Perhaps the single strongest aspect of my application to your most distinguished and highly competitive program is my language ability, providing me with a vehicle for doing important work in real estate development across Asia, since Mandarin Chinese is my mother tongue and I am fully fluent in English. I also have a working proficiency in Cantonese as well as Malay. Most of all, however, I ask you to take into consideration the way in which my professional dreams and visions are based on a profound desire to help the less privileged classes of our society.

A young Chinese man from Malaysia, still only 22, I have been in the United States for the past 3 years on a student visa. By early next year, 2015, I will be completing my Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with an emphasis on Finance as well as my Real Estate Certification. My long term career goal is give my all at the forefront of constructing affordable housing across Asia, working for the most innovative progressive companies in this area. I hope to become an expert in affordable and sustainable housing across Asia, helping less successful or underdeveloped areas learn from the successes of their neighbors.

Comfortable and affordable home ownership for working class people across Asia is the great dream and vision that I share with many of my colleagues and network contacts the world over, but especially in Asia. I am sensitive to the way in which India, for example, is projected to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation within a few decades. Still only 22, I hope to live to see this take place and to help respond to our increasing need for housing that is at once affordable, socially sustainable, and at one with our natural environment. At the same time that I give my life to helping to make home ownership possible for as many as I can, I also want to protect the lives and potential opportunities of the generations that will follow by encouraging an laboring on behalf of environmentally friendly technologies and construction practices.

My profound love for and sensibility concerning the less fortunate members of our society is reflected in my record as a volunteer while still in Malaysia, organizing educational games with children at orphanages and shelters such as the Agathians Shelter and the Harvest Center. I also volunteered at the Kechara Soup Kitchen. One of the highlights of my life so far was my participation in World Food Day, packaging dried food to be distributed to the hungry. I like to think of myself as someone who thinks globally and acts locally, wanting very much to improve the world one home at a time.

I am currently employed by the university as a videographer and interview stenographer for the Faculty Teaching Excellence Program. I especially enjoy our exploration of comparative teaching strategies and how they lead to enhancements of the learning environment, helping good professors to become great ones based on feedback from their classrooms.

Your distinguished program at the XXXX Institute of Technology is my first choice for graduate school because I see it as the finest of its kind in the world. I also deeply admire Sweden as a country because of the just and socially advanced character of your economic and educational systems. I especially appreciate the egalitarian nature of Sweden’s educational system because I come from a very hierarchical society in Malaysia where it is most difficult to get a good education unless one comes from a privileged stratum of society. I was most fortunate to have been awarded a full scholarship for my undergraduate studies in the USA.

I want to get involved with multinational real estate projects that add environmental, social and emotional sustainability to residential and commercial areas. I see myself down the road as a property consultant in a multinational firm, doing presentations for foreign clients and investors from all around the world. Your program represents for me the optimal springboard not only for attaining high levels of professional responsibility in years to come, but also going on to complete a PHD and contributing in the future to the body of literature in my area of expertise, distinguishing myself in research and publication as well as teaching.

I have long felt troubled by the way in which, in most societies, social and economic hierarchy is the main determinant of one’s fate, with only a small minority of individuals attaining an extensive education of high quality. This is one of the reasons why I plan to labor to make the world a fundamentally more egalitarian place to grow up through the advancement of more dignified housing and equal opportunity for upward mobility. Before I secured a full scholarship to further my studies in the USA, I grew up in a family where it was a great struggle to pay for my college tuition. Throughout my school years, I was mocked by classmates because of my underprivileged background, which tended to leave me feeling like a social outcast.

The grief that resulted from my comparatively humble economic origins was compounded by the fact that I lost both of my parents at the age of 12, when my father died of a heart attack and my mother was forced to leave the country in search of work. Finally, being gay led to all sorts of additional abuse as a pre-teen and adolescent, being raised by distant relatives with only the most minimal of education, people who cared little for me and used me as an object upon which to vent their own misery, often resulting in beatings and humiliation. I mention this in my statement as a testimony of my resilience and determination to succeed against all odds.

What I find most appealing about Swedish education is its encouragement of intellectual innovation, diversity of opinions, and independence of thought. Stepping into Sweden would be taking a step into an intellectual adventure of vast proportions that would provide me with numerous opportunities to measure up to many great challenges both personally and professionally. I was subjected to a conservative and rigid curriculum throughout my schooling in Malaysia. While my education in the US has been a liberating experience indeed and helped me to learn to think on new levels, I see your program in Sweden to be the optimal location for bringing my creativity to its fullest fruition as someone capable of making important contributions to progressive social change and development in Asia.

In my humble opinion, important questions of professional ethics, morality and especially sustainability are simply overlooked by most people in business and public administration in the culture from which I come, Malaysia. In fact, I see my country of origin as a classic example of the moral and financial crises confronting many Muslim countries in particular, as they struggle to more fully integrate themselves into the increasingly international economic and political structures of our global capitalist economy.

I hope to learn from Sweden in order to teach Asia. I want to study towards my first professional degree in one the world’s most advanced societies in terms of social responsibility and eco-friendly attitudes and initiatives. I am certain that your program at the XXXX Institute of Technology will inspire me for a lifetime of creative thinking in pragmatic ways that, nevertheless, refuse to surrender the most important principles of sustainability in real estate development.

I see my central mission in life as doing everything that I can to promote and advance the cause of those multinational real estate projects that add physical, social, emotional and environmental sustainability to the world. I dream of promoting the beauty of philanthropy by lending our helping hands to orphans, in particular, as a result of profits generated from multinational real estate projects. In everything that I do professionally in the future, I seek to raise awareness of the importance of principles of social and environmental sustainability and I fully intend to go to my grave many decades from now still arguing that these ventures can still be highly profitable at the same time that they are socially responsible.

I thank you for consideration of my application to your unique program.