标题: [分享]Sample Stanford MBA Essay [打印本页] 作者: celinapple 时间: 2007-8-14 22:09 标题: [分享]Sample Stanford MBA Essay
Question: What matter most to you, and why?
What matters most to me is making tomorrow a better day, not only for myself, but also for the world around me. What I learned with my family, in my community, and throughout my career, taught me how I can make the best out of my life and accomplish this ambitious plan.
Being the eldest of five children shaped my personality, making me realize, very young, the importance of others. Our home was joyfully disorganized. My father was very busy launching his own law firm and starting a career in local politics. My mother was snowed under with kids, as she gave birth to all five of us in just six years. As the eldest child, I was the most qualified to assist her. I took my role seriously, attentively looking after my brothers and sisters when in the house. My mother appreciated having an additional pair of eyes to count with. To me, my brother and sisters were the most precious things in the world. In return for my attention, they gave me their trust and, I like to think, grew up in better conditions. Watching over them, I learned that being attentive to others is one humble yet powerful way to make a positive contribution to their lives.
In addition to benefitting from my attention, I observed that my brother and sisters were also influenced by my personal behaviour. For instance, they would spontaneously help our mother, after observing me doing so. This observation taught me that privileges generally come together with duties. While my parents' trust allowed me to do grown-up things and to enjoy more freedom than most of my friends, it also gave me the responsibility to consider my actions. The impact I had on my siblings taught me to be mindful of my behaviour and, at the same time, rigorous with myself. I learned from this experience that leaders influence their environments not only through their achievements, but also through their behaviour.
To positively influence my brothers' and sisters' education, I realized I had to do more than be attentive to them and watch my own actions. I also had to let them know when they were doing right or wrong, which was sometime unpleasant. I learned that, for their own sake, I sometimes had to be demanding with them. This family experience taught me something about the complexity of being a good leader. In my view, positively influencing the lives of others not only requires being 'nice to everyone', as one of my primary school teachers wrote about me in my academic record, but also requires rigor and decisiveness.
I was faced with this same type of challenge in another context: my community. In my senior year as a computer engineering student at ESEI, I was elected by 250 fellow students to become the President of REIP, the school's leading non-profit organization. REIP helped students finance their tuition with tax-exempted IT consulting jobs. Seven other volunteers helped me run the organization, which had annual sales of $800,000. My ambition was to make a difference in my community by strengthening REIP however, upon starting my term, I discovered that we would soon be confronted with particularly difficult decisions. My first shock was discovering that several alumni were fraudulently using REIP to benefit from tax exemptions. As those exemptions were legally reserved to students, a single control of the URSSAF, the French equivalent of the IRS, would have threatened the organization. However, stopping these contracts was a difficult decision to make, as they were providing 30% of REIP's income. In addition, they had been tolerated by previous managing teams, and it would have been easy for us not to question this situation. Nevertheless, I did not allow myself to choose this easy path.
After careful deliberation, I understood that putting an end to the fraudulent contracts was the best option for the organization. To compensate for the loss of revenue, I repositioned the organization's offer towards Internet solutions, which was eventually successful. I also made REIP join France's official Association of Student Organizations. As part of this Association, REIP established rigid management procedures and accepted yearly audits, thus preventing further legal problems from occurring.
Secondly, I realized that REIP's recently recruited administrative assistant was making numerous errors in her accounting tasks. It was a very important issue, as she was the only permanent employee and occupied a key position in the organization. I tried to understand what was going wrong, and to give her the possibility to solve this problem. I did not rush, giving time for the situation to improve, and for myself to find a solution. As I was leading an organization dedicated to positively contributing to the lives of others, I questioned whether or not it was right to terminate the contract of an employee who needed her job. However, I reached the conclusion that keeping her on board would eventually damage the organization, causing more harm than good. After initiating debate among the team, and reaching a unanimous consensus, my responsibility was to announce our decision to our employee. I tried to manage the situation with tact and respect, notifying her well ahead of time, and then supporting her job search. This decision was difficult, yet necessary, and I still believe it was the right thing to do to maximize the outcome of our non-profit organization. With these two important, yet difficult, changes to the organization, I am convinced that, with my team, I made a positive contribution to our community.
My actions resulted in giving REIP a much more solid grounding to serve future generations of students. It is now one of the most pre-eminent members of France's official Association of Student Organizations, and one of ESEI's flagship organizations. Once again, knowing how to find the right balance among being decisive, compassionate, and rigorous, allowed me to resolve the challenges, and to succeed as REIP’s President.
My community stayed equally important to me once I completed my term leading REIP. Today, I am the youngest member sitting on ESEI’s Board of Directors, and also a member of the Admissions Committee at ESCP-EAP. These two roles allow me to give back to the institutions that shaped me, and to help them deliver a better education.
Within a different context, the professional one, I learned that two others ingredients are essential in accomplishing great plans: optimism and perseverance.
Optimism and perseverance helped my father face up to a very hard time, when the firm he founded collapsed. With five children attending high school or university at the time, my father had no choice but to respond to the situation and focus on what he could do to keep building our future. He pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, heading for a totally different career after twenty years as a lawyer. I believe that his optimism allowed him to stand up, and that his perseverance made him do everything possible to earn back what he had lost. My father is therefore a role model for me when I think of the ups and downs that can occur in one's professional life. In the same way that optimism and perseverance helped my family, these ingredients were instrumental in allowing me to impact my professional environment, at each step of my career. In my last year with ESEI, my optimism made me confident with my ability to succeed as a student-entrepreneur and establish a 35-person company: Kakabo. While finishing my term as President of REIP, I convinced a prospective Internet entrepreneur to get me on board as co-founder of his company. We had to build an e-commerce system to convince our first investors, Stanford MBA alumni Alberic Braas, Jean-François Moyersoen, and Hervé Lasseigne. Taking on this challenge with aplomb, I recruited a team of four engineers, who accepted to work for free until funds would be raised. My enthusiasm and perseverance helped motivate the team to work days and nights for seven weeks before we unveiled Kakabo.com. This early launch allowed us to raise $2.5M and our concept provoked enthusiastic press coverage. We were selling various consumer products online at discount prices.
We hired an experienced CEO, who focused on preparing a merger of the company. I got promoted to Director of Operations to supervise the execution of our strategy. I recruited and managed a cross-functional team of 17 professionals, who represented half the company's headcount. I launched new projects and structured the company. Nine months after the initial call at my office, we sold Kakabo to Lycos Europe for $5M worth of stocks.
In 2001, what I accomplished on the field convinced the management of Briancone, a Silicon-Valley based software vendor, to go international. When I proposed Briancone's CEO to join him, the company was young and had no plans to go abroad for a couple more years. He seized this opportunity to have someone give him early insight into the company's international potential. At first, I focused on collecting information and establishing a network in the European industry. From this work, I identified several other opportunities. I took the initiative to establish business relationships with local players. As I was alone in Europe, I could only count on my own actions to succeed. Working hard, I managed to start a strategic partnership with Cap Gemini, the most important company in our field, and to bring some significant sales leads with prospects such as Schneider Electrics. With those results, I convinced Briancone's management, which included co-founder Josh Sinh, another Stanford MBA alumnus, to invest several million dollars in Europe and start a local sales office. Through my perseverance, I made Briancone go international much sooner than initially planed.
Last but not least, in 2003, the very same ingredients allowed me to have a strong impact on the situation of my current employer, Sofixi. I convinced a financial group to make the second biggest investment in Sofixi's history. Sofixi had just lost its principal source of new funds, an event that strongly challenged its development. On my own initiative, I suggested approaching several potential investors that could compensate the loss, including Avava, one of the biggest French life-insurer. Our CEO was convinced that Avava was out of our reach, but I refused to give up without trying. I persuaded him to let me approach this company on my own. With my hope of a positive outcome, I identified a senior contact, established a relationship with him, and met him several times to discuss his investment criteria. Following this, I performed an analysis of our competitors, and identified where we could beat them. I prepared a detailed proposal, had it approved within Sofixi, and submitted it to Avava. As a result, we were selected as finalists out of ten competitors. I organized and participated with the senior management in representing our offer. Eventually, a year after I started the negotiations, we won this $50M investment. This victory provided Sofixi with $5M of cumulated management fees and allowed the company to increase funds under its management by 30 %, at a very challenging time. I am convinced I could not have made such contributions to my professional environments, with Kakabo, Briancone, and Sofixi, if I had not displayed indestructible optimism together with inexhaustible perseverance.
Altogether, what I experienced throughout my career, as well as with my familly and in my community, convinced me that I have the ability to make a difference in the world around me. In my view, it is by being attentive to others, by displaying exemplary behavior, as well as by being decisive, that I can make a positive contribution to my environment. I also believe that, like every individual, I have some talents and, if developed and used to their best, those talents can allow me to achieve and accomplish my aspirations. Through optimism and perseverance, I intend to turn my talents into actions, and my actions into useful achievements.
The way I want to accomplish my aspirations is through building a family and a company. For this reason, my grandfather, who succeeded doing so, is another role model to me. On a professional level, he became CEO of the food-processing family business at age 24 after studying business. He developed it and successfully sold it to Geant Vert, which is still the French market leader today. He became the official advocate of this industry when trade agreements were discussed with other countries, and was decorated for his contributions. On a personal level, he was also a wonderful family man. He gave his four daughters the grounding and the values that allowed them to succeed in their own fields and to build their own families. To me, my grandfather's impact is an inspiring example of success.
At this stage of my life, I am convinced that studying an MBA at Stanford is the best way for me to get prepared to accomplish my aspirations. In the past, I learned that putting myself in diverse, collaborative, yet challenging, contexts can provide lifelong benefits. Today, I see Stanford GSB's intimate community as an unmatched environment to nurture and challenge my thinking. Spending several weeks on campus, meeting some students of the University, and collaborating with MBA alumni all along my career, I have observed individuals displaying not only professional promise, but also, as Leland and Jane Stanford's wished, the will to be 'useful citizens' who make a difference in our society. In my view, no other school than Stanford GSB would add this dimension to my business education, and could better develop my ability to make my hope of a better tomorrow a reality. In return, I hope to contribute to Stanford's community by bringing my unique path of experience and my desire and will to make a difference.
