Essay

1. Please provide a statement regarding your experience, if any, in applying your quantitative skills in problem solving in business or research settings. (minimum: 500 words)

I’ve participated into several researches and contests where I applied my quantitative skills.

I undertook an undergraduate research work sponsored by President’s research fellowship from April 2006 to Oct. 2007. I investigated into the relationship between “the quality of earnings” of Chinese firms and their stock returns, examining whether a fundamental-based investment strategy could alter investor’s return distribution for three different investment modes. During the empirical research, I applied the fundamental scoring system to data from 1998 to 2007 in Chinese capital market. I used Excel in basic data processing, Matlab in data mining, and SPSS in Spearman Correlation test and Wilcoxon significance test. I arrived at the conclusion that the stock price in Chinese market could only reflect information of the current year, and that investors could earn significant return by analyzing fundamental information.

In Nov. 2006, I took part in a project in the course of Developmental Economics concerning rural-urban migrants’ job-hunting, living condition and the education of their offspring. To analyze the data we collected by disseminating thousands of questionnaires and interviewing the subjects, I developed a relatively simple but convincing model to explain the educational decision the rural-urban migrants made on their children and its effects. From the model, we found that the migrants’ educational decision is mainly based on such conditions as whether their mothers or relatives stay in Beijing, regional gaps of educational qualities, and the locations of their hometown. Therefore, to better allocate “education” as a social resource, government should make endeavors in eliminating the educational gap and migration barriers between rural and urban sectors. Our professor commented on our report as “a good demonstration” of my “well-practiced statistics, economics research skill, and modeling ability”.

In February 2007, I organized a team to take part into ICM (Interdisciplinary Contest of Modeling), and our team got an “Honorable” Mention from COMAP. It was an exciting experience. In the contest, we were to complete a report titled “Finding the Perfect Match” for kidney transplants, a topic unfamiliar to all of us.  I worked with two partners for four days, reading and searching for literature, building databases for patients and organs, designing distribution of parameters, establishing an efficiency testing model and optimizing the allocating system for kidney transplants. Using our model, we successfully improved the efficiency of the allocation system. The judges awarded our project an “Honorable”.

Nov. 2006-February 2007, two friends and I formed a team into the e-Strat business challenge held by L’Oreal. In the contest, we were running a virtual company for 6 periods in an oligarchy cosmetic industry, making decisions for the R&D, production, product distribution, marketing, human resources, as well as social & environmental responsibilities. We were supposed to maximize the stock price index of the company. At each decision period, large amount of data are reported. We need to analyze them and get decision data from complex computation. To improve efficiency and accuracy, we design a model in Excel, with data entries of each period and the computation process embedded. Such automatic management model greatly reduced our workload. Each game period, we need only discuss the main strategy, adjusting accordingly the parameters involved in the model, and we can get the outcomes of other decision data from our model! Over 3000 team from all over the world took participation and only 50 got into the semi-final contest. Our team was one of them, and also the 9^th in East Asia Game Zone. Although we were not among the three finalist teams, the experience of business challenge and close team work left us very deep impression.