Portfolio of Student of Dalhousie University - Personal Life, Academic Qualification, Achievements - Admission/Application Essay Example

Portfolio Introduction The importance of creating a personal portfolio is that it provides a gist of each and every activity, which has been carried out by an individual throughout his / her life span. It is just like a reflective presentation of any individual’s life (College of Charleston, 2013). I was always keen about framing up all the activities and occurrences that I experienced in my life. Through this portfolio, I desired to establish a link between my personal and my music academic life. I also wanted to join up my future ambitions in this personal portfolio through which I will be getting a glimpse of the way in which my life pattern is moving forward. This personal portfolio will be just like a self-exploration process for me. Through this portfolio, I will be trying to find out the faults within my thinking and acting patterns and improve those accordingly. I being a student of Dalhousie University, Canada currently looking forward towards developing my career in the areas of music. I also understand setting up future goals is vital for me to become successful in terms of achieving my expected career outcomes. I also consider myself significantly good in English language and thus I am looking forward to pursue my graduation in English, which I expect will help me in attaining a bright career. I will be framing this personal portfolio in a very simplified manner so that it projects an overall description of my life rather than just describing my career objective s and future planning. Moreover, I possess supportive family members who helped me in every stage of my life. 2. Academic Qualification An appropriate academic qualification is vital in terms of projecting an individual’s knowledge levels to the outside world (Hobcraft, 2000). I also believe that the academic certifications are of significant value that will further assist me in moving forward with my higher studies. Moreover, these might help me in securing my future in terms of developing various skill sets and potentialities at large. However, I pay much importance towards effective learning process rather than just attaining certifications. In my view, the academic life will play a significant role in terms of preparing me for facing the upcoming difficulties and challenges that would appear in my life. This will also help me in becoming a socially and mentally sound person and improve my decision-making capabilities at large. I am currently studying in Dalhousie University, which is situated in Canada. My parents are from business background and thus they want me to make my future move in supporting our family business. They have also suggested as well as morally helped me towards becoming a writer by profession. Moreover, I belong to Chinese origin and had spent a major portion of my childhood life in attaining excellence in the areas of music. I have been taking piano lessons for more than 10 years now and have also participated in multiple musical competitions. Moreover, I have also attained multiple musical certifications from famous Chinese Music School and Royal Music School. 3. Personal Life a. Social Background The social culture of China is diverse. From the past period itself, the entire Chinese population has been segregated based on social and societal rankings (Wang, 2008). I prefer interacting with people belonging from varied community and background rather than remaining confined to my own community type. This provides me with an opportunity of learning multiple new cultures and their interaction styles. I also like working with different community students in terms of performing academic projects. I believe these would add up towards improvising my leadership capabilities and thus help me in becoming a better manager, which I will be needed for supporting and managing my family business. b. Family and Spouse I basically belong to a Chinese family and our family is mostly business oriented. Moreover, our family is ranked among one of the most respected communities in the Chinese society. But despite of being a part of the Chinese society, I am strictly against categorizing individuals on the basis of classes and social ranking. I believe that every individual in this society is equal and should earn social and prestige ranking based on his or her deeds. Adding to this, I also spent considerable amount of time outside China and thus believe in a broader perspective thinking process. 4. Professional Life a. Experience Based on the learning attained from my parents who have been long in the business profession, I can say that I have gained considerable amount of knowledge about the functionality and work culture of our family business. However, till now, I have not got into the world of professional business but still I am looking forward towards developing my career in terms of managing and expanding our family business. I can state myself of being a complete fresher to the corporate world. I still need to reinforce my knowledge and understanding process about how to manage employees within an organization and how to keep pushing the entire organization in the path of success. My present focus is towards understanding every aspect of effective business management during my management qualification period and gradually apply those aspects in our family business process. Apart from these, getting a management degree is also vital for me in this stage for proving myself eligible enough in terms of managing a business process. b. Skills and Abilities In terms of abilities and skillsets, I possess a considerable knowledge in areas of employee management. However, I need to brush up and reinforce my incomplete managerial knowledge base with various tools and tactics that have been taught to me currently in the management course. I also hold considerable skill sets and certifications in piano playing. Moreover, my ability list also includes interpersonal communication, which I think is vital for my managerial career. Through interpersonal communication, an effective communication link can be established between the employees and top-level management, which further facilitates greater work efficiency (Nicotera, n.d.). Without effective interpersonal skills, I will not be able to carry out the communication process effectively within the employees engaged in our business at the time when I will be a part of my family business within the next three to four years. Over the years of management training, I am trying to develop my adaptability qualities that will significantly help me in the long run. I also possess significant skill sets in the areas of human resource management, which includes performance appraisal of employees, employee motivation, recruitment and many more. Apart from all these aspects, I attended multiple managerial seminars that provided me a better understanding about the appropriate tools and additional managerial skills for moving up in the corporate ladder. I was also involved in brainstorming various aspects in terms of effectively managing and utilizing the resources that were allotted to me in case of performing any academic project. 5. Achievements Till date, I achieved multiple certificates from participating in numerous piano playing competitions that held in my own country. Moreover, my hard work in context to learning English literature has also helped me in developing my English speaking capabilities, which I consider to be one of my major achievements. With this quality, I have claimed multiple prices in context to my participation in various English speaking competitions within China. I even hold a musical certification from Royal Musical College, China. Apart from my country achievements, I have also participated in numerous intercollege managerial skill evaluation competitions that underwent between our university and all other managerial colleges within the entire region. My participation in these intercollege competitions itself appears as a big achievement for me since all these competition programs have provided me a great platform wherein I could practice my theoretical skills with real life scenarios. It would be vital to mention that I keep on updating my set goals on periodic basis and keep track of my daily activities through which I can acquire an idea about how to formulate such goals and proceed accordingly with minimum chances of failure. I also experienced failure in multiple situations and occurrences in my life, but instead of repenting about it, I took it as a lesson, which will help in overcome such failure in future. During my college vacations, I engaged myself in internship jobs in multiple local firms even at low pay scales. My main intention is to accumulate as much experience as I can, which will significantly help me in securing my future. I strongly believe that in the corporate sector, the more knowledge and experience I possess, the better is my change of increasing my potentiality and overall development. Apart from these, I am also looking forward towards attaining a Master degree in the field of economics and human resource management through which I will be able to attain a better understanding about the prevailing business market conditions in the present scenario. With a Master degree in hand, I can directly aim towards attaining a senior managerial level job with a high salary package. By that time, I will be financial secured as well as experienced enough to continue with the expansion process of our family business. With the knowledge of economics and human resource management along with the gathered financial support by me over the years of service, I will be looking forward to add up new segments within our existing family business and develop my overall personality. During this current academic period, I have been continuously participating in multiple sports events in order to remain physically and mentally healthy. My parents desired to hold a PhD degree by me after certain years of service and even I am looking forward to that. However, for now, my entire target is to join my family business and attain a specific level of growth within a stipulated period of time. Currently, my parents are the owners of a medium scale automotive parts manufacturing company and are facing issues in terms of employee retaining. Thus, whenever I get time, I go through certain reports of the company and at certain times take suggestions from my professors about how I can create a better management system in order to solve this issue. I also practice several employee management concepts under the supervision of my parents that improvised the understanding of every operational function, which is being carried out within our company. 6. Interests and Hobbies As per my opinion, I consider studies as a part of my life. However, I provide equal importance to multiple other things. Thus, in order to minimize my academic stress levels, I carry out other fun activities along with stress relieving exercises to keep myself active. As a result of childhood attachment, I start up with practicing and composing new tunes with my piano. In my leisure time, I call my friends group to my place and play music with them. Fortunately, most of my group members are quite good in playing musical instruments and I find myself pretty comfortable for participating in multiple musical concerts with them. I am also a big fond of exploring new places and I usually go out on monthly trekking trips to the local and remote areas within the state. This appears to me as an adventurous activity and also adds up to my extra co-curriculum activity list. I even go for swimming classes on regular basis and have also participated in multiple interstate swimming competitions. Swimming helps in relieving my study pressure and I find it relaxing as well. Periodically, I also go out on long vacations with my family members, as I do not get to see them every day. Apart from these, I also love cooking and trying out new dishes. My interest lists also includes reading story books, nobles and journals of latest technological advancements. I even spend a lot of time chatting and mingling with new friends on social websites. I believe that through these ways, I will be improvising my communicational and understanding capabilities at large. 7. Future Ambitions In terms of my future ambition, I want to see myself to be an owner of my own business. Currently, I am targeting towards opening up a garment manufacturing and designing company in China. This is mainly because the Chinese fashion sector has shown significant level of growth in recent times (Kearney, n.d.). For my business, I will be taking consultation from my parents since they possess much more experience of carrying out real business as compared to me. My main intention for choosing the garment company is that I think development and expansion of a garment industry can be attained at a much faster rate in comparison with others. Adding to this, I believe that with the cheap labor force availability in my nation, I can start such a business at an affordable investment level. Through this way, I will be adding up new sub brands to our family business and increasing the parent brand image in the domestic markets of China. Once the business attains specific market recognition, I will be looking forward towards establishing mergers and partnerships with other small-scale local garment manufacturing firms. Through this way, I will be expanding my company. As for the starting investment, I will be looking forward to utilizing my own savings or taking help of locally available business investors. 8. Sample Work In term of sample work, I have been currently taken up certain live projects of a local cloth manufacturing company. This is my final year internship project. In this project, I have been given the role of being the assistant of a local fashion designer who will be teaching me about the new trends of fashion garments that are being followed in the current day context. The designer will provide me a brief idea about how to conduct market surveys and also teach me about the designing steps. Apart from these, I will also be practicing all my theoretical employee management concepts in terms of managing a small portion of this company’s workforce. As an intern, my allotted responsibilities include keeping track of regular employee presence, conveying messages to the top-level management employees, keeping track record of every employee within that small group, understanding their payroll and daily wage process and many more. I am currently finding this intern job pretty amazing despite of the low payment, which is being provided to me. This is mainly because this company is providing me with an appropriate platform where I am implementing and developing my managerial skills that will help me at the time when I start my own business. Moreover, the employee group with whom I am currently being working are pretty much cooperative and of friendly nature to me. They have been continuously sharing their personal experiences and work related problems with me, which helped me in managing them better by a certain extent. At last, I must say that the above depicted work experiences and learning programs would facilitate me in fulfilling the dreams of my parents through developing our family business as per their expectations. References College of Charleston. (2013). Why do I need a portfolio? The Importance of a Portfolio, 1-3. Hobcraft, J. (2000). Abstract. The Roles of Schooling and Educational Qualifications in the Emergence of Adult Social Exclusion, 3-4. Kearney, A. T. (n.d.). China’s apparel industry is growing rapidly- accompanies by some major challenges. While there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for success, finding the right fit will be vital. Winning China’s Apparel Market, 1-5. Nicotera, A. M. (n.d.). Communication and interpersonal relationship. The Importance of Communication in Interpersonal Relationship, 3-4. Wang, S. (2008). A history of rural, economic and social policies in China. Center Of Social Development, 1-3. Read More