My Personal Statement


1. How I got interested in Economics
2. What I have been involved in over the last 4 years
3. Why do I want to apply for this position
4. How might this be related to my background?
5. What I hope to achieve in the future?

The path that led me to decide that I want to work in applied microeconomics in Economics was not a straightforward path. I was born in Hong Kong and spent the majority of my time living in a fairly multi-cultural and diverse background. Because of my father's occupation I moved around throughout my childhood. The places that I have lived and called home at some point in my life are Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. Looking back, I did have a first-hand account of witnessing different stages of development in three different countries: I lived in Shanghai for six years in the from 1990-1996, during which time it was gradually opening its doors to foreign imports and the like. In Kuala Lumpur, I saw the building of the Petronas Twin Tower, which was then the tallest structure in the world. Finally, in SIngapore, which is my current home, I saw how a small island is transforming itself to one of the most admired and possibly best success story out of the South East Asian region. Nevertheless, apart from this background I was more interested in learning about theory and taking my college experience in stride.

College itself was an interesting experience to learn how to study effectively without compromising anything. It gradually became clear to me that while I might have an excellent preparation from high school, I had not encountered an immense variability in a teacher's ability to convey the information in planned manner. For example, most of the teaching duties are assigned to graduate students for many introductory classes, while full-time professors may only be hired for their research and not their teaching abilities. A lot of this I see as a model that I had not quite yet understood as a first-year. The learning curve was considerably harder in that respect. But I persevered and went through the class. It was only fairly recently, though not late that I thought hard about using my intuition to make sense of what I was learning. That made studying considerably easier - much easier and far more manageable than I had previously thought.

I became interested in applied microeconomics in my third year of college as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Before that, when I was taking the core sequence of the major, most of what I was taught was fairly mechanical most of it was understanding how to use applied math. Last winter, I took an economics class on Growth and Development, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was an introduction to issues specific to the study of development, using basic tools in microeconomic and macro-economic analysis to identify fundamental features that might be common across developing countries. The topics that we studied include how agents optimize their options and make decisions subject to realistic constraint, from occupation choice model concerning different types of wage contracts, to micro-financing, where we studied how an entrepreneur might be able to take out a loan and how the structural constraints such as the size of one's community might affect how feasible such a scheme is.

I am particularly interested in modeling because of its intuitive use as a simplified representation of the real world, of which the mechanism can be used to explain a particular concept. As a theoretical construct to explain economic process, it is a useful framework from which one can use to test the assumptions using empirical work. I am interested in exploring academic research and become a part of real-world applications of economic concept. I followed this by choosing to use the remainder of my senior year in College to complete a minor in Statistics. The minor in Statistics heavily emphasizes on statistical methods and data analysis.

Finally, I have a personal aspiration to be involved in fieldwork that has a positive impact on local communities. I speak from personal experience growing up in South East Asia how much work should be done to address the economic argument that has perhaps been the fundamental distinction between the rich and the poor. Interestingly enough, and it has also been addressed in my Economic Development class, developing economies is a subjective a term, and obvious examples show that that there is a continuum of different development stages that countries experience and transition between. However, by understanding how dynamics work and influence the long-term path of the economies, it is possible to influence positive change through appropriate policy recommendations. Involvement in field work is not only a means but also an end to arrive at empirically verified facts about the many dimensions of economic development. We gain insight by designing experiments to test these ideas in the hope of obtaining something real and applicable that will make a positive change on our community.

I believe that I will benefit largely from this work experience and to gain a solid preparation prior to pursuing graduate studies. What Boston has to offer in particular is a great academic environment, a change that I look forward to after my time in Chicago. I imagine that my exposure to academic colleagues will be greater post college. There are already some ground rules that I have established for myself. For example, I found that I enjoy working on task when I can focus on it for a long period of time, but like variety in my work to maintain my interest and enthusiasm. Working for at least a year will give me more academic maturity and the time spent will allow me to build on my mathematical and statistical analysis abilities.