Please discuss your post-MBA short- and long-term professional goals. How will your professional experience, when combined with a Kelley MBA degree, allow you to achieve these goals?

My short-term, post-MBA plan is to pursue a career in corporate finance. I want to influence business decisions by designing sound financial strategies which benefit an organization. Long-term, I see myself in a leadership role making strategic decisions that maximize an organization’s value by determining the best growth path, whether through re-investing internally or strategic acquisitions.

Working as a business analyst, both at Company X and as a consultant, I have relished the challenge of helping organizations not only identify critical problems, but also establish project development frameworks to effectively manage the planning and implementation of key initiatives. Often times, this required working with multiple business units within an organization, analyzing each unit’s unique needs to identify critical requirements, and creating a roadmap for the potential solution. Serving as a liaison, I collaborated with technical teams, bridging communication gaps between business units and programmers to ensure the timely development of a solution that perfectly satisfied the needs of the organization.

For example, at the Department of Human Services (DHS), my ability to elicit business needs and clearly communicate them to the technical staff resulted in the management team asking me to establish the best practices for the creation and management of business requirements. These best practices are now used during the implementation of other information technology initiatives. Also, based on my instrumental contributions in the success of the project at DHS, I was recruited to Company X by the Director of Information Technology, formerly the Senior Bureau Chief of Infrastructure at DHS.

After three years and many successes as a liaison between business stakeholders and technical teams, I feel that I have reached the pinnacle of my business analysis career. Consequently, I feel it is time to return to business school to integrate leadership and financial skills into my repertoire and have the opportunity to make a more lasting impact on an organization in a corporate finance role.

I envision corporate finance and business analysis share a similar skill set of communication, interpersonal, and problem-solving skills. I look forward to utilizing these skills, plus my new MBA skills, to perform the best possible financial analysis when evaluating the implications of potential business scenarios on the bottom line and recommending a course of action. Kelley courses such as Advanced Financial Statement Analysis and Valuation, Derivatives Securities, and Financial Analysis for Corporate Decisions will allow me to build on my quantitative skill set.

In addition, the Leadership, Professional and Career Development (LPCD) program will provide an avenue to complement my financial skills by learning and applying key leadership skills in simulated conditions. Likewise, the Corporate Finance Academy will allow me to fine tune my newly acquired skills while enabling me to network with alumni and executives from firms that hire Kelley MBAs.

During my visit to Kelley, I was deeply impressed by Professor Philip Powell’s enthusiasm while discussing the sustainability of CompUSA’s business model. I am certain that the smaller class sizes at Kelley will augment my learning experience by promoting one-to-one discussions with such passionate professors and gaining from their perspective. The students I spoke with all applauded not only how well Kelley’s integrated core is both structured and relevant to the world of business, but also how well it equipped them to analyze business problems from many perspectives. Although I was fairly certain of my school choice prior to my visit to IU, the visit reaffirmed my belief that the energetic, diverse, and close knit community at Kelley will provide the best bridge for connecting my current skills with the future career that I seek.