Here is the personal statement of an applicant who got admitted to MIT Sloan’s Masters in Finance program. For personal statement, Sloan poses several questions to applicants, which the admissions committee expects to be answered in an essay form. MIT provides these personal statement prompts to encourage students to self-reflect and then to share their insights with the program.
The following essays are an example of a compelling story and reflect the original voice and personality of the applicant. Get inspiration from them and try to incorporate their strengths into your own personal statement.
Personal Statement Prompt 1
Please discuss past academic and professional experiences and accomplishments that will help you succeed in the Master of Finance program. Include achievements in finance, math, statistics, and computer sciences, as applicable.
As an ardent finance student, I have always sought opportunities to develop a solid grounding in the subject.
During my undergraduate, I successfully co-founded a philanthropic long/short Impact Investment Hedge Fund, “Australian Students Asset Management” (ASAM). The fund secured firms like Goldman Sachs to provide pro-bono services and mentorship. In addition, I developed a proprietary ESG algorithm to identify investment opportunities per our social development mandate. As a result, our investments have consistently outperformed our benchmark. Furthermore, I attended two courses at LSE on Alternative Investments and Financial Risk with “A” grades. This involved in-depth exploration of topics like Monte Carlo, Bootstrapping, Financial Modelling and Stratification.
As an Associate at PwC, I created PwC’s first fully automated valuation process. This consisted of using industry-specific valuation templates using Python and VBA for data scraping. This solution saw significant savings for the firm and is now used by PwC throughout the world.
As an analyst with Barclays Capital, a Global Quantitative Hedge Fund, I gained exposure to arbitrage trading strategies by implementing statistical principles like mean reversion, volatility trends and co-integration in Python. This helped me develop successful trading algorithms yielding a highly desirable annualized return of 33%.
Personal Statement Prompt 2
Describe your short-term and long-term professional goals. How will our MFin degree help you achieve these goals?
My short-term goal is to return to Australia and establish my own quantitative “for-profit” hedge fund. I will utilize my previous experience co-founding the philanthropic hedge fund, ASAM, to that effect. My long-term goal is to expand this hedge fund’s operations overseas and invest in the North American markets, as they present significant growth opportunities.
At MIT, I am eager to research the implications of current trends in institutional capital flows. This detailed exploration will enhance my understanding of the potential risks of passive investing and provide an edge in building trust with future investors.
As an Analyst at Barclays Capital, I developed event-driven and relative-value trading algorithms using Python. With the MFin, I will create an advanced, intuitive approach to data science problems, enabling the manipulation of alternative data sets to automate trading decisions and executions. The Advanced Analytics and Data Science courses and Analytics Certificate are especially exciting as they will allow me to understand shallow models and train deep neural networks in an economic context. I also hope to improve my technical skills around asset pricing and general dimension reduction techniques and ensemble methods which are critical to forming accurately priced derivatives.
Personal Statement Prompt 3
Please share personal qualities that will enable you to contribute to the advancement of our mission.
THE MISSION
The mission of the MIT Sloan School of Management is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and generate ideas that advance management practice.
I believe success as a Leader requires one to have a passion for taking the initiative, thinking outside the box and persevering in adversity.
These traits have always been integral to my personal and professional pursuits, including my recent experience as a special education teacher in San Pedro, a rural village in Costa Rica. I was required to develop creative methods to overcome the language barrier and constructed visual aids from cardboard pieces to make block numbers. In addition, the school had a dire need for wheelchairs, so I devised a cost-effective design to repurpose old bicycles into wheelchairs that we implemented as a team. My commitment to improving the world through innovation will allow me to contribute actively to MIT’s mission.
Furthermore, my extensive involvement in boxing has enabled me to develop perseverance and increased focus in facing challenges. My first loss was devastating, and I considered giving up the sport, as my goal had been to maintain a perfect record. Ultimately, increasing training intensity, dance classes and the strong support from my team allowed me to win my next match and achieve the Most Improved Fighter award by the Sydney Boxing League.