Corporate finance postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last spring my mother had to decide whether to lease or buy a new van for her mobile dog-grooming business. The dealer's leasing quote looked cheaper each month, and the bank loan looked cheaper overall, so she asked me to sort it out. I built a spreadsheet that compared the timing of each set of payments, discounted them at the rate the bank would charge her, and allowed for the resale value of the van after five years. The answer was closer than either quote suggested, and it depended heavily on that resale assumption. We chose to buy, with a larger deposit than she had planned. The decision itself was small, but it showed me how much of corporate finance is about turning a vague choice into cash flows, a cost of capital and a few honest assumptions. I would now like to study the subject properly at postgraduate level.

My BSc in Business Management gave me a broad base. I enjoyed financial accounting and the introductory finance module most, particularly net present value and the weighted average cost of capital. For my dissertation I studied the debt levels of a sample of small listed UK retailers over several years, using figures from their published annual reports. I calculated gearing and interest cover and compared firms that had cut dividends with those that had kept paying them. The work was descriptive rather than causal, and my supervisor helped me see the limits of a small sample. Even so, reading the notes to the accounts taught me more than the headline figures did. Lease liabilities, covenant disclosures and going concern statements often told a fuller story about financial risk. The project received a first-class mark, and it left me wanting the theory and quantitative tools to analyse such questions more rigorously.

Since graduating I have read beyond my course. Working through parts of Brealey, Myers and Allen's Principles of Corporate Finance helped me understand the Modigliani-Miller propositions. It explained why capital structure matters once taxes, financial distress and information problems are added back in. Damodaran's The Little Book of Valuation was useful in a different way. It insists that every valuation tells a story about a business and that the story should be consistent with the numbers. I tried this on two of the retailers from my dissertation, building simple discounted cash flow models. These exercises were rough, but they made me much more comfortable with forecasting and sensitivity analysis.

I work full-time as a shift supervisor at a garden furniture retailer. The role is not financial, but it is commercially instructive. I manage rotas for six staff and handle end-of-day cash reconciliation. Because sales are so seasonal, I have watched how stock bought in winter ties up cash until the spring rush. When the manager asked for help preparing a case for an extra summer staff member, I estimated the extra sales needed to cover the cost. This was a modest piece of work, but it reinforced the habit of asking what a decision does to cash, not just to profit.

Outside work I restore old bicycles and sell them online. I keep a running record of parts, time and sale prices, and I have learned not to pour money into frames that will never recover their cost. It is a hobby first. However, pricing a finished bike against comparable listings is a small, practical version of relative valuation.

I want to develop a firmer grasp of valuation, capital structure, mergers and financial modelling, together with the econometric skills to test ideas rather than simply describe them. In the longer term I am interested in corporate finance roles that advise small and medium-sized businesses. Decisions like my mother's are common there, and good analysis can make a real difference. I bring careful work with accounts, a reliable record in a demanding job and a genuine curiosity about how firms fund themselves.