1. MOTIVATION: Why do you apply for this program?

Are there any specific aspects in

the program that were particularly appealing to you?
My most straight forward answer to the first question would be bringing my education
to a higher level. As of today I have a Bachelor Degree in Business and I believe
having a master degree is a must in order to be able to achieve my ambitions in the
future. Nonetheless, it is only during my current working experience that I have
realized I want to do a Master. Including management responsibilities and tasks, my
position in the company has been both challenging and successful. The knowledge
acquired during my Bachelor degree has been just essential to slowly and patiently
succeed in a working atmosphereturn my work into a success. This experience has
made clear to me the need of higher education in managing human resources,
finance, accounting, marketing and production, especially if I want to be able to work
more efficiently and effectively in management positions in the future. This is why I
believe that my profile would benefit significantly a lot from an intense year of
management study. M The masters in Global Management would indeed allow me to
review the topics already studiedthat have been covered during my Bachelor, and to
strengthen and deepen knowledge in management science applied in the primary
components of business value such as financial, capital and human resources.
The part of the program that is most appealing to me is the Leadership and
Development Track. In my experience, a Master in Management needs to stress the
importance of developing leadership skills in students. At the beginning of my current
working experience in fact I struggled a lot to bring out my leadership skills, mainly
because I did not have clear image, yet, that first I should have developed a selfleadership and, only then, my colleagues could have seen me as a leader. Making
mistakes, overanalyzing and continuously putting myself into discussion has helped
me to practice leadership while I truly just understood it. This is the reason why today I
believe that the Leadership and Development Track can be a unique added value to
both my persona and future career.
2. EXPECTATIONS: What do you expect to learn in this program? What skills do you
wish to develop? How do you think participating in this program will influence your
future career? What are your career goals?
In addition to stress further my leadership skills, from this program I expect to
overview, strengthen and deepen my knowledge in management. After this master
Masters program I expect that all the business insights I had the chance to build up so
far through my experiences, will strengthen even further the self-awareness that I will
be able to use in the future to create my personal systematic way of managing
business.
Certainly this program would influence my future career. First,ly by matching theory
with my past working experiences;. sSecond,ly by developing knowledge and stressing

skills through case studies, presentations, class discussion, group works and so on. I
believe it will also give me the chance to meet other students and possibly people that
could be important for my business network in the future.
Today my career goals lay around the responsibility I feel towards my familys business
and my ambition to create my own business. On one hand, my goal is to be able to be
in control of my family business by supervising professionals in charge of the different
departments,. oOn the other hand, my objective would be creating my own business
activity and being able to connect it to non-profit realities.
3. PERSONALITY: Describe 3 personal strengths and 3 weaknesses and explain why
you (or other people) see them as such.
I believe, ambition, determination and flexibility that the three strengths that most
describe myself areare the three strengths that are most applicable to me ambition,
determination and flexibility.
Ambition in everything I do, starting from my professional life and hobbies (like
painting and playing piano) to cooking a nice meal for my friends on Saturday night.
Everything I do, I like to do it very well and to stress always for continuous
improvementOne could call me a perfectionist with constantly demanding nothing but
very best out of myself with continues demand to perform better. Perfection does not
exist; what is real is the will to improve yourself and your acts.
Determination in reaching the goals I set in all the aspects of my life. When I decide I
want to reach a specific result in my professional o personal life, I work hard until I
reach the result I want. Sometimes the outcome requires a long-term work, like
convincing someone of something I believe in. Some other times the result requires a
short-term work. In my current job, for example, when I feel that something can be
potentially improved, I would work night and day in order to have it done as soon as
possible.
Flexibility, in adapting to situations and people. Most of the time I am driven by my
determination of reaching final objectives. I am trained to face all sorts of professional
and personal environments from the most irrational and Mediterranean to the most
rational and Nord European one. I am open to review my ideas, my plans or my way of
working when it is logical to do so in order to reach my final goal.
On the other hand, I believe altruism, overanalyzing, pessimism represent my three
worst weaknesses.
Altruism, in the way I honor other people priorities over my own. I am very often
incapable of refusing an invite or a request made by the people that surround me.
Altruism is normally seen as a positive aspect but in my case it deviates me from my
real self. Often I make everybody happy by doing what they want and behaving the
way they expect. Only after that I do what I believe is natural to me. Despite I am
continuously pushing to improve myself, I believe that, by culture and by character,
this will always remain one of my biggest flaws.

Overanalyzing, in the way I overthink about situations or people that are new to me.
Occasionally this behavior tends to magnify problems and to get myself worried and
anxious. Sometimes I should just keep it simple and see how it goes!
Pessimism, in the way I try to prevent all the possible negative consequences when
taking a decision. This is my way to be prepared myself to face failure. In spite of
that I am a person who takes risks and who loves enough life not to let myself down
for not having achieved my goals or wishes. I believe my need of having everything
under control is just my way of protecting myself from being badly surprise. If I think
about failure before hand, somehow I feel ready and stronger to face it.
4. COMPETENCIES
A. Give an example of a situation in the recent past in which you performed better
than expected and showed more initiative than required. Describe the circumstances.
As an accounting assistant of Yara International IT Department, 80% of my time was
dedicated to manage the department invoices. After a couple of months I was working
there, I had figured out my jobs efficiencies and inefficiencies. With the purpose of
improving the quality of my job and of reducing waists, I put down some ideas that I
explained through a power point presentation to present to my manager. My boss was
really happy about my work and initiatives and promised he would have talked to his
manager about it. Three months later, though, nothing changed. I believe some big
companies just have different priorities and different ways to deal with them. After
four months I decided to leave the company. I could no longer work in a static way;
continuous improvement was too difficult to apply.
B. Give an example of an event or project that you recently organized. How did you
prepare yourself?
A project I recently managed has been the dismissal of my companys senior financial
consultant. He had started to work as an external consultant for the company 12 years
ago. At the time the business reality was much smaller in terms of employees and
yearly profit while the business target was represented by Italian small and simple
business realities. From that day the company had grown and developed under many
aspects. Today the company has triplicated yearly profits, increased by 1/3 the number
of employees and completely changed his business target by making 75% of its sales
outside Italy with bigger and bigger clients. Today the company needs a consultant
able to: 1.Support the business activity with European financial and legal
competences; 2. Support the company with a studio of professionals that would help
him to be always updated with the world financial news; 3. Be in charge of controlling
and implementing the company financial situation with both national and international
future perspectives. After having presented the problem to the CEO and having agreed
upon the necessity of a change, I started to work on his dismissal. I gave myself 3
months because I wanted him to have the time to close properly the 2014 financials
without any personal or emotional interference. During these 3 months I organized my

work in 4 steps: 1. Interviewing new consultants, 2.Choosing and testing the

consultant that would most match the companys requirements, 3. Preparing myself
by interfacing with my lawyer, 4. Organizing the D-day. The purpose was arriving at
the D-day as follow: having already found and tried the level of service offered by the
new consultant; having the 2014 financials finalized; making sure to know before hand
the companys legal rights as well as his; convivially dismiss him. And thats how I
proceeded.
In the end the senior consultant took the news very well. Our final speech underlined
the huge responsibility and the stress that the companys grown reality had put him
through in the past years. I believe he even felt relieved to hear that news.
C. Give an example of an achievement that you are proud off and explain.
When I started to work in my current company there were only three people working in
the Administration Department, two senior accountants and an assistant. The 2
accountants agreed on dividing their tasks 15 years ago and since then they had
always been working under that agreement. Their jobs just occasionally would cross
into each other. The finance aspect of the company instead was taken care by an
external consultant, who was not doing much more than trying to answer to the
accountants doubts with regard to foreign transactions and developing the annual
financial statements. No financial assessments were developed during the year. The
administrative assistant followed-up documents for the administration, registered
purchasing invoices, made logistics reservation for goods and people and created
transport documents. I entered in the team as the process manager and accountant
assistant for the Administration Department. Apart from ordering the companys
processes, I was asked to sit next to one of the accountants and learn how to deal with
some of the daily accounting tasks. After six months, suddenly this accountant wrote a
letter of dismissal with immediate effect. Obviously the problems were manifold. Firstly
none knew how he had organized and filed all the documents and folders for the past
15 years. Secondly, I was not ready to be able to take over his job; there were many
things he still had to teach me when he left. With the help and support of the other
senior accountant though, I managed to do a great job. I organized my new accounting
tasks while I was still learning them; I interviewed some potential accountants and I
employed two of them; I transfer to the two new accountants the knowledge acquired
and the tasks organized for them; I cleaned up and reordered the archive; I built up
user-friendly excel sheets with the purpose of having better access to data; I organized
new tasks for the new accountants including the creation of weekly financial
situations; I distinguished the administration department from the logistic department
for which the administration assistant became responsible for; I dismissed the old
financial consultant and engaged a new one to follow the company in a more complete
and professional way; finally I created a compact team represented by the senior
accountant that today is the companys CFO.

D. Give an example of a project that you realized in team or for which you had to
cooperate intensely with others. What was your task and how did you feel about the
cooperation? How did you tackle conflicts or disagreements?
The project regarded the companys stock records adjustments in order to finalize
and close the year 2014. The project team involved the head of the Technical
Department, the Purchaser Assistant, the Head of Logistic and myself. Its deadline was
in two weeks time. The purpose was making the stock records to match with the
inventory result. The head of the Technical Department was the source of knowledge
to know which piece was misplaced and where to correctly place them. The Purchaser
Assistant had the knowledge of the materials, their exact codes, exact weight and so
on. The Logistic Assistant was in charge of making the actual records adjustments into
the companys management software. Finally I was in charge of making sure that the
company could actually do those adjustments in terms of legal and accounting
national guidelines. The cooperation went in general very well. The only difficult
member of the team was the Head of the Technical Department, which was very
often busy and underestimating the importance of this project. However, using
patience, kindly and politely insisting and stressing the reason why this project was
important for the company, we managed to have this project completed in time.
5. CHOICES: What factors made you decide to apply for this program at Antwerp
Management School? How did you inform yourself? Have you also applied at other
schools? Are you considering other alternatives?
Antwerp Management School was advised to me as a very good business school by
some acquaintances. The Master in Global Management instead reached me by word
of mouth. After having found the program online, I have liked it immediately,
especially the focus directed to the leadership track. In this moment of my career this
master is exactly what I want and need. On top of that Antwerp Management Schools
qualitative management education has been recognized by very high national and
international accreditations, which makes me believe studying at this university can
only be an added value for me.
Despite this program at Antwerp Management School is in my top list, I am applying
as well to other Master in Management in Belgium. Since at the beginning of August I
will leave my job in Italy and move back to Belgium, I would like to take a break of
about a year from my professional career to fully commit to a Master degree.