Statement of Purpose to the MA Program at McGill University

577 Words2 Pages

I am applying for admission into the MA program in economics at McGill University, because I want to prepare myself for a rigorous study in PhD economics program. My short-term and mid-term objectives are to gain admission into and pass all requirements of the graduate program. In the long-run, I plan to be hired as a faculty member by the research oriented university in USA or Canada.

My academic background consists of a four-year undergraduate education (major in international economics) and a two-year graduate education (major in finance). During my undergraduate program, I passed courses on calculus, intermediate microeconomics, intermediate macroeconomics, statistics, and econometrics. Within my graduate program I passed applied statistics, business research methods, modeling and decision analysis, and managerial economics. My GPA in bachelor’s degree program was 4.62/5.00, and my GPA in the master’s degree program was 86/100 (%).

While studying at Khazar University, I submitted one master’s thesis entitled “Financial sector reform: impact on banking industry in Azerbaijan”. This thesis was due to meet my graduate course requirements; it was supervised by Professor M. Nuriyev, who is now a Vice-Chancellor at Khazar University. I was advised by Professor Nuriyev to include into my research work the analysis of empirical data and several mathematical lemmas. At that time, I gained rough understanding of research work nature and purpose. In the following paragraphs, I will describe critical developments in my academic background, introduce my research interests and reveal my career plans linked to the present admission effort.

In 2012, I took GRE with 161 quantitative reasoning and 152 verbal reasoning section scores. During 2013 fall semester, I was taking two courses on mathematics for economists and econometrics. These courses helped me understand Lagrangian function (equality constraint), Kuhn-Tucker conditions (inequality constraint), Cobb-Douglas production function, Jacobian and Hessian matrix determinants (concavity and convexity tests), integrating factors for ODEs, Leontief’s input-output model as well as simple and multiple linear regression models, estimation of statistical significance (hypothesis tests), jointly significant and insignificant variables, time series models (ARMA). In fall semester of this year, I was offered/accepted teaching position and instructed two cohorts of undergraduate students (68 students) on calculus (single-variable and multivariable topics) at Khazar University.

Within the area of economics, I have become interested in microeconomics, econometric modelling and forecasting. I want to explore economic relationships among various market agents and gain an opportunity to write my master’s project on the similar topic. Although, I am equipped with optimization techniques and may conduct empirical study, I would like to study micro and macroeconomics, econometrics and time series modelling at advanced level.

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