Pursuing a Doctoral Degree in Finance :: Graduate Admissions Essays

Pursuing a Doctoral Degree in Finance I have an excellent job with tremendous advancement opportunities. At my well-paid job at a prestigious investment bank on Wall Street, my computer science and analytical skills are recognized and lauded. Moreover, I enjoy intellectual interactions with my Ph.D. colleagues, have many friends, and am appreciated by my managers. Still, I feel a void in my life. While my friends and colleagues do non understand my decision to leave my rewarding public life, I know that I have no picking if I am to pursue my long-term goal and my childhood dream to teach and publish research. While my friends think I am sacrificing certain career advancement for unnecessary training, I do not act impulsively, and I am certain that I have made the correct decision. What they do not understand is that I will derive even greater satisfaction by pursuing a doctoral degree than by earning a high salary and advancing in my present career. By pursuing a doctorate, I will have the priceless probability to realize my dream. Learning gives me a world of satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment. The more I learn, the more fulfilled I feel. I do not learn solely to reserve my knowledge in a practical setting instead, it is the quest for knowledge and the challenge of learning that motivates me. Originally, I took my current job since I saw it as an invaluable opportunity to further my learning experience. Over the past two years, I have accumulated a good knowledge of Finance. I was introduced to Bayesian Statistics, GARCH processes, and other topics of time series analysis. I also learned how to price volatility swaps and categorize different optimization tasks. While I never think to focus solely on the practical side of finance, nearly all of my work revolves around it. For example, I have done research that forecasted assets expected returns as well as research on a better way to execute a trade. These research opportunities were all re sults-oriented. I rarely have had the opportunity to look at the theoretical aspect of finance, like deriving closed-form solutions to evaluate financial instruments, which I sometimes find interesting. Although I try hard to poke out my knowledge of theoretical finance by reading finance and econometrics books on my leisure time, I am not able to test those theories empirically.