student would be less competitive than other graduate students. However, she surprised me with her quick understanding of the business structure. After the interview, I found she spoke fluent English and thus I was convinced that her ability would meet the requirement of working in a whole-English environment. Moreover, her long-held interest in computer enabled her to use our Oracle based accounting system in no time.

At the time Ms. Huang began her internship, our group (Global Brands Group, a world's leading branded apparel, footwear accessories and related lifestyle product companies) spin-off from Li & Fung Limited (SEHK Stock Code: 787). We set up a brand new finance department in PanYu office to support finance booking of Asia's intercompanies. Therefore, there was lots of unexpected work. In this circumstance, Ms. Huang showed her strong ability to adapt to different tasks. She managed the routine accounting works such as issuing debit note and credit note in two days and quickly learned to book some of accounting entries. From my observation, she was a fast leaner and I was impressed with her solid professional background.

Based on my description of how our company works, Ms. Huang got on track and began her jobs including issuing debit note and credit note, making AR/AP accounting entries, and related finance documents filing. Accounting work requires patience and carefulness. At first, I still need to check the debit note and credit note she made. After a week or so, she managed to eliminate her mistakes by double checking with her colleagues.

In addition, Ms. Huang showed her leadership and active communication skills in team work. Still vivid in my memory is the occasion when another supervisor of the interns left for vacation, Ms. Huang managed to keep her group working on the strength of her finely honed interpersonal skills and solid understanding of our accounting activities. She helped check the supervisor's emails and, after communicated finely with other interns, assigned the missions to the group. She proved to be much more capable than our initial estimation of an intern and became a crucial member of our department.

When Ms. Huang talks to me about his study plan in the US, I am very glad to see that he is endeavoring to pursue a higher degree. Given her excellent performance here, he has my full support. If there is any question about Ms. Huang's work here, please contact me at any time.

Name: xxxxxxxxx
Position: xxxxxxxxxx
Millwork Trading (Shenzhen) Limited PanYu branch
Email: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Address: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Graduate / Essay for Master in Management Study Northwestern University---Contemporary Managerial Issue [5]

Hi everyone. Please help me to check the usage of words. Also, if you find anything unclear about what I am discussing below, please point out. Thanks!

Topic: Briefly describe a contemporary managerial issue or challenge that interests you. How do you expect earning a Master of Science in Management Studies will enable you to better understand this issue? (300 words)

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I have become interested in the issue of employee retention from the Principles of Management class and my own experience. The case discussed in class was about Google. Although Google is highly profitable and is a wonderful place to work, many of its experienced employees are leaving to start up their own businesses.

Retaining elite employees not only save the cost of operation but also keep the core competence in-house. But from the employees' point of view, their choices are between jumping ship and staying. After meeting a jump ship situation myself, I have started to consider using game theory to analyze this issue. Game theory as a powerful management tool can be used to calculate the highest outcome of an employee's decision. Thus we can base our prediction using payoff matrix or game tree on simulated situation and change our stimulation mechanism accordingly. However, as I am not sure whether the employees choose their moves without being sure of the firm's move or not, both sequential games and simultaneous games have to be taken into consideration. So there may be several decisions for several different scenarios instead of a recommendation based on the overall picture.

I have not figure this out in my undergraduate study which only introduced some general solutions to employee retention such as holding an exit interview to learn why employees leave. I learned that MSMS provides Leadership in Organization class which will help me understand how to best organize and motivate the human capital of the firm. There are also classes about research methods and the proper use of statistical which are vital in setting up the right model for analysis. I believe MSMS will help me look at this issue from a comprehensive view with a deeper insight into employee's behavior.

Graduate / Trying Out Different Possibilities and Finding My Future Path - Northwestern University essay [3]

Essay for Master in Management Study Northwestern University

Topic: How have you grown and developed as a person over the last four years? What experiences at your undergraduate institution have contributed to your development? (500 words)Please include the essay prompt in bold at the top of the page.

Hi guys. Below is my first draft. Any advice or correction in usage is welcomed! Thanks!

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Trying Out Different Possibilities and Finding My Future Path
The four years of undergraduate time has been one of the happiest times in my life because I have my life in control and I have come closer and closer to my dream.

I learned a lot from my experiences in being a group leader. Aside from many successful experiences, an unhappiest experience left me with the greatest impression when I teamed up with some students major in computer science to develop a shopping website. They jumped ship in the middle of our project because they had better chance with greater rewards in a competition. I was not told until they finished their new project and of course my project blew up. As the group leader, I felt I was deceived. But after a lot of thought, I believed it could be my insufficient marketing knowledge that gave them the impression that marketing was not as important as techniques. This strengthens my determination to further study marketing and management as I know they are actually very vital in the success of an organization.

I also found my interested field and decided my long term goal in my undergraduate years. For years I have been unclear which path I should choose. When I was eleven, I gave up the opportunity of entering the top music school in China and my dream of becoming a professional pianist because I also wanted to pursue my other interests. During my undergraduate years, I attended many classes at Peking University, including Demystifying the Chinese Economy, a course taught by Justin Yifu Lin, the former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank. This course raised my interest in the Chinese financial system. I learned that with limited channels available to raise capital, the Chinese financial system has yet to hit maturity to balance out the labor-intensive small and medium-sized firms which have a great comparative advantage in the world. During my internship, I was struck again by the need to develop a more mature financial market. One of my missions was to promote privately raised company bonds for small and medium enterprises, a method Lin said would benefit the Chinese financial system. However, this product was a limited release in testing phases even though I was in one of the biggest security companies in China. Therefore, I decided to pursue further study in the area of business to have a deeper understanding of this issue.

Aside from my academic experiences, I have also been an active member of many sport activities. As member of my university's swimming, badminton and tennis teams, I enjoyed competing in sport with my teammates and I met many great friends in sport activities. I also took up a part time job playing the piano to keep my interest in art as my university does not have piano related activities. Knowing that Northwestern University has a great musical environment, I am eager to have a chance to study there.

In conclusion, I have learned a lot from my leadership, academic and extracurricular experiences and am more confident at myself. It is my dream to continue my study at Kellogg and to pursue my interest for business.

Graduate / Optional Essay for WUSTL MSCA (300 words limit) 'interested in Master of Customer Analytics' [4]

Dear Admission Office:
I would like to state why I am interested in Master of Customer Analytics in this essay.
During my undergraduate study, I find my strong interest in data processing. Before I had any data processing classes, I had already used excel to predict the income of a hotel with a nonlinear model consisted of 5 variables (e.g. advertisement spending, price of rooms) in a National Business Simulation Competition. Although the process of constructing model was very time-consuming, I never lost interest and I was thrilled when I developed a model that simulated the data well.

Afterwards, I realized that I can work passionately and innovatively when in my interested field. In the Management of Corporate Financial Risk class, I exerted myself to learn new skills. One of my assignments in that class was demonstrating Support Vector Machines (SVM) with an application which requires a profound understanding of classification and regression. Although as an accounting major student with limited programming skills, I broke away from the confines of the reference material I provided, which only introduced the application of SVM on SPSS. Based on the knowledge I learned MATLAB class, I referred to other programmers' code of SVM application and wrote a set of codes successfully to predict return on investment using financial data in the past. With the help of my teacher, I added the factorial analysis of SPSS in my application of SVM. In the end, I wrote a thesis about this application and it was published on the Global Market Information Guide, a national magazine.

I know from the course description that I can learn many programming skills and financial analysis in this program and thus I am very interested to continue my study at Olin.

Thank you.

Graduate / Required essay of the application to Washington University in St. Louis---choosing my career path [4]

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.