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 not understand my decision to leave my rewarding career, I know that I have no choice 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 higher salary and advancing in my present career. By pursuing a doctorate, I will have the priceless opportunity to realize m y 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 apply 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 intended 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 results-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 broaden my knowledge of theoretical finance by reading finance and econometrics books on my leisure time, I am not able to test those theories empirically.