When I was a child, I often helped my grandmother, an accountant, to do her bookkeeping work as it was difficult for her to see the entries due to her impaired vision. My job was simple enough---- I just held a magnifier over the entries and put unrecorded entries below the magnifier when my grandmother told me to. At that time, I wondered, how could she make income simply by recording numbers?

Years have passed and now I’m a senior student majoring in accounting. I am not quite so naive anymore, however, after receiving several years of academic training and acquiring some hands-on experience, more questions arose in my quest to become a professional accountant. Therefore, I feel strongly that it would be prudent for me to pursue a MS in accounting at your university in order to achieve my career goal. Possessing a natural proclivity with numbers and a strong interest in economics, it seemed logical to me to select an accounting career. This professional track only admits students with the highest scores in the College Entrance Exams. Contributing to the integrative training and courses, I have absorbed comprehensive knowledge in accounting and finance at every opportunity. With a talent for mathematics, I have been head and shoulders above most of my fellow students out of a class of 132. I have ranked among the top 3 percent in macro-economics, top 2 percent in micro-economics, the top 5 percent in financial management, and the top 4 percent in intermediate accounting.

Realizing that studying accounting was not just about getting good grades, I took every opportunity to further develop my abilities in analysis and research. In the summer of 2012, I was chosen as a research assistant for a project conducting a survey about Tax Planning of Enterprise Income Tax for small and medium-sized businesses. In this project, I was assigned to conduct questionnaire surveys and analyze the resultant data. We started by online investigation through emails, which later proved to be time-consuming and ineffective. In order to gather more valid information and time-sensitive responses from the participants, I spent two months visiting more than 200 enterprises and successfully persuaded most of them to complete our questionnaires. Later, during the process of analyzing collected data, I had determined that the main restraining factors for the tax planning of small and medium-sized enterprises was the quality of financial management (financial management what? “tools”, “personnel”, “knowledge” “services”???) and the lack of familiarity with the tax laws. Understanding that academic success is not enough for me in terms of pursuing a career in accounting, I consciously participated in all kinds of extracurricular activities to improve my leadership and communication skills. In sophomore year, my friends and I co-founded the Model United Nations Association, where I was in charge of raising and managing club funds. Since “Model United Nations” clubs are not familiar to most of the students in my school， we had no credibility and as a result，I raised only a small amount of interest and money in the beginning. To increase awareness and educate students about the club, I taught myself how to film a promotional (the word propaganda has negative connotations in the west) video and then posted in on the school website. I also wrote letters to every professor and administrative staff person I could find in an effort create a buzz among students and faculty about our new club. My efforts finally paid off. Several months after the founding of the MUN Association, I had raised about 6000 yuan and now, it has become one of the most popular student clubs in our university.

Out of all of the activities I have participated in the university, one of them made me realize that accounting really clicks with me. In the third year of college, I worked as an administrative assistant in the International Office. One