Standing under the rolling mountains, I have never thought that the previously impoverished mountain village would become the place I saw now.

I major in tourism management. After entering to college, I only knew that I wanted to study business, but was somewhat confused about future plan. Tourism management is a secondary subject of business administration, from which I learned knowledge of both general business and tourism segmentation, yet without ruling out other commercial areas, I wasn't determined to engage in the tourism industry solely.

In 2020, I was an intern at the Department of culture and tourism of Shaanxi Province, assisting the selection of Rural Tourism Key Village. I participated in several inspection trips of the villages. Surprisingly, when I arrived at one of those rural villages, what I saw was a featured modern village resort with sightseeing parks, fishing areas and tea gardens. They were not as poor and backward as I expected—the government improved the traffic blocking and infrastructure by building highways, electricity and network facilities. The village resort was invested by a company. With professional design and precision marketing, the company attracts people by rural life experience based on local natural resources, and the resort has promoted employment and income-generation.

After inspection, Fu Tea Town, as a characteristic tourist town combining folk culture and Fu tea industry, aroused my most interest. I conducted a field trip as a tourist, interviewed staff of the management company, and looked up literature to study its competitive advantages. Under the suggestion of my college professor, I chose the Porter Diamond Model to carry out the analysis of its success factors and wrote a term dissertation, in which I came up with many thoughts regarding the strategy of organization. Fu Tea Town standing out among many rural tourist attractions is mainly because its positioning of “Fu Tea characteristic industry”. Its development company gathered a number of Fu Tea enterprises to promote industrial clusters and tourism industry chain based on cultural resources, forming a unique market positioning and competitive advantage with innovation and its features. As a result, the local residents have greatly increased income from related industries and got rid of poverty. The differentiated strategy and successful marketing have further driven me to understand that business innovation has a more direct role in developing economy. As David Ahlstrom said, “the main goal of business is to develop new and innovative goods and services that generate economic growth while delivering important benefits to society.” That was the time I found management consulting might be a better place where I can pass on my thoughts to organizations and help them create value.

Interested in photography, I joined the Photography and Video Department of Nankai Student Publicity Centre, to take photos of school activities and posting them on WeChat public account. After a period of promotion, few people subscribed us and clicked on our content. We fell into a bottleneck period. Comparing to our competitors, I realised that school activities was not close to students’ interests. I proposed our own strategic positioning: locate the needs of students, carry out content innovation, and build our own characteristics. After discussing, my collages and I selected members from each department to set up a "tactical team", responsible for finding hot spots and innovate themes. The tactical teams enable us to communicate more directly beyond departments, and we successfully launched innovative topics, one of which was to capture spring scenes in the campus from low angle and aerial perspective. This adjustment increased us thousands of followers, and our reputation continued to expand. Concurrently, I have grown up with the organization and became the director of my department. Managing team was also a significant part for me. I proposed team-building activities to improve team cohesion, and to guarantee the quality of photos, I networked experts of Photography Club to help launch training seminars. During this process, I have grown into a leader, conducting strategic positioning for organization as well as enabling my members to develop. From this moment on, I discovered the joy of solving problems and the charm of strategic-thinking.

Therefore, with the interest of strategy, I started my first internship in consulting at BDA, a boutique consulting firm. In a due diligence project for a battery company, under the guidance of my leader, I conducted 35 expert interviews with target company’s competitors, manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and technical experts, proficient at communication. I also dug into the company’s annual reports and industry news to verify information, used Excel to organize sales data, and made an equity structure diagrams by PowerPoint. Handling intense work more and more proficiently, I harvested consulting work techniques and industry insights concurrently. Through data gathering and information analysing, I summarized the business model of the target company. In the R&D link, it absorbs research talents for new material innovation; in the production link, it establishes a sustainable relationship with lead manufacturers and OEM, and conducts lead waste recycling; in the sales link, it grasps market channels and builds brand image. I was excited by organizational strategy knowledge and industry insights. Consulting work has provided me with the opportunity to explore different industries and companies in depth, and to analyse business from various perspectives, from which I am able to take a step closer to understand the world. The feeling of connecting the dots after deeply learning is my greatest satisfaction.

During my second consulting internship at Roland Berger, I found myself enjoy working in management consulting. Summarising my work and reviewed with my leader, I pieced together an overall structure of research, and my work was to verify the team’s hypotheses to solve key issues in a limited time. With the understanding of structured-thinking and hypothesis-driven methods of consulting, in a steel industry park planning project later, I collected the industry chain layout measures and investment policies of domestic steel industrial parks for transformation and upgrading. Developing high-tech industries with steel industry such as high-end equipment manufacturing can effectively improve the local industrial structure and develop economy. When studying the feasibility of some transformation policies, I thought from the assumptions behind the research topic and verify the hypotheses from different angles. The understanding of consulting and research methods shortened my working time and made my research results more solid. I finally found consulting to be a better place where I can use my talents and passion to help organizations perform better and create value to the society.

I have never thought that the village resort and my photography hobby drove me to a career path of management consulting and to the management academic area. In the short and mid-term, I will work hard to enter a tier-1 management consulting firm, and in the first year participate projects in several industries such as tourism and consumer goods, industries that are close to daily life, to find the one I aspire to specialise in. In 2 to 3 years, I will focus on 1 industry, and become a specialist of the firm. In the long term, I plan to switch to the strategy department of a company in that industry, using professional knowledge and scientific consulting methodology to help organization deploy strategies, optimize practice, and generate value.

With my previous experience equipping me with fundamental business knowledge and problem-solving skills, I aspire to learn more business analysis techniques and more rigorous training to management, as well as an exposure of the wider socio-economic environment to understand the causes behind business. [University Name] MSc Management and Strategy provides students with economics lens to focus on management issues, and explorations of different areas. Through The Analysis of Strategy A&B, I am able to learn how to make decisions under uncertainty, and analyse market structure and aspects of competition from the perspective of game theory. In Design and Management of Organisations, the psychological and sociological perspectives to analyse entrepreneurs and managers in the organization can also broaden my horizons and ways of thinking. In elective courses, I plan to choose Managerial Finance and Financial Markets. A company’s financial status is a significant part especially in strategy making, and combining more financial knowledge with my tourism management background would make me unique in the industry. Moreover, the strong alumni network in consulting industry of this programme enables me to gain insights and advices in my career path.

In 2019, I participated in [University Name] summer school of Management and Economics of E-business. Learning new theories in lectures, and discussing cases by group in seminars, I got used to the high-intensity learning rhythm by [University Name] teaching method. Career-enhancing workshops, sunset cruise, lecture series and farewell party gave me the opportunity to enhance myself and experience colourful study life, and strengthened my idea of going back to [University Name] for graduate study. In the future, as a full-time student, I can not only continue enjoying the resources that [University Name] provides but also make my own contribution to this wonderful community. Together, we make the world a better place.

I am ready.