Statement of Purpose PhD in Economics, Essay Example

As a Chemical Engineering undergraduate student I had the opportunity to develop and propose a plant design business plan for Chevron. During my senior year at UCLA, various UCLA faculty members, Chevron executives and senior chemical engineers taught me basic principles of plant design including technical, financial and economic analyses. This was a turning point in my vision for my career goals. For the first time I was exposed to the complexity of microeconomics of an industry and to the ephemeral effect time has on economic conditions. This experience made me realize that I was much more interested in the financial and economic analyses than I was in the applied engineering technical aspects of the project. From that point on, I focused on business analysis during my graduate studies and I have a strong knowledge of business, entrepreneurship, and marketing analysis. Economics is a building block for each and every one of these areas and I want to delve deeper into the subject in order to carry out meaningful independent research that will ultimately benefit others in the field. I realize though that my knowledge in the field is far from enough, hence my decision to join the Economics Ph.D. program at UCLA.

From a very young age I always had an affinity to science classes particularly mathematics. At the age of fifteen, I enrolled in a “Young Mathematics Doctorate” in which I mastered Calculus basics and developed my strong mathematics background.  After acing calculus, economics, chemistry and physics classes during my freshman and sophomore years in college, I decided to pursue a Bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering because I believed it would be the best way to combine my passions for science and mathematics. During my undergraduate studies, I started to develop my analytical and research capabilities and I aim to further this development by enrolling in the economics doctoral program.

To support my undergraduate education, I took up a position with the Israeli government Tourist Office. Given the titles of Accountant and Project Manager, my responsibilities included various financial and administrative duties as well as project management and market research analysis. I found that my interest in the world of finance and economics grew as projects became more complex and comprehensive. Economic analysis was at the heart of every project I coordinated and executed. In order to properly market Israel to American tourists, I assisted our marketers in research and analysis of the travel behaviors of American citizens. Through this job, I began to realize how intertwined economies of different countries around the world can be and the magnitude of the effect of something as trivial as travel habits of citizens from one country on the economy of another.  This is a relationship that would not have been discovered through the traditional Chemical Engineering path, and I quickly understood that there was a greater importance in the field of economics and finance for me than that of Chemical Engineering.

Upon this realization, I first moved away from engineering education to pursue an MBA with an emphasis on Finance and Accounting. Graduate level courses such as International Financial, Mergers and Acquisitions, Investments and Global Marketing strategy stirred my interest in finance and economic principles. I specifically enjoyed courses that pushed me to go beyond the scope of the material learned in class through stimulating assignments and group projects. A specific example was a Mergers and Acquisitions project in which I had to research the microeconomics of the oil industry in order to propose an acquisition of a foreign company for multinational diversification purposes.  Not only did I learn a great deal from this program, but I was also able to extend past my Chemical Engineering background in order to obtain information and knowledge in a much more meaningful career field that I am extremely passionate.

To support our living expenses and education my husband and I founded a home improvement business in 2006. At the peak of the housing bubbles, the business showed strong prospects as homeowners were able to easily refinance their mortgages to obtain sufficient equity to remodel their properties and in turn sell them for profit. The ease of borrowing money without proper documentation always puzzled me and I know that the end is soon to come. By 2007, the real estate prices were rapidly declining and owners could no longer refinance their adjustable rate mortgages. Inevitable defaults on mortgage payments and consequent property foreclosures led to the collapse of big financial institutions such as Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch to which our business was directly caught in the middle. The economic crisis forced my husband and I to make substantial changes to our business operations and in an attempt to maintain operations we started targeting a more affluent clientele through alliances with interior designers and with higher liquidity, and we narrowed our service offering to a niche in home automations and room addition. While we have survived this economic crisis, many of our friends and family in the same line of business were forced out of business. These current events have enforced my desire to study economics in order to better predict the next economic crisis before it happens and help individuals better prepare for surviving it.  Few people are able to see the direct impact of economic environments and market outcomes, but I truly understand the importance of economics in business and everyday life which has only increased my passion for the field.

As a graduate assistant at Loyola Marymount University and now an Administrator, I had the pleasure of assisting Faculty Affairs Associates in various responsibilities including tenure, rank, sabbatical procedures. This has provided me an inside view of academia and intrigued my interest in becoming a faculty member at a higher research institute.

My previous education prepared me for advanced research. I obtained a solid academic background in mathematics, science, finance and economic theory. Through further graduate education I plan to take statistics, probability and econometrics courses that will help me conduct meaningful independent research to offer feasible solutions to pressing economic issues. At the top of my research interest are Financial Economics, International Economics and Labor Economics. I want to delve deeper into what makes these areas interconnected. Furthermore, I would like to study the effect of legal and illegal immigration on the labor market of two countries to compare and analyze the overall impact that these effects have on the market economies. Issues such as retirement plans of illegal immigrants and entrepreneurships are fascinating to me. From a global perspective, I want to research the variables and effects of volatile exchange rate fluctuations on economies, as well as the reasons for so many unsuccessful global mergers and acquisitions. There is still much to learn in order to improve the stability of the global economy as well as for me personally to grow within my knowledge and experiences of the field.

UCLA’s economics PhD program is my first choice, largely because of its outstanding faculty and interdisciplinary approach to Economics. Among the professors whom I wish to study with are Professor Sebastian Edwards. I particularly enjoyed his working paper “The relationship between exchange rates and inflation targeting revisited.” I would also like to study under Professor Maria Casanova for her extensive research on retirement behavior and Professor Francisco Buera for questioning the relationship between wealth and entry to entrepreneurship and the interaction between savings and the decision to become an entrepreneur under borrowing constraints.  Economics is my strong passion and I know that I will grow and learn within this field by having the opportunity to have strong educational relationships and experiences with such a powerful, knowledgeable faculty.