Good Short Term Goals Essay Example

Section 1

My priority in the short term lies in affording myself opportunities to gain expertise and experience in finance and management, which I can leverage in the subsequent years to build a successful career. To this end, I intend to start out in an industry that is both demand and draws directly on the principles, concepts, analytical tools and methods that I have gained in my course. I hope to start out in the banking industry, but specialize in real estate financing and investment. The banking industry will allow me to utilize the financial analysis tools that I have already gained in my course, which will ensure that I master and deploy them in my future career endeavours. To consolidate my knowledge and skills in real estate finance even further, I believe an MSc (Finance) is an excellent launching pad, which will give me a grasp of the conceptual and practical building blocks of real financing and industry. I hope to consolidate my knowledge on default risk, its measurement and management, chain financing and other aspects that I am convinced are critical to building a successful career as a real estate financier, manager and developer.

Challenges

The labour market, and especially the financial industry, has grown fiercely competitive and innovative. The industry is changing due to new technologies, financial market liberalization and globalization, innovation and sheer competition from players. The 2007/8 global economic crisis is illustrative of ensuing revolution in the industry as well as how failures by key players to correctly estimate credit risks correctly literally brought the industry and the global economy to its knees. While I have gained considerable knowledge and skills in my undergraduate studies, I believe that to move to another level and to be competitive in this industry, I need further knowledge and skills. I know I am bound to make mistakes in my work and my career, and I hope that I do make them, because this way, I can learn and prevent catastrophes such as the one in 2007/8. MSc. (Finance)’s strong technical basis is a major attraction to me, and I intend to avail myself any opportunities to put my knowledge to practical use.

Medium Term Career Goals

My insistence on gaining knowledge and experience in real estate financing is driven by my intention to build a career in real estate portfolio management in China. Specifically, I expect to be part of a consultancy, set up my own consultancy or play other technical advisory role for investment funds on financial aspects. Predictably, this requires immense technical knowledge and experience in real estate finance, the real estate industry and the general financial industry. I believe that courses in Investment and Portfolio Management, Portfolio Management, the real estate industry and other associated areas, as well as my practice as a banker, will go a long way in equipping me to excel. Other specialist courses that I am interested in include Structured Credit and Equity, Fixed Income Securities, and Private Wealth Management. With a young and promising real estate market in China, conduits like REITs are expanding rapidly. It is expected that innovative new instruments and products will increasingly depend on excellent quantitative finance knowledge. As such, I am persuaded that an MSc. As well as its flexibility will give me the technical muscle to take full advantage of the emerging opportunities in the industry.

Skills

Success in the banking and real estate industries is heavily dependent on excellent understanding of practical aspects, and I am on course to achieve this, having landed an exciting internship at Roly. This internship has given me hands-on experience in retail and commercial loaning and credit assessment of actual real estate projects financed by HKBEA. I had the incredible fortune of developing a full risk appraisal report for a client, before compiling a report with my own assessment and recommendations that were fully adopted. Subsequent to the loan agreement, I was tasked with managing the process with the customer along with my immediate manager. Working on this report and managing the portfolio afforded me rewarding opportunities to conduct extensive research on the real estate and finance industries, as well as the economy as a whole. This exposure ultimately decided my mind to pursue a career in real estate, even though I had never considered it before. My research while working on the project revealed many exciting facts on the real estate industry as well as the usefulness of analytical financial tools that I gained during my undergraduate studies. I thought I would do best with an MSc Finance degree as against a similar qualification in real estate.

Part 2

2.1 Long-term Career Goal
I intend to go on and earn a Ph.D., after which I hope to work as a fund manager in a technical capacity. I am particularly drawn to the possibility of specializing in researching and developing new and innovative products to existing portfolios, building expertise in complex project analysis (e.g. structured credit instruments and derivatives). I notice that traditional Markowitz-style portfolio optimization techniques lack the requisite flexibility to analyze derivatives and other complex instruments. Consequently, I think it may be exciting to develop integrative investment analysis frameworks that can be used to optimize bonds, derivatives, equities and other intricate instruments without having to develop numerous analytical techniques for every instrument. I hope that I can bring my technical expertise and experience to bear in developing specialist knowledge in technical investment analysis for financial institutions (including hedge funds).
2.2 Skills
I have been certain to develop strong technical ability in analytical methods and theory, including by taking courses in econometrics, computational finance, business finance and quantitative methods. As a testament to my determination, I passed all these courses with nothing less than first-class grades. I have also pursued further, independent studies in portfolio management, besides building and testing my own Markowitz models in Microsoft Excel, using a variety of resources.
The second most critical skill in achieving my long-term career goal is the versatility in the application of my knowledge. With the industry, technology, theory and tools changing by the day, my success in the finance and real estate finance industries is dependent on my ability to constantly adapt my knowledge to match the specific industry and personal goals. To this end, I have set out to equip myself with practical knowledge in finance, general knowledge on the industry, the Chinese and global economies, as well as a range of other aspects of practice. I firmly believe that while technical analysis is contrary to weak form market efficiency, it offers insight on market operation and versatility necessary to succeed in the industry.