Mission Admission: I’m a Freelancer—My Resume Looks Like I Can’t Hold a Job!
Professor Profiles: Teck H. Ho, Haas School of Business
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) MBA Essay Analysis, 2012–2013 July 10th, 2012 The MIT Sloan School of Management has tweaked all of its essay questions this year and has dropped one question entirely, going with what appears to be a trend this application season toward giving business school candidates less opportunity to provide qualitative information about themselves. Many applicants will be disappointed to see that Sloan’s quirky “cover letter” essay prompt remains. We will start our analysis there…
Cover Letter (up to 500 words)
Please prepare a cover letter seeking a place in the MIT Sloan MBA program. Your letter should describe your accomplishments, address any extenuating circumstances that may apply to your application, and conform to standard business correspondence. Your letter should be addressed to Mr. Rod Garcia, Senior Director of Admissions. You will note that unlike most schools, Sloan does not ask its applicants to discuss either future goals or “why Sloan.” This is not an oversight! In keeping with its conviction that past behavior is the best predictor of future success, Sloan wants candidates to emphasize their past actions and thought processes in their essays, rather than their long-term aspirations. In fact, in an interview with Fifteen, the MIT Sloan newspaper, Director of MBA Admissions Rod Garcia explained that the “admissions committee does not explicitly ask applicants for their future goals to prevent candidates from telling stories that they think the admissions committee wants to hear.” Garcia added, “That’s why we don’t ask the ‘Why Now?,’ ‘Why MBA?,’ and ‘Why Sloan?’ type of questions that every other business school asks because these questions are leading questions, i.e. they lead the interviewees to tell the interviewer what the interviewer wants to hear. So, to go around this trickery, we ask candidates to talk to us about past examples instead.” Our advice? If you believe that you absolutely must outline your goals in your cover letter to provide context for your stories, do so, but discuss them as minimally as possible. Similarly, explaining “why Sloan” is neither expected nor encouraged, but if you feel you absolutely must address this topic anyway, again, keep your statement(s) brief, relevant and specific. Now that we have discussed what you should not do, let us discuss what you should do. The admissions committee asks that you describe your accomplishments, thereby providing an open-ended opportunity for you to tell a more complete story about yourself. The school’s other two essay prompts, by contrast, are rather narrow and require you to focus on a single instance. Here, you can delve into experiences and themes in your life that define who you are and how you have made an impact on others. We do believe that you should include at least one professional accomplishment, but you can also discuss personal and extracurricular accomplishments to provide a more well-rounded presentation of what you have to offer. However, be sure that you discuss all of your chosen stories thematically and that you do not just offer a boring career summary or a repetition of your resume. If you have any extenuating circumstances in your candidacy, you should use this opportunity to address them, but certainly do not devote the entire 500 words allotted to explaining, for example, why your GMAT score is lower than expected. Instead, you should briefly (very briefly) mention the issue and then assert that you have strengths in other areas and are confident that you can perform in Sloan’s rigorous academic environment. Whatever you do, do not dwell on your “extenuating circumstances,” make excuses for them or let them overwhelm your accomplishments in this essay. Although Sloan’s cover letter differs in some ways from a typical Personal Statement, some fundamentals still apply. We therefore suggest that you consult our mbaMission Personal Statement Guide—which we offer free of charge —before writing this essay for Sloan. Please feel free to download your copy today. Essays From Sloan’s admissions committee: “We are interested in learning more about how you work, think, and act. For each essay, please provide a brief overview of the situation followed by a detailed description of your response. Please limit the experiences you discuss to those which have occurred in the past three years. In each of the essays, please describe in detail what you thought, felt, said, and did.” Essay 1: Please describe a time when you had to convince a person or a group of your idea. (500 words or fewer, limited to one page) MIT MBA申请 Essay解析 2012-2013回复可见 本帖隐藏的内容需要回复才可以浏览 | 
