Smart MBA Applicants Prepare And Manage Their References - Poets&Quants

About six weeks before your first MBA application deadline, you need to have identified a couple of MBA application references who are willing to write strong letters of recommendation for you. In the intervening weeks until the deadline, you are then faced with the challenge of working with your reference letter writers to help them craft letters that will help you stand out from the rest of the MBA applicant pool. Fortunately, MBA Prep School can help by breaking down what you need to do to prepare and manage your references during one of the more stressful parts of the admissions process.

First, provide your recommenders with a reference letter guide:

There are two critical documents that you should provide to each of your references: your MBA application resume and a reference letter guide. The reference letter guide should be personalized for each of your recommenders. The guide should be no more than a couple of pages. Remember to include the due dates for each university that you’re applying to and to briefly reiterate the importance of both the reference letter and the completion of an MBA program in achieving your career goals in a cover letter to your recommender. You should begin working on this guide approximately two months before the admissions deadline, after you finalize your recommenders. We recommend that you give your references earlier deadlines than the actual school deadlines in order to ensure that their letters are submitted in time.

The body of the reference guide should focus on the evidence and qualities that you would like your reference to emphasize in their letter and remind them of the projects that you’ve worked on together and your achievements that they have witnessed. You want your letters to provide admissions committees with a third party endorsement about how well you’d fit in with the school’s culture, your leadership abilities, career readiness, and management potential.

Next, schedule a meeting with each reference:

It’s a good idea to have an in-person meeting with each of your references about a month and a half before your application is due. This is your chance to go through your reference letter guide together and clarify any questions or concerns that they may have about the reference letter process. At this time, you can also establish how much collaboration they are comfortable with.

While, in an ideal world, the recommendation letter process is entirely collaborative, remember to leave your references space to be creative. The admissions committees have already heard from you in your essays and resume – the reference letters should provide a fresh perspective. Remember that some recommenders may not be open to your input on their letters. You used your best judgment in selecting them as your references; be careful not to micromanage them and have faith that they will use the information that you provided them to write a strong letter.

Offer to provide your references with input on their recommendation letters:

If your references are willing to accept input from you on a draft of their recommendation letters, you will want to keep in mind what admissions committees are looking for from your references. MBA Prep School detailed the aspects of a strong recommendation letter in a previous post.

When reviewing a draft of a reference letter, make sure that every assertion that your reference makes about you is supported by evidence, such as anecdotes about your leadership accomplishments from projects that you’ve worked on together. You’ll also want to pay special attention to how consistent the recommendation is with your other application materials. Ideally, the reference letter should provide evidence that corroborates your own claims about your preparedness for an MBA program – you want to avoid a scenario in which your recommender contradicts the picture painted by your other application materials.

Finally, check in with your references and verify submission:

Around three weeks before each program’s deadline, touch base with your references to ensure that they’re making progress. Rather than pressuring your recommender, ask if they would like you to provide additional materials or feedback. This check-in is also a good time to convey any changes or recent updates.

A few days before the letter is due, you’ll want to check in with your references again. If your reference is still working on the letter, offer any additional support you can to ensure they make the deadline. If the letter still hasn’t been submitted by the night before the deadline, gently remind them that missing the deadline will mean that you won’t be able to apply in that round and will hinder your chances of admission.

Thinking about applying next year? Start your prep now with MBA Prep School’s comprehensive three-part MBA Application Timeline series starting a year from your deadline, six-part Essay Writing Bootcamp Series, MBA Application Resume Tips, and suggestions for selecting your MBA applications references to get ahead of the curve.

Learn from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, and other top MBAs about how they wrote essays that got them in!

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Tyler Cormney  is the co-founder of MBA Prep School, a full-service, boutique MBA admissions consulting firm that specializes in helping aspiring MBA candidates realize their dream of attending an elite business school. As a graduate of both Harvard Business School and USC’s Professional Writing Program, Tyler draws upon his unique blend of creative writing, strategic thinking, and coaching skills to help applicants stand out from the competition for a place in the most selective MBA programs, including Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton.

The post Smart MBA Applicants Prepare And Manage Their References appeared first on Poets&Quants.

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Choosing Your MBA Application Recommenders - Poets&Quants

In an ideal MBA application timeline, the search for your MBA application reference letter writers begins about two months before the application submission deadline. About eight weeks before you hit “Submit,” you should have a short list of potential recommenders whom you’ve spoken with about supporting your bid for admission.

Most schools will ask for two recommendation letters and will expect one letter from your current direct supervisor. If the MBA program doesn’t specify criteria for a second recommender, it can be difficult to determine the best person among your many professional contacts to write that second letter. In previous posts, MBA Prep School helped you craft excellent application essays (Essay Writing Bootcamp Series) and provided tips for improving your MBA Application Resume. Read on for MBA Prep School’s advice on choosing reference letter writers who will optimize your chances of admission.

Let’s start with what the MBA admissions committee looks for in reference letters:

• How well do the reference and the applicant know each other?

Given the choice between a recommender with an impressive title who doesn’t know you personally or someone who has worked wit`h you closely with a less-lofty title, always choose the reference that knows you best.

Remember, we don’t mean that your recommender’s seniority is unimportant. Strong reference letters from your firm’s senior leaders will help to differentiate you from your competition. However, it is important to choose a senior leader who knows you well.

• What evidence does the recommendation letter provide?

Your recommendation letters should provide further evidence of the skills and strengths you are advertising in the other components of your application. It is important that your references’ view of you matches what you represent in your resume and essays. The goal is for your recommender to cite specific examples that back up your claims as well as their own praise. Along the same lines, we recommend that you enlist references who have known you for at least a year. Furthermore, a recommender who has seen you in action recently is in the best position to feature evidence of your most advanced skills and knowledge.

• What will the recommendation letter add to the picture?

The recommendation letter should provide the admissions committees with information about you that they can’t find within your other application materials. Are there important fit qualities that you were unable to address in your essays or resume? The letter of recommendation is a good place to include information about how you perfectly demonstrate those qualities. Further, your references can freely brag about accomplishments in a way that may come across as boastful if you were to discuss them. Coming from a reference, information about your promotions or your responsibilities that are uncommon for someone at your level may hold more weight.

With those points in mind, how should you select your MBA application recommenders?

• If your school has specific requirements, stick to them:

You need to satisfy the school’s stated requirements about who is qualified to write your letters of recommendation. If your chosen program requires a letter from your current direct supervisor and you don’t have one in your package, the admissions committee will have some questions. If you cannot ask one of your required recommenders to be a reference, be sure to explain in your “optional information” essay why you made this choice.

• Choose a recommender who respects the value of an MBA:

A recommender with an MBA, or someone who believes in the value of an MBA, is an ideal choice as a reference. References who are familiar with the demands of an MBA program and what admissions committees are looking for will be best suited to express how prepared you are to meet those demands as well as to feature ways you compare favorably to the MBA applicant pool.

• Choose a great writer:

Your reference letters need to be persuasive; recommenders function as the witnesses who will provide the admissions committees with evidence of your accomplishments and who will seek to sway the committees’ decisions in your favor. All else equal, choose a reference who is skilled in the art of persuasive writing because that skill improves your odds of obtaining a compelling recommendation letter.

• Choose a recommender who is going to write a glowing review:

Someone who truly believes that you are a fantastic candidate for an MBA program is going to be able to write a stronger, more compelling letter on your behalf. Remember, your hope is that your references will be able to convince an admissions committee that you are a natural-born leader, that you are prepared for the challenges of an MBA program, and that you stand above 80-90% of your peers.

• Choose a recommender you trust who is willing to work with you:

In the best cases, the reference letter process is collaborative between recommenders and candidates. You want to enlist mentors who are enthusiastic about your MBA candidacy and feel they are part of a team that is committed to your success. Ask yourself if your recommender would be willing to listen to your feedback on ways to strengthen his or her letter. This isn’t always going to be the case, so make sure that you seek recommendation letters from superiors who have your best interests at heart and whom you know you can trust.

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Up next from MBA Prep School: You’ve selected your MBA application references, but how will you work with them to guide them to express the right fit qualities in your MBA recommendation letters? We’ll discuss providing your references with supporting materials, checking in with them, and giving feedback during the recommendation-writing process to help you optimize every component of your MBA application.

If you’re enjoying MBA Prep School’s articles on Poets&Quants, then you’re going to love their 5-star reviewed eBook titled How to Apply for an MBA. Download your copy of MBA Prep School’s step-by-step guide on how to earn a spot in the world’s top MBA programs: https://mbaprepschool.com/ebook/

 

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Ten Ways to Improve Your MBA Application Resume In Ten Minutes - Poets&Quants

So far in our six-part Essay Writing Boot Camp Series, we have discussed MBA admissions essay writing at length and provided a timeline of how to invest your time wisely throughout the MBA application process (check out our three-part MBA Application Timeline Series). With all of the time and effort that you’ve devoted (or plan to devote) to these crucial applications, don’t let an average resume hurt your admissions chances. Your resume is meant to be a compelling executive summary of the experiences and accomplishments that make you the perfect fit for top business schools. Your MBA application resume is of central importance in building your case for admission; thus, it should be given as much thought and effort as your essays. We at MBA Prep School have pulled together a set of tips that our resume editors use to help our clients create a superb MBA application resume. Read on!

1. Submit a one-page resume (for most applicants):

When it comes to MBA resume lengths, the accepted rule of thumb is that you should have a page for every 10 years of work experience. As such, most MBA resumes should be a single page. If you have 20 years of post-college work experience, you can usually get away with an extra page on your resume. However, check the application policies because some of the top schools insist that you only submit a one-page resume. If you have several employers and/or many years of work experience, you will need to prioritize your most relevant accomplishments and experiences to stick to the one-page limit.

2. Order resume sections from newest to oldest:

List your experiences in reverse chronological order, meaning you’ll place your current employer at the top of your resume and title and work backward to previous employers and roles. One exception is continuing education coursework. In standard practice, it is best to list the schools where you earned your undergraduate and/or graduate degrees as the first entry in the education section of your resume.

3. Cut your summary & objective section:

Given the space constraints imposed on an MBA application resume, it has fallen out of vogue to include a summary section or an objective statement. Even without the shift in convention, including these sections in your resume often takes up space without adding much value. The entire resume is already considered to be a concise summary of your experience and candidacy. Save your summary statement for your LinkedIn profile and devote the space on your resume to showing rather than telling readers about your skills and industry experience.

4. Don’t sacrifice readability for more information:

Reducing your font size to pack in more accomplishments is fine to an extent. However, we recommend that you don’t go below a 10-point font. The discipline of having to revise your materials to fit on one page forces you to cut out extraneous information and think strategically about where to focus your career story. When it comes to choosing a font, we recommend you pick a simple font like Calibri, Arial, or Times New Roman that is still legible at a smaller size.

5. Proofread:

Proofread your resume on your own and also send it out to professional editors or trustworthy friends who are willing to scour your resume for mistakes. Sloppy grammar or typos in your MBA resume will definitely spoil the impression you are trying to make on the MBA admissions officers.

6. Quantify your accomplishments:

Enrich your resume by quantifying your achievements. Did you save your firm lots of money by catching an accounting error? Tell your reader how much. Did you design a sales initiative that boosted revenue? Post the percentage sales growth that resulted. By quantifying accomplishments, you add credibility to your resume claims; plus, impressive metrics can make your accomplishments more concrete and memorable for your reader.

7. Include your extracurricular activities:

While top business schools are primarily focused on your professional and academic experience, they are also impressed when you have a track record of leadership and achievement across other dimensions of your life. Remember to include information about your extracurricular activities to show that you are more than your grades and job title. Comment on the length of time that you have been involved with the activity as well as your role in the organization and your achievements while involved.

8. Use excellent action verbs:

Rather than using passive terms like “worked on” or “responsible for,” use active verbs that illustrate your core strengths, such as “led,” “designed,” and “implemented.” Each of your bullets should begin with an action verb. This will allow you to best demonstrate the impact that you have had on your organization during your time there rather than simply listing generic responsibilities. You’ll often have a chance to describe your daily responsibilities on the application form.

9. Stand out from the competition:

In a large pool of talented applicants, consider what points of difference will set you apart from the competition. Does your resume reflect your passions, interests, and the causes and communities that are important to you? Have you shown off experiences, expertise, and talents that will convince admissions committees that you can bring a unique viewpoint to their MBA program? For example, you’ll want to include cross-cultural experiences, impressive awards, and significant hobbies to stand out from other applicants.

10. Create a resume for your future (not current) career:

To an extent, a business school’s reputation depends on how well their recent graduates do in the job market for their chosen fields. Therefore, admissions committees are looking for the applicants who are most likely to be compelling candidates for the careers described in their application essays. Thus, adding information about your career readiness to your application resume helps to show admissions officers that you have the foundation to be successful in your future job search. Our advice: design your resume to impress recruiters for the post-MBA position you want rather than for the recruiter that hired you for your present job.

Up next from MBA Prep School: Tips on Recommendation Letters. The majority of schools will ask you for two letters of recommendation, with one letter required from a direct supervisor. We’ll help you figure out the best person to write your second recommendation letter as well as how to work with your recommenders so they focus on the fit qualities schools care about.

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If you’re enjoying MBA Prep School’s articles on Poets&Quants, then you’re going to love their 5-star reviewed e-book titled How to Apply for an MBA. Download your copy of MBA Prep School’s step-by-step guide on how to earn a spot in the world’s top MBA programs. https://mbaprepschool.com/ebook/

Tyler Cormney  is the co-founder of MBA Prep School, a full-service, boutique MBA admissions consulting firm that specializes in helping aspiring MBA candidates realize their dream of attending an elite business school. As a graduate of both Harvard Business School and USC’s Professional Writing Program, Tyler draws upon his unique blend of creative writing, strategic thinking, and coaching skills to help applicants stand out from the competition for a place in the most selective MBA programs, including Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton.

The post Ten Ways to Improve Your MBA Application Resume In Ten Minutes appeared first on Poets&Quants.

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How Much Time Is Required To Apply For An MBA? - Poets&Quants

If you’ve been following along with the first two posts in MBA Prep School’s three-part MBA Application Timeline series, you have a checklist of what needs to be completed in the year before you submit your MBA applications. Unfortunately, with a full-time job and a multitude of other responsibilities, it can be difficult to budget enough time to produce strong applications. We’ll take you through the estimated amount of time needed for each part of your application prep based on MBA Prep School’s years of experience gathered while coaching hundreds of MBA applicants.

Here’s the headline: believe it or not, a fully prepared MBA applicant applying to 3 separate business schools spends no less than 154 hours crafting the core components of his or her application. Let’s break that number down.

Here’s how you can best budget time for your MBA application:

• Identify your strengths and weaknesses: 12 Hours

In previous posts, we recommended journaling over the year leading up to your MBA application to help you account for your day-to-day responsibilities, strengths, weaknesses, and career goals. Having a realistic view of your strengths and weaknesses early on will give you time to figure out how to best showcase your strengths while deflecting your weaknesses in your application materials. Use this time in the early stages of the application process to identify your key differentiators, leadership capabilities, and unique strengths.

• Solidify your career goals: 20 Hours

Most top schools will ask you about your career goals in their essay questions or application forms. You need to prove that you have focused and realistic short- and long-term goals which you need an MBA education to achieve. These goals don’t have to be about saving the world, but they do have to be both ambitious and genuine; they should reflect your real interests and what you’re passionate about. For all these reasons, we recommend that you invest around 20 hours in career planning work over the course of several weeks.

• Select your target MBA Programs: 18 Hours

With your career goals in mind, find the schools that will best prepare you to achieve them. Business school rankings have little to do with whether or not a particular business school will help you reach your specific goals – look into the school’s culture, top professors, and career placement statistics for recent graduates in your chosen field. Putting in the time for an in-depth review of the schools that you are interested in via school visits, meetings with current and former students, and desk research will ensure that the school you attend is the best fit for you and your goals.

• Match Your Qualities With Each School’s Fit Qualities: 10 Hours

Speaking of “fit,” once you have your shortlist of schools, take some time to research your chosen school’s fit qualities to make sure that you can demonstrate the attributes that the admissions committee will be looking for. Having a clear-eyed understanding of each school’s fit qualities will be invaluable when you are creating your application resume and writing your essays. Use the differentiators and unique strengths from your journaling and self-assessment work to guide you.

• Craft Your Application Resume: 12 Hours

A majority of schools will require you to submit either a CV or a one-page resume. Seek out resources (like our next blog post!) that explain what exactly the AdCom is looking for in an MBA application resume. Use those tips on multiple iterations of your resume document to produce a resume that makes your career progression and most impressive achievements crystal clear to the reader.

• Write Application Essays: 60 Hours

The amount of time that we have budgeted for the writing process may seem excessive, but creating strong essays is well worth the time commitment. You should have approximately three to five drafts of each essay by the time each is completed. Don’t know how to start? Add an hour to your essay budget and check out MBA Prep School’s six-part Essay Bootcamp Series for tips on the most common essay prompts.

• Work With Your References: 12 Hours

Select references who will be able to write you the strongest possible recommendation letters and collaborate with them (to the extent that they are comfortable with) throughout the letter writing process. Do what you can to make sure that their letters emphasize the same fit qualities that you are trying to highlight in your other application materials so that your combined materials tell a cohesive story of who you are as an applicant.

• Complete Your Application Forms: 10 Hours

Take enough time and care in completing your application forms to ensure that you have accurately included all of your awards, achievements, and relevant personal information.

While you’re budgeting time for MBA applications, remember to account for extra time for MBA interview preparations and practice, which can vary based on your current interview skills. Typically, interview prep takes about 20-30 hours.

Investing a substantial amount of time to complete each step of your MBA application will give you an edge over the tough competition and help you present your absolute best self to admissions committees.

If you’re enjoying MBA Prep School’s articles on Poets & Quants, then you’re going to love their 5-Star reviewed eBook entitled How to Apply for an MBA. Download your copy of MBA Prep School’s step-by-step guide on how to earn a spot in the world’s top MBA programs. https://mbaprepschool.com/ebook/

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If you’re enjoying MBA Prep School’s articles on Poets & Quants, then you’re going to love their 5-Star reviewed eBook entitled How to Apply for an MBA. Download your copy of MBA Prep School’s step-by-step guide on how to earn a spot in the world’s top MBA programs. https://mbaprepschool.com/ebook/

Tyler Cormney  is the co-founder of MBA Prep School, a full-service, boutique MBA admissions consulting firm that specializes in helping aspiring MBA candidates realize their dream of attending an elite business school. As a graduate of both Harvard Business School and USC’s Professional Writing Program, Tyler draws upon his unique blend of creative writing, strategic thinking, and coaching skills to help applicants stand out from the competition for a place in the most selective MBA programs, including Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton.

The post How Much Time Is Required To Apply For An MBA? appeared first on Poets&Quants.

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Outlining Techniques for Better MBA Application Essays - Poets&Quants

Somewhere along the way, a well-meaning writing teacher told you that a great essay starts with a great outline. In our experience, MBA essays are no exception! Outlining your topics and stories before you start writing your MBA application essays will not only save you time, but will also help you to design an essay that is crisp, cohesive, and content-rich. While providing an outline framework for every type of essay is beyond the scope of a short article, MBA Prep School   shares a powerful outlining framework that will help you to write excellent story essays: it’s called the STAR framework.

STAR is an acronym that stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result.

• Situation
• Task
• Action
• Result

MBA Prep School’s final article in the Essay Writing Boot Camp series will help you understand how to use the STAR outlining framework. We’ll also show you an example of how Stephanie, a fictional MBA applicant, used the STAR framework to outline a Leadership essay for one of the business schools to which she was applying.

Situation

The S in STAR stands for Situation. This is the time and place and context of the story — you can think of it as the setting, but it might also include the broader challenge or conflict that you or your organization faced. In essence, this is the set-up of your story.

In our example essay, Stephanie’s story is about a fundraising event benefiting a not-for-profit organization for which she served as the donations chair.

For the Situation in her STAR outline, Stephanie wrote:

Last year, I volunteered to chair the donations committee of Literacy Now’s annual fundraiser.

Next up in your outline, you will concisely describe the Task that you or your team had to accomplish.

Task

The Task relates to your role in this particular situation and story, and frequently takes the form of a goal or objective statement.

For example, Stephanie summarized her Task as the donations chair for the event in the following way:

To lead the fundraising team to raise a minimum of $10,000 for the organization, I would need to assign specific jobs to committee members, track their progress toward obtaining donations, help teammates make agreed-upon deadlines, and offer individual assistance to make sure each person fulfilled their responsibilities. 

Action

The Action of the story is of greatest interest to MBA admissions officers, because they are reading the essay to see your strengths and qualities in action.

While it won’t be necessary in your outlining stage to write down every action you took, you’ll want to jot down the highlights.

In this example, Stephanie summarizes her Action as follows:

Motivated team by having them meet Literacy Now children. Assigned tasks and checked in regularly. Successfully mediated team dispute. Visited 20 restaurants and called 12 wineries. Ensured deadlines were met.

Results

The best stories for MBA application essays are those in which you actually surpassed expectations. For the purposes of your outline, the Results are the impact of your actions and/or the final resolution of the complication you set up at the beginning of the story.

Evidence of Results is almost as important as is Action when you’re trying to choose one story over another for an MBA application – a positive outcome and happy ending will make the story that much more powerful.

Specific details count here, as we will see in Stephanie’s case. Stephanie quantifies her Results, which is a very good idea, because this specificity makes the impact of her efforts vivid for the reader:

Convinced 10 restaurants, 3 wineries, 20 businesses to donate, directly helping to raise $15,000 for organization, ensuring the event’s success.

Your STAR Story

While your actual STAR outline will likely include more details than in this sample, you can see by looking at Stephanie’s complete STAR outline how this technique will help you tell a succinct story that has a clear beginning, middle, and end.

You may not have listened to that old English teacher of yours when she urged you to create an outline before you start writing an essay, but it’s not too late to make him or her proud. The STAR outline framework we provided will also help you select your strongest stories before putting hours and hours of effort into writing them. Once you’ve selected the story that you believe has the most potential, you will be ready to start the drafting process. When you are admitted to a great business school, feel free to call up your English teacher to thank him or her for preparing you to tackle one of the most challenging writing assignments of your career!

Conclusion

Congratulations on completing MBA Prep School’s Essay Writing Boot Camp for Poets & Quants readers!  This series of articles covered the steps you can take to write outstanding MBA application essays:

• Familiarize yourself with the most frequently asked MBA essay questions;  Career Progress And Career Goals Essays,  Why Our School? and What Will You Contribute? Essays, Leadership, Past Decisions, And Setback Essays, and with what the admissions committee wants to learn from your answers, so that you are primed to score top marks.
• Strategize which of the qualities valued most by business schools are those that you plan to feature most prominently in your essay(s).
• With the valued qualities and question categories in mind, follow our step-by-step process for choosing your best topics and stories. 
• Use the STAR outline framework to help you identify the topics that will translate into successful essays, and follow your outline to make sure your stories are complete, compelling, and well-structured.

MBA Prep School hopes you’ve benefited from MBA Prep School’s Essay Writing Boot Camp, and look forward to your comments and questions about the articles in this series.

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If you are enjoying these Essay Writing Boot Camp articles, then you will want to take advantage of MBA Prep School’s  advanced course on MBA application essay writing. 

Learn from MBA essay experts as they break down the most popular MBA application essay questions, provide outlining templates, and showcase high-quality essay sample response. A scoring chart accompanies each course, which you can use to determine whether your application essays are as effective as possible.

For a limited time, MBA Prep School’s Essay Professor course is free to Poets&Quants readers. Follow this link to sign up and learn how to write essays that will impress admissions officers at the top business schools: MBA Prep School’s Essay Professor Course.

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Tyler Cormney  is the co-founder of MBA Prep School, a full-service, boutique MBA admissions consulting firm that specializes in helping aspiring MBA candidates realize their dream of attending an elite business school. As a graduate of both Harvard Business School and USC’s Professional Writing Program, Tyler draws upon his unique blend of creative writing, strategic thinking, and coaching skills to help applicants stand out from the competition for a place in the most selective MBA programs, including Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton.

The post Outlining Techniques for Better MBA Application Essays appeared first on Poets&Quants.

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Selecting Your Best MBA Application Essay Topics - Poets&Quants

When you first read the MBA application essay questions you are expected to answer, it can sometimes be tricky to figure out which topics to cover and which of your many personal or professional stories to tell. This article by MBA Prep School aims to help you decide what to write about by providing a step-by-step process you can use to discover your best essay topics and stories.

 

Review the Valued Qualities

When you are reading the MBA application essay questions and starting to consider what you will write about, it will help to keep clearly in mind the qualities that MBA programs hold in high esteem. If you need a refresher on those qualities, please refer back to our previous article in the MBA Prep School Essay Writing Boot Camp series, titled The Most Important Qualities to Feature in Your MBA Application Essays.

Categorize the Question

With the qualities you want to feature front-and-center in your essays clearly in mind, you should read each essay question carefully and try to categorize each according to the type of essays we told you about in our first three articles in this series on the most frequently asked MBA essay questions.

Is that first question a Leadership question, a Career Goals question, or a Contributions question … ?

Do your best to categorize all of the questions you are expected to answer across the applications of your target MBA programs. Categorizing each question for any given school will give you a much better idea of what the admissions committee is going to be looking for in your essay responses and what it will take to score top marks with your essays.

Brainstorm Topics/Stories

Your third step is to brainstorm potential topics and stories. Your essay brainstorming work is going to be at its most productive if you have undertaken self-assessment work long before you sit down to write your essays. At MBA Prep School, we refer to this self-assessment phase of the application process as “application strategy.”

In short, you want to have a clear idea of the subset of qualities that you want to showcase in your application as a whole and in your essays in particular. If you try to feature every one of your skills, strengths, and traits in your essay(s), you’ll run the risk that admissions officers will finish reading your essays and have no clear takeaways about who you are and what you have to offer their program. It’s best to have three to five big-picture messages in mind as you brainstorm potential topics or stories.

A well-developed application strategy focuses your brainstorming in a way that is likely to lead to essay concepts that offer the most potential.

Choose a Topic or Story

Finally, you’re ready to choose a topic or story that looks the most promising. Here are a few questions you should ask to help determine which of your ideas have the most potential.

First, ask which essay topics or stories on your brainstorming list offer you the greatest opportunity to feature the qualities MBA programs value most.

Next, ask yourself if the topic or story will score top marks for this essay type. For example, if this is a Leadership essay, did you rally other people and motivate them to work together to achieve an important shared vision or goal? To winnow down your list, cross off any stories where you were working on your own, and circle the stories in which you made an impact by leading others.

Another important test is whether you think the essay can be written with a clear beginning, middle, and end within the word count provided. Given the tight word limits business schools allow, you need to choose stories that you can tell succinctly. For example, instead of writing about a trip around the world, perhaps you can focus on a portion of the trip that was particularly meaningful. A related question to ask yourself is whether the story will be easy to understand without a great deal of background or technical knowledge. Clearly, you don’t have the space to tell a story that requires an elaborate set-up, if you are limited to 500 words or fewer.

Next, you’ll want to make sure you are you the central player in the stories on your shortlist. 99% of the time, you want to write stories where you play the starring role, as those are the stories that will help the admissions officers get to know you better.

Finally, try your best to write about situations that occurred relatively recently. It’s usually best to tell admissions committees stories that happened within the last three years. The more time that has elapsed since your story took place, the higher the bar for how powerful and defining that story needs to be in order to qualify as an effective story for an MBA application essay.

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If you are enjoying these Essay Writing Boot Camp articles, then you will want to take advantage of MBA Prep School’s  advanced course on MBA application essay writing. 

Learn from MBA essay experts as they break down the most popular MBA application essay questions, provide outlining templates, and showcase high-quality essay sample response. A scoring chart accompanies each course, which you can use to determine whether your application essays are as effective as possible.

For a limited time, MBA Prep School’s Essay Professor course is free to Poets&Quants readers. Follow this link to sign up and learn how to write essays that will impress admissions officers at the top business schools: MBA Prep School’s Essay Professor Course.

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Tyler Cormney  is the co-founder of MBA Prep School, a full-service, boutique MBA admissions consulting firm that specializes in helping aspiring MBA candidates realize their dream of attending an elite business school. As a graduate of both Harvard Business School and USC’s Professional Writing Program, Tyler draws upon his unique blend of creative writing, strategic thinking, and coaching skills to help applicants stand out from the competition for a place in the most selective MBA programs, including Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton.

MORE FROM MBA PREP SCHOOL: Career Progress And Goals Essays,  Why Our School And What Will You Contribute Essays,  Leadership, Past Decisions, And Setback Essays;  The Most Important Qualities To Feature In Your MBA Application Essays

The post Selecting Your Best MBA Application Essay Topics appeared first on Poets&Quants.

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The Most Important Qualities To Feature In Your MBA Application Essays - Poets&Quants

Your primary objective in writing your MBA application essays is to provide evidence that proves you possess the qualities that admissions committees value most. Doing so will bring you one step closer to earning an acceptance letter.  In this article, MBA Prep School  will introduce and describe the qualities that successful MBA candidates feature in their essays. The qualities MBA programs prize above others include:

• Leadership
• Collaborative Style
• Integrity
• Analytical Intelligence
• Emotional Intelligence
• Creativity
• Community Spirit
• Global Awareness
• Self-Awareness

All nine of these qualities appeal to MBA admissions officers. Nonetheless, it’s not possible to emphasize every single one of these traits to the same degree. That’s where designing an application strategy comes into play.

One of the most important aspects of designing an effective application strategy is deciding on the subset of qualities and strengths you are going to highlight in your applications. Your decision hinges on the collection of evidence and examples available for you to draw upon to exemplify your most prominent traits and abilities.

While reading the following definitions of the qualities we listed, start to consider which ones you can best exemplify in your application materials. Later, you will want to be certain of your shortlist of qualities, so that you can evaluate the drafts you’ve written and your MBA application as a whole in order to ask yourself whether or not you have managed to highlight the qualities you decided to feature in your application strategy.

It’s no secret that MBA programs are seeking to admit future leaders. That’s why leadership tops our list of the qualities that MBA programs value most.

1. Leadership

Most MBA candidates realize that convincing the admissions office that they are leaders is of the utmost importance. What’s less clear to them is how to do so. Too many applicants end up devoting most of their essay word count—and application real estate as a whole—to sharing individual achievements rather than leadership accomplishments.

In fact, it can sometimes be tricky to distinguish between an individual accomplishment story and a leadership story. The best way to tell the difference is that a leadership achievement represents a result or outcome that you couldn’t and didn’t reach solely on your own. Leadership is about achieving your goals by harnessing the energy and ideas of other people.

2. Collaborative Style

A person who has a collaborative style is a team player who works well with others and puts the good of the group ahead of his or her self-interest. Business schools want to see that you are going to contribute to the success of your classmates and their learning and growth. This trait is the opposite of being selfish or self-serving.

3. Integrity

Integrity has to do with honesty, ethics, and morals – it centers on your sense of right and wrong.  MBA admissions officers are interested in your character. Have you built trust with others and kept the promises you have made to yourself and to other people?

4. Analytical Intelligence

Analytical intelligence has to do with your ability to run the numbers, solve quantitative problems, identify patterns in information, and make data-driven decisions.

5. Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence has been a hot topic over the last decade. You might also refer to it as “interpersonal intelligence.” This quality has to do with your aptitude for understanding other people’s feelings and your capacity as a leader for tapping into emotion to inspire your followers to realize a high degree of success.

6. Creativity

Creativity, or creative intelligence, relates to your ability to cope with new situations by synthesizing prior knowledge and skills in a novel way. It also means seeing the world in your own unique way and having the ability to design and develop something that hasn’t existed before.

7. Community Spirit

Being community-minded means that you devote energy to serving your communities and strengthening them. Your community service accomplishments provide admissions officers with an important signal that you are a giver, not a taker. Remember, business schools are looking for students who will contribute just as much as they take away.

8. Global Awareness

A person who is globally aware typically has had life experiences that extend beyond his or her home country. When writing your MBA application essays, look for ways to emphasize your cross-cultural and international experiences. Ideally, the career goals you share in your Career Goals essay will also demonstrate a global scope.

9. Self-Awareness

Self-awareness relates to your capacity to objectively assess your strengths and weaknesses, learn from your mistakes, and grow beyond prior limitations. In many ways, the entire MBA application process is a massive test of your self-knowledge. To succeed, you need to understand yourself and communicate what you are about to a third party (i.e., the admissions officers).

CONCLUSION

If you’ve read this article closely and started to reflect on a subset of the above qualities that you can best exemplify in your application essays, then you are one step closer to writing powerful application essays.

With a clear understanding of the types of essay questions you’re going to face  during the MBA application process and a better handle on the qualities you need to showcase in your application essays, you are now prepared to begin the essay brainstorming process. In the next article in MBA Prep School’s Essay Writing Bootcamp series, we share a step-by-step process for choosing your most powerful topics and stories.

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If you are enjoying these Essay Writing Boot Camp articles, then you will want to take advantage of MBA Prep School’s  advanced course on MBA application essay writing. 

Learn from MBA essay experts as they break down the most popular MBA application essay questions, provide outlining templates, and showcase high-quality essay sample response. A scoring chart accompanies each course, which you can use to determine whether your application essays are as effective as possible.

For a limited time, MBA Prep School’s Essay Professor course is free to Poets&Quants readers. Follow this link to sign up and learn how to write essays that will impress admissions officers at the top business schools: MBA Prep School’s Essay Professor Course.

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Tyler Cormney  is the co-founder of MBA Prep School, a full-service, boutique MBA admissions consulting firm that specializes in helping aspiring MBA candidates realize their dream of attending an elite business school. As a graduate of both Harvard Business School and USC’s Professional Writing Program, Tyler draws upon his unique blend of creative writing, strategic thinking, and coaching skills to help applicants stand out from the competition for a place in the most selective MBA programs, including Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton.

MORE FROM MBA PREP SCHOOL’S SERIES: Part 1: Career Progress And Goals Essays,  Part 2: Why Our School And What Will You Contribute Essays, Part 3: Leadership, Past Decisions, And Setback Essays

The post The Most Important Qualities To Feature In Your MBA Application Essays appeared first on Poets&Quants.

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MBA Application Essays Part 3 – Leadership, Past Decisions, And Setback Essays - Poets&Quants

In the first two articles in our MBA Essay Writing Boot Camp series, MBA Prep School  discussed four of the most common types of MBA application essay questions. In this third article, we will round out the list of essay question types that you may come across when applying for an MBA. The final three essay categories include:

• Leadership Essays
• Past Decisions Essays
• Setback Essays

Leadership Essays

The top business schools are designed in part to serve as training programs for future organizational leaders. For this reason, identifying candidates who possess the motivation and baseline ability to lead is considered “job one” for an MBA admissions committee.

That’s why Leadership essay questions commonly appear on MBA applications. Admissions committees are unlikely, however, to simply ask: “Are you a leader?”  Instead, they will expect you to tell a story about one or more of your leadership experiences, or to discuss your leadership style.

Here are two examples of Leadership essay questions from the current application season:

Kellogg Essay 1: Kellogg’s purpose is to educate, equip & inspire brave leaders who create lasting value. Tell us about a time you have demonstrated leadership and created lasting value. What challenges did you face, and what did you learn?

Darden Question 3: Darden strives to identify and cultivate leaders who follow their purpose. At this stage, how would you describe your evolving leadership style and please provide an example.

Other essay questions in this category include:

• Discuss a defining experience in your leadership development.
• Tell us about a time when you made a lasting impact on your organization.
• What impact do you hope to have as a leader of consequence in the future?

To score top marks with your answer to these Leadership essay questions, you’ll be expected to show the admissions committee evidence that you have an ability to rally other people, motivate them to work together, and harness the energy and talents of a group to achieve an important shared vision/goal. Keep in mind that admissions officers are interested in your leadership achievements both inside and outside of work.

Past Decisions Essays

Your success following business school will have a lot to do with your values and the quality of your judgment. For this reason, admissions officers are interested in learning about your decision-making abilities. The next category of MBA essay questions relates to your ability to discuss your past decisions and to explain why you made them.

Here is an example of a Past Decisions essay question from the current application season:

Booth Essay 2:Chicago Booth immerses you in a choice-rich environment. How have your interests, leadership experiences, and other passions influenced the choices in your life?

Here are a few additional examples of this type of question:

• Reflect on a time when you turned down an opportunity.
• Tell us about a difficult decision you had to make.
• What decisions have you made that led to your current role?

Questions of this type essentially ask you to explain your thought process when you were making an important decision. In an ideal sense, the decision should have posed high personal or professional stakes.

You’ll score top marks if you clearly discuss the choices with which you were presented, concisely describe the pros and cons of each, and share the reasons for your ultimate choice. Remember that what the decision was about is less important to the admissions committee than how you approached it. They are trying to determine whether you think analytically and attack complex decisions systematically and efficiently, because that is what business leaders must do every day.

Setback Essays

Another strength that MBA programs are interested in identifying is the ability of a candidate to recover when things don’t go his or her way.  A variation of the Setback essay—also referred to as a “Failure” or “Mistake” essay—appears this year on Columbia Business School’s MBA application:

Columbia Essay 3: Please provide an example of a team failure of which you have been a part. If given a second chance, what would you do differently?

Over the years, we have also seen this type of essay appear on applications in other forms, including:

• What have you learned from a mistake?
• Discuss a time when you navigated a challenging experience in either a personal or professional relationship.
• Describe a failure that you have experienced.

You will earn top marks if you provide evidence that you handled a negative experience with emotional intelligence and treated adversaries and naysayers with empathy and understanding. If the negative experience is related to a relationship you had with another person, then showing you have an ability to compromise and diffuse conflict is important.

When reading your Setback essay, admissions officers will be interested to see if you can accept responsibility for missteps, rather than making excuses or pointing a finger at another party. The best Failure essays will convince your reader that not only were you able to recognize that you fell short, but also that you did something about it and grew in the process of overcoming the setback.

Next Up in the MBA Essay Writing Boot Camp Series

No matter which type of essay question you’re asked to answer in your MBA applications, your primary objective is to provide sufficient evidence that you possess the qualities that admissions committees value most. By doing so, you’ll move one step closer to an acceptance letter. In the next article in MBA Prep School’s MBA Essay Writing Boot Camp series, we will discuss the qualities admissions officers care about most – qualities that you will need to find a way to showcase in your MBA application essays.

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If you are enjoying these Essay Writing Boot Camp articles, then you will want to take advantage of MBA Prep School’s  advanced course on MBA application essay writing. 

Learn from MBA essay experts as they break down the most popular MBA application essay questions, provide outlining templates, and showcase high-quality essay sample response. A scoring chart accompanies each course, which you can use to determine whether your application essays are as effective as possible.

For a limited time, MBA Prep School’s Essay Professor course is free to Poets&Quants readers. Follow this link to sign up and learn how to write essays that will impress admissions officers at the top business schools: MBA Prep School’s Essay Professor Course.

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Tyler Cormney  is the co-founder of MBA Prep School, a full-service, boutique MBA admissions consulting firm that specializes in helping aspiring MBA candidates realize their dream of attending an elite business school. As a graduate of both Harvard Business School and USC’s Professional Writing Program, Tyler draws upon his unique blend of creative writing, strategic thinking, and coaching skills to help applicants stand out from the competition for a place in the most selective MBA programs, including Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton.

MORE FROM MBA PREP SCHOOL’S SERIES: Part 1: Career Progress And Goals Essays,  Part 2: Why Our School And What Will You Contribute Essays

The post MBA Application Essays Part 3 – Leadership, Past Decisions, And Setback Essays appeared first on Poets&Quants.

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MBA Application Essays Part 2 – Why Our School? and What Will You Contribute? Essays - Poets&Quants

In the first article in this series, MBA Prep School  discussed essay questions that had to do with your career progress and career goals. The next two questions we’ll discuss also dovetail with one another.  A “Why Our School?” essay question is a chance to tell the admissions committee what their program has to offer you.  The “Contributions Essay” is your opportunity to inform admissions officers what you will offer their class and community in return.

Why Our School? Essays

MBA admissions committees are very fond of asking you to tell them why you are applying to their school. MBA applicants are well aware of the stiff competition they face for admission to elite business schools, but they may not realize how hard MBA programs are competing to convince the best applicants to attend their schools. This is why an applicant’s answer to the Why Our School? question is a crucial way for admissions officers to separate the most engaged applicants from those who display only a superficial interest in attending their program. It follows that the quality of your answer to this essay question may have a significant bearing on your odds of being accepted.

Here are a couple of Why Our School? essay questions from the current application season:

Stanford Essay B: Why Stanford?

Wharton Essay 1: What do you hope to gain professionally from the Wharton MBA?

The “Why Our School?” question might be asked in a few other forms, including:

• Why do you need an MBA from our program?
• How do you think that our school can prepare you for your career goals?
• How will our program enable your personal and professional growth?

The best answers to these types of questions are both personal and specific.  They are personal because they cover the unique challenges that you need to prepare for in the future. They are specific because they draw distinct connections between your motivations for an MBA and the particular resources that each business school has to offer you.

Answering the “Why Our School?” question requires thoughtful research and doing more legwork than your competition. Whereas other applicants browse the school’s website and think that’s sufficient, you must endeavor to understand each school on a deeper level. Before you begin your research, decide what you’re looking for in an MBA program and then figure out how the unique resources of each of your target schools check those boxes for you.

Contributions to the Class Essays

At the best business schools, there are always more qualified candidates vying for admission than there are seats in the class. As a result, the admissions committee awards the open seats to the candidates they believe will add the most to their MBA community.

Here is an example of a Contributions essay question from the current application season:

Wharton Essay 2: Describe an impactful experience or accomplishment that is not reflected elsewhere in your application. How will you use what you learned through that experience to contribute to the Wharton community?

You might see other forms of Contributions essay questions, such as:

• What can you contribute to our program?
• How can you enrich next year’s class?
• How will your past experiences, values, and academic background be of value to your future classmates

The important thing to understand when preparing to answer these kinds of questions is that concrete answers about what you can contribute to the program are very important. The schools are looking for candidates who will put in just as much as they take out.

The key to scoring top marks is to be both concrete and specific. Too many candidates answer this question with vague generalities: “I’ll be a student leader” or “I can offer a diverse perspective.”  We don’t mean to imply that you can’t talk about softer skills or qualitative reasons. The point is that you must clarify how those attributes and your novel life experiences would be of benefit to your classmates. Don’t expect the admissions officers to do the heavy lifting to figure out what you can offer next year’s class; instead, tell them explicitly how you plan to contribute, and you will increase your chances of gaining a spot in their program.

In the next installment of MBA Prep School’s Essay Writing Boot Camp series, we’ll discuss three additional frequently-asked MBA essay questions that you may encounter during your MBA application campaign.

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If you are enjoying these Essay Writing Boot Camp articles, then you will want to take advantage of MBA Prep School’s  advanced course on MBA application essay writing. 

Learn from MBA essay experts as they break down the most popular MBA application essay questions, provide outlining templates, and showcase high-quality essay sample response. A scoring chart accompanies each course, which you can use to determine whether your application essays are as effective as possible.

For a limited time, MBA Prep School’s Essay Professor course is free to Poets&Quants readers. Follow this link to sign up and learn how to write essays that will impress admissions officers at the top business schools: MBA Prep School’s Essay Professor Course.

---

Tyler Cormney  is the co-founder of MBA Prep School, a full-service, boutique MBA admissions consulting firm that specializes in helping aspiring MBA candidates realize their dream of attending an elite business school. As a graduate of both Harvard Business School and USC’s Professional Writing Program, Tyler draws upon his unique blend of creative writing, strategic thinking, and coaching skills to help applicants stand out from the competition for a place in the most selective MBA programs, including Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton.

The post MBA Application Essays Part 2 – Why Our School? and What Will You Contribute? Essays appeared first on Poets&Quants.

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