PERSONAL STAEMENT

Born into a family beset with poverty, I had to give up a normal undergraduate university education in favor of vocational training before I finished high school. Exercising diligence to give full play to my intelligence, I parlayed my vocational career in the provinces into graduate studies at a top university in the nation’s capital, Beijing. Now a Ph. D. candidate with China’s top most research institution and a postgraduate in world-renowned program run out of Paris, I wish to vault to the forefront of the field of spatial statistics by pursuing doctorate studies at your university.

I made a most reluctant choice in 1986, when I finished my junior high school. In the entrance examinations for senior high school, I scored the highest total of grades in my county that year, making me eligible to join the privileged band of students at the best senior high school in my native Jiangxi Province. If I enrolled in that school, I would be virtually guaranteed acceptance into one of the country’s top universities later on. But my family could not, in its destitution, possibly afford the exorbitant cost of sending me to that coveted school. In fact, they could not pay for my further education in any school. In a desperate effort to continue my education without putting any financial encumbrance on my family, I gave up on senior high school and went instead to the Changsha Nonferrous Metal College, a non-degree vocational training school that waived all my tuition fees. Fighting against all odds, I pushed through four years of intensive studies in geology at this college by surviving on scholarships that I won every year.

Upon graduation in 1990 with the second highest academic ranking among 120 students, I obtained a job working for the Jiangxi Geology Prospecting Bureau. The first project I worked on at the Bureau led to the finding of seven potential mineralization belts in Jiangxi Province. With this success, I was chosen, a year later, to join a team of geologists to prospect the Jinshan gold deposit field in the same province, a project funded by State Gold Administration. This project taught me different aspects of geological work. A significant part of my contribution to this project was that I developed a set of statistical prognosis models for gold deposit in Jinshan gold ore field, with which my colleagues and I circumscribed 10 promising prospecting targets. Eight of these were later found to be potential gold mines. This project was a significant boost to the China’s gold industry and won us the prize of excellent performance among the geological prospecting teams of China in 1994.

(以下从略。略去的部分大致讲：Thanks in part to my achievements at work, I won admission into the graduate program of mathematical geology at the Beijing University of Science and Technology in 1994. After obtaining my Master’s Degree in 1997, I joined a Ph. D. program at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which has decided to send me to Paris for advanced training.)