What are your career goals over the next 3-5 years and what would be your long term dream job? (500 words)
What are your career goals over the next 3-5 years and what would be your long term dream job?
What is your immediate post-MBA professional goal? (50 Characters) [46] Join a diversified INDUSTRY X investment firm
Essay 1- Short Term Career + Dream Job
Through your resume and recommendation, we have a clear sense of your professional path to date. What are your career goals over the next three to five years and what is your long-term dream job? (500 words)
The confluence of rigorous financial analysis, creative design, and entrepreneurialism drew me to INDUSTRY X. When I joined COMPANY X, the SECTOR X market was booming; I consequently spent the majority of my time working with the NICHE X development group. When Covid hit, most of the world screeched to a halt, but not in NICHE X. Investment into this space hit record highs, and I was asked to focus full-time on NICHE X acquisitions. As society reopened and the pandemic waned, so too did demand for NICHE X. In my brief four years in INDUSTRY X, I have already witnessed peaks and troughs across different sub-sectors. I have learned the value of a diverse investment mandate and the perils of being confined to one asset class. Going forward, I seek a generalist INDUSTRY X role that allows me to capitalize on the asynchronous cyclicality across product types by pursuing the optimal sub-sector based on the state of the market.
Merging my past experiences with a Columbia MBA, I will be primed to succeed as an associate in a generalist INDUSTRY X group, such as COMPANY X Fund or COMPANY Y INDUSTRY X Investing. Ultimately, INDUSTRY X assets are similar enough that best practices from one sub-sector can be applied to others, yet it takes a broad knowledge base to identify those potential cross-applications. Moving up through the ranks of an established generalist INDUSTRY X group will enable me to gain experience in a broader array of product types.
While I strongly believe joining one of these INDUSTRY X groups provides opportunity for advancement and is a viable long-term job, I also have entrepreneurial ambitions. In this spirit, my long-term dream job is to raise my own generalist INDUSTRY X fund that focuses on rolling up pre-institutionalized assets that bigger firms avoid due to their novelty. For instance, while at both COMPANY X and COMPANY Y, I learned the restrictions of product isolation when I presented a business plan to invest in NICHE Z, a newer and more cousin of NICHE X. Despite acknowledging its promise, both firms shied away from it because it did not fit the traditional bill of INDUSTRY X NICHE. Since my last proposal, however, trades in this space have increased by 25%.
Today, I believe that there are huge opportunities in nascent asset classes, such as NICHE Y, NICHE Z, and [tangential niche 1]. In my time in NICHE X, I have learned that large institutions get comfortable with more unconventional asset classes through scale. Single property NICHE X deals, for instance, are untenable investments for large Public Investment Funds, though portfolios of disparate sites sufficiently reduce risk to entice larger players. My fund will roll-up high growth, novel assets and create marketable portfolios that attract institutional interest. Through Columbia Business School, I will have the educational foundation and professional network to succeed at a generalist fund, and when the time is right, to launch my own INDUSTRY X fund.