Personal Statement: MSc Management, Organisations and Governance (LSE)
I will graduate from the University of St. Andrews by June 2013 and I want to enroll in the MSc programme to enhance my chances of obtaining a position in one of the better UK consulting firms before returning to Morocco to start my own business. I like the variety of options offered by the LSE’s management programme, which would allow me to study those topics that I think are most important for my both personal development and professional career. In my opinion, one of the most important objectives in management training is improving rational and strategic thinking over the medium and long term, which has always appealed to me. Besides being a lover of rational thinking, I also like organisational studies which provide a deeper understanding of companies, and this is an important aspect of the MSc programme. These were some of the first classes that I took at St. Andrew’s and my interest in this particular field has continued since that time. The MSc programme would give me the necessary entrepreneurial skills that would facilitate the development of my own projects and also prepare me deal with any problems that might occur later. Since I am taking a joint honours major in economics and management at the University of St. Andrews, I have discovered that a successful entrepreneur has to be a manager, an economist and rational thinker at the same time. This is exactly how the MSc course is structured, since it balances between the conceptual and the analytical, and offers the basic framework necessary to train business leaders. Overall, then, I believe that I have the necessary academic background and practical work experience in an international business environment that would qualify me to be accepted at the LSE for graduate studies in management.
My academic background has prepared me well for graduate studies in business and management. In 2009 I graduated with distinction from the ELT programme at St. Andrew’s University, which is a business foundation course for international students. I was on the Dean's List for academic excellence twice during the years 2010/2011 and 2011/2012. At St. Andrew’s I have taken various courses such as organisational analysis, microeconomics, macroeconomics and quantitative methods. I have very good mathematical skills, and in high school I was selected every year selected by my mathematics teachers as one of the top fifteen students in my who were given the opportunity to take advanced classes at the university level. I speak Arabic, French and English fluently and Spanish at the intermediate level, which I studied during my first year of university. I am interested in developing my language skills even further so that I can have a very good international career, particularly in the field of consulting.
Even at a very young age, I had an interest in and an aptitude for management and organization, and I completed my first project when I was fifteen years old. At that time, I wrote a collection of short stories for children, and I still do this in my free time. I managed every step leading to the final product by myself, from the time I met with the design company and worked with them on the appropriate images that should accompany the stories, until I met with the printing company that produced the final version of the book. My project was very successful, and I received an offer from to publish my work. In addition, the director of a primary school purchased my work so that it could be taught to pupils. This means that I possess some of the managerial skills that I would like to develop further at the LSE graduate programme.
For the past three years, I have has summer internships at various companies that gave me broader international experience, and also enabled me to apply the academic and theoretical knowledge that I received in my business courses. In the summer of 2010 I worked in the international operations department at the Popular Central Bank in Morocco, where I learned about the Swift system and how it operates and assisted clients with their problems in international transactions. I worked in the accounting department of Sobim in the summer of 2009, a company that specialised in the manufacturing and importing of office furniture. At this job, I was able to put into practice the basic accounting practices that I studied in the management module at St. Andrew’s University. Above all else, precision and exactitude, as well as being up-to-date, are vital in the accounting field, and the ability to work with others is important in gathering the necessary information about the accounting process in an efficient way. In the summer of 2012, I did an internship in Shanghai in the marketing department of a multinational company called the Horizon Group. I was a member of the Kits team and helped to develop B.O.M.S. based on descriptions of the product from the American marketing department in New York, which were then given to the Chinese manufacturers.
These opportunities motivated me to pursue my dream of becoming a manager of a consulting firm that would assist other multinationals in selecting profitable investments. After accomplishing that goal, I plan to run my own business in my home country which would also focus on consulting activities. I want to gain experience through working at a good consulting firm in the UK or in any another developed country before returning to my home country in Morocco. I have been inspired in this goal by the recent tendency of many multinationals to invest in African continent, particularly in North Africa, given the market saturation that has occurred in many Asian countries. I am of course well-aware that this region of the world is at a critical historical juncture because of the recent political upheavals and the possible transition to more democratic governments in these countries. I would like to play my own small part in changing the system in North Africa away from the older forms of authoritarian rule, which in the final analysis is the only way that real economic growth and development will ever take place there.
