Waseda Business School Application Essay

1. Describe your career goals in detail. How do you plan to achieve them? Explain how your studies and research at WBS will help you achieve your career goals? (500 words)
2. Describe a professional work experience such as a task or project that you were involved with, and in which you experienced failure or in hindsight, felt you could have performed better. Explain the reasons for choosing this experience for this essay, and if you had a second chance, how would you do things differently? (500 words)
3. What would be your ideal way of spending a day off from work or school? (300 words)

1. Describe a product (or service) which is unique to your country or for which your country is associated with. Provide the product’s name, its purpose, as well as a description of its features, and how consumers benefit from it. Explain how you would market the product in Japan. (800 words)
2. (Optional) If you would like to elaborate on any information provided to us in your application documents, you may do so here. (250 words)

1. Describe your career goals in detail. How do you plan to achieve them? Explain how your studies and research at WBS will help you achieve your career goals? (500 words)

After two periods of study in China and England, as well as self-evaluation throughout routine work and life, I decide to pursue my career goal in WBS. In detail, I want to develop my future career in the sports marketing industry which is a promising blue ocean in China. Sports industry is not young in China but traditionally the development was led by the “whole-nation” system of the Chinese government. Although many top athletes benefiting from the “whole-nation” system have won a number of Olympic medals, the professionalism and commercialization of sports occurred later than Japan and South Korea. In the recent few years, the sports industry became a hot spot of investment chased by huge amounts of capital. Chinese billionaires have invested millions of dollars to purchase world-class players for Chinese football clubs and acquire famous European clubs like AC Milan and Inter Milan, while entrepreneurs started their own sports business with the investment from Venture Capitals. Obviously, it is a fast-developing industry with huge potential.

I have always been a sports fan since I was a child, interested in almost all kinds of sports such as football, basketball and Formula 1, which becomes a main reason to determine myself to develop career in this industry. During my postgraduate life in England, I found that the English Premier League was not only the best football league in terms of competitiveness, but also highly commercialized. For example, Manchester United has nearly 100 official sponsors from various industries globally and over £500m annual revenue. However, Chinese football clubs are far less commercialized in terms of sponsorship and brand value, despite that Chinese Super League has the highest average attendance per match in Asia. Hardly any Chinese clubs are profitable nowadays, which is not a sustainable phenomenon. Judging from the enormous fan base and the potential market space, there is a huge demand for professional marketing talents in sports industry in China.

To achieve my career goal, I have decided to further my study in Japan because Japan is one of the pioneers in the commercialization of sports in Asia and Japanese professional leagues like NPB and J. League are relatively mature. I am looking forward to gaining in-depth views and experiences from relevant business cases as well as on-site internship during the MBA study. After graduation, I plan to look for marketing positions in sports industry such as famous professional clubs or sports goods companies. With sufficient accumulation, I will seek opportunities to market a Chinese professional club to make it a world-famous commercial brand.

Japan has successful professional sports leagues and famous sports goods companies such as Mizuno and Asics. WBS, as one of the top business schools in Japan, has definitely done many studies and researches inside this industry. With the study in WBS hopefully, I am looking forward to gaining both theoretical knowledge and practical experience in sports marketing because successful examples are very important references for me to apply into my future career.

1. Describe a professional work experience such as a task or project that you were involved with, and in which you experienced failure or in hindsight, felt you could have performed better. Explain the reasons for choosing this experience for this essay, and if you had a second chance, how would you do things differently? (500 words)

While I was working for Trafigura Investment China as a trader assistant, l was once asked to back up my mentor (a senior trader) during his business trip. The main responsibility of my mentor was to make the decision of purchasing/selling refined metals according to the real-time futures market and his personal prediction. This is a highly difficult work which requires a lot of experience. Although I had been trained with a series of simulations for a long time, this was the first time I took the full responsibility without guidance. In the morning, everything went well and I made considerable profits based on my mentor’s prediction that the market price of Zinc would be continuously rising. So I remained the same strategy in the afternoon by hedging only half of the Zinc in hand and expecting to make greater profits from the unhedged part. However, the market suddenly fluctuated at around 2 p.m. and the Zinc price dropped down rapidly. If I did not response immediately, I would have suffered a huge loss. At that time my mentor was on the plane so I decided to hedge all the unhedged part at a stop-loss price to avoid any further loss. By the closure of the market, I still made a small profit in total but could have earned more if being more conservative (hedge all the Zinc in hand).

Although I took remedial measure in time and avoided big loss, I felt that I could have performed better in that situation. The market is dynamically changing and no one can predict it 100% accurately. Even if my mentor is a senior and experienced trader, his prediction for the market will not be always right, let alone his absence on that day. Actually, there were some indications of market fluctuation on that morning when I thought back later. I should have analyzed the real-time market more and combined my perspective with my mentor’s prediction, instead of wholly following. Furthermore, I should have been a bit more conservative by hedging more Zinc so as to make fixed profits because it was the first time I did trades alone. It would be better to do some risky trades after enough experiences.