Personal Statement MBA Program

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A Personal Statement for an MBA Program
A Ship in the Harbor is Usually Safe. But Ships are built to sail across Vast Waters
I was brought up in a conservative family. My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother were all married at a young age of 17 years. I knew well my life would follow a similar trend unless I took and made bold steps regarding education. Driven by the pressing urge to break this deep-seated social cycle of early marriages, I took my education seriously at the high school and college levels. I was lucky to be the first female in the family to graduate from college and later enrolled in a graduate program in the United States. My parents offered the much-needed financial support and the psychological and emotional backing to study abroad. This I must admit required me to break from the comfort zone, face my fear, and consequently develop a resilience that comes with meeting new people, acquiring new experiences, and of course, merging and interacting with students who we share different cultural backgrounds.
My journey towards engineering was paved by obvious obstacles and challenges, including the fear of people, the fear of the uncertainty of situations, and self-doubt. For example, I remember struggling to recite the Pythagoras Theory in front of classmates during a mathematics session. My palms were sweaty, legs were shaking and heart was racing as I faced the entire class. Although having a solid grasp of this mathematical model, the fear and trauma of facing people impaired my recitation and from henceforth I knew I had to do something.

From this situation and experience, I believed to excel meant to be comfortable with my weakness and to challenge myself to overcome self-fear and doubt. As a result and a consequence of this understanding, I would later excel in mathematics, physics, science, and technical courses and got admitted to an engineering course. As a young girl, I knew that the engineering program was a male-dominated field, and to succeed I had to overcome these negative perceptions held by people about the differential abilities of the sexes or genders. After graduating from the engineering program, I later secured a job at a manufacturing firm before working in the financial market. I still loved the fast-paced, quantitative nature of the financial industry where I was tasked with developing intricate trading algorithms. I have since worked in the financial industry with key roles being the identification of changes in financial markets as inflation and deflations, and developing algorithms to assist investors in making better analytics and decisions.
The decision to pursue a Master’s stems from a pressing need to break the male-dominated corporate culture. As an MBA cohort, I look forward to bring an alternative or different perspective through years of training and experience in the engineering and financial sectors. When I observe institutions, I see an orchestrated culture where major organizational decisions are made by the male dominated boards. For example, women occupy a meager 15% of board seats based on trusted and credible surveys. This stark shortage of female professionals in executive and corporate fronts points to a worrying trend (Kowalski 2). In this realization, I believe the Master’s in Business Administration is tantamount towards the realization of my personal and professional undertakings and goals. I look forward being part and parcel of the corporate change where women will be part of major decisions. There is the existence of an unconscious gender and sex bias which strongly impairs the realization of better solutions, improved policies, and enhanced organizational practices. While most institutions are slowly improving their enrollment and promotional practices towards the realization of gender balance, I believe there is still a lot remaining. Perhaps this is the reason I believe that studying for an MBA to supplement my engineering undergraduate will bring me close to corporate stewardship and provide a positive shaping experience. Most importantly for pursuing a Master’s educational qualification is to be in a position to provide long-lasting corporate solutions in engineering and management fronts.
Works Cited
Kowalski, I. MBA Admission: What to know about Admission Essays. The US News Official. 2016. Pp. 1 – pp.3.