Happy new year, everybody. I hope you all had a fun and safe New Year’s Eve celebration last week and have settled back into the post-holidays “real life” comfortably.
With the second round deadline for many business schools having just passed or coming up soon, I thought I’d post something to help those of you who are targeting the Round 3 B-school application cycle. The following article comes to us from the good folks over at GottaMentor.com and was written by John Rice, the founder of Management Leaders for Tomorrow, one of the most successful B-school admissions prep organizations in the U.S. In this article, John gives tips on how to write strong essays to help gain admission at one’s target programs. John is an HBS graduate himself and his organization has helped hundreds of folks get into top MBA programs, so I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s talking about. If you’re planning to apply to business school in the future, you should check this out.
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“Business school essays that get you in”
Author: John Rice Source: http://www.gottamentor.com/ViewGeneralAdvice.aspx?g=14
Excerpt from the article:
“One of the most important aspects of applying to business school is understanding how to tell your story in a way that translates your strengths and accomplishments into high potential for positive impact at your target MBA campus and later as a leader over the course of your post-MBA career. Focus the body of your story on articulating and illustrating the following things:
1. What you are passionate about and why, and what that implies for your long-term career goals. Your story should focus on what you want to accomplish in life/why and secondarily how business school fits into that plan. Failing to be introspective and genuine about what you really care about and what you really want to do with your life virtually eliminates the chance that you will tell a unique, memorable, and compelling story. Many applicants make the mistake of focusing on what they think admissions officers are looking for. When you try to tailor your story to what you think they want to hear, you will probably just blend into the crowd of thousands of rejected applicants. Here is an example of a common mistake applicants make in this regard: A female applicant scarred her face accidentally when she was young. This experience negatively influenced her sense of her own beauty and overall self-esteem, and it took her several years to build her confidence to the point where she felt she could accomplish anything she wanted and not be burdened by her scar. As a result, her true passion was helping young women maximize their beauty and overcome self-esteem issues related to how they looked. What she really wanted to do long-term was to develop and manage a chain of beauty spas targeting younger women. But she thought that admissions officers would view her as being “shallow†if she talked about her passion for beauty and felt it was safer to craft her story around a long-term goal of becoming a marketing executive in the cosmetics industry rather than a beauty entrepreneur. That story fit with her perception of the path that many MBAs take, but it is not her story and telling it would be failing herself and jeopardizing her chances of getting accepted.”
Please visit http://www.gottamentor.com/ViewGeneralAdvice.aspx?g=14 to see the remainder of John’s advice on writing powerful B-school essays.
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