When the financial crisis hit, while Britain rushed to bail out its banks and feared another Great Depression, India continued to grow at an impressive rate and barely felt the crash of the banks across the seas. With roots in both countries, I was uniquely placed to appreciate this difference in economic fortunes, and I became intent on understanding the economic reasons for the disparity between the two nations. India may be growing dramatically faster than the UK but many of its people live untouched by the new economic prosperity while many bailed-out bankers in the City flourish again.  I want to study Business so that I may later work in the financial sector in a management capacity and promote a more ethical way of doing business. Much of the damage in the crisis was caused by complex financial products. My exceptional mathematical skills, shown by my A-Level results and Junior and Senior School Mathematics prizes, should enable me to master their complexities when I come to them in the degree, while my talent for A-Level Chemistry equips me with the analytical skills necessary to examine and analyse large bodies of data in the Management Accounting part of the degree. A-Level Economics, on the other hand, has given me a solid understanding of how economies function and has made me better able to appreciate the theoretical and ideological differences between the Keynesian and Monetarist approaches to the recent financial crisis.

Having been gripped by the unfolding financial disaster, I have devoured with relish numerous books about the City and the crisis. Most recently, I have particularly enjoyed Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail, which reveals the strategic mistakes made by Wall St bosses in the run up to the crisis, and Tony Golding’s The City, which gives a good theoretical overview of the financial markets.

To gain an understanding of how businesses work in practice not just in theory, in the last few years I have packed my summers with valuable work experience both in the UK and India. Most recently, I worked for the J Walter Thompson Group, an international ad agency, at its London headquarters, where I was mentored by the company’s global chief gaining a lot of insight into how international firms operate. The year before, I worked in India for Mahindra Defence Systems, a global automotive company, where I observed how the management develop new strategies to deal with changes in the global economy. In the same summer, I did a stint at a major accountancy firm, where I did a lot of book-keeping, which should be great preparation for analysing financial statements during the degree. All my diverse work experiences helped cement my decision to work in finance and impressed upon me that it is essential to be a good communicator and team player to succeed in business.

Outside of the classroom and the workplace, I have worked on developing the requisite communication and team work skills by taking a leadership course in Italy and becoming a Prefect at school. My leadership skills were called upon when I set up the Economics and Current Affairs Society at school with the aim of providing a forum in which I and my fellow students could discuss and come to better understand developments in the economy and wider society. I hope to manage a similar society when I enter university. Some have lost out from our globalised economy and I have sought to do my bit by volunteering for a charity in India and managing the charity committee at school, which also gave me useful practical experience of handling funds.

I am a keen cyclist, having competed in a series of mountain bike races across Europe, and I would like to join the university’s mountain biking team. I also hope to continue doing charity work when I enter university.

For, I hope that university life will not only prepare me academically for the challenges of financial management but will strengthen my ethics so that I may handle those management duties responsibly.

This Business personal statement example is one of many examples on this site which can be used as a helpful guide for your university application.