In order to further enrich myself, I availed myself of every opportunity of academic exchange both on campus and off campus. I shuttled among Peking University, Central Finance and Economics University, and China Renmin University on my bicycle in order to attend lectures delivered by the country’s leading scholars and entrepreneurs. Those lectures constituted an important supplement to my in-class training because they were immediately connected with the realities of Chinese society. I also benefited importantly from my extracurricular activities. As minister of the Department of Social Practices of the School’s Students Union, I planned and organized the School’s Festival of the Art of Management. I also canvassed Pepsi Company to sponsor our university’s basketball league match. In launching those activities, I improved my organizational and managerial skills. In retrospection, my undergraduate program was most strengthened by my self-conscious attention to various applied subjects—higher mathematics, statistics and probability, linear algebra, operations research, etc. It can be said that my undergraduate education (in which my overall scholastic performance ranked top 4th in my class consisting of 30 students) enabled me to make some basic preparations in theoretical knowledge and in the application of mathematical tools.

From Sept. 1998 to April 2000, my employment with Hisense Group in QingDao City, Shandong Province (one of the largest manufacturers of electrical appliances in China) was a major opportunity to practice what I had learned. The second year I joined the Group, the most fierce price warfare happened to China’s electrical appliances industry. Manufacturers reduced the prices of their products to unprecedented low levels in order to maximize their market share. As an act of market competition, the Marketing Department where I worked launched Traveling Expositions of Hisense Products. As one of the four key personnel of the department, I planned and organized a series of exhibitions in most major cities in China. Our one-year efforts achieved remarkable market effects. In Shijiazhuan City, for instance, of a total of 30 brands, our sales of televisions and air conditioners accounted for 24% and 18% respectively in 2000. In that year’s performance evaluation, I was awarded the Group’s Model Employee.

My understanding of marketing was enriched and modified by my 2-year practical work experience. To me, marketing was not merely composed of such elements as product designing, promotion through advertising, pricing models, and distribution channels. It also encompassed the analysis of the behavior both of your competitors and of consumers, studies in organization behavior, brand management, and decision-makings. Believing that a more systematic education would contribute to a more successful career, I went back to my alma mater in September 2000 and went on with a Master’s program in Engineering and Management Science in order to gain knowledge on a higher professional level, to follow the most updated academic information, and to improve my managerial caliber.hxw.red