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Your MBA Essay Strategy
FOR YOUR INFORMATION.
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Your MBA Essay Strategy
For admission to an MBA program, you need to put together a set of essays that are able to convey your thinking and those traits that make you successful. This note on 'your strategy' will help you think through your past and explore different aspects of your personality. It will help you identify those areas, which when projected appropriately will get you the admission you are aiming for.
There are four parts to this note:
1. Your career plans
2. Projecting your unique background
3. Projecting your all-round skills
4. Write winning essays
The first three will help you think and tell you what to project, while the last will help you convert this strategy into well written essays for your business school admissions.
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1. YOUR CAREER PLANS
Successful applicants have clearly thought out and well crafted plans for their careers. Their plans seem achievable yet ambitious. While writing about their plans, these applicants build upon their existing skills and past experiences, and through different parts of their essays show that they have the capability to achieve their goals.
When writing about your own plans make sure they are not vague. Almost all applicants want to work for the top consulting companies or start their own businesses after their MBA.
A lot of successful applicants have similar desires too, but they are different in that they are very specific about their goals. They
list down their existing skills and experiences, try to imagine correctly the skills and experiences they will need to be able to get to the future they have imagined for themselves. They then break up their long term goals into several short term goals to show that they understand the route to their future goals.
Once your plans are clear, you have to, by quoting suitable examples, describe how your past experiences and present skills will help you achieve your goals.
You then have to ensure that you have a differentiating strategy to pitch you as an applicant with a unique profile and make your application stand out from among thousands of other applications that the admissions committee will read. The next part of this note focuses on this aspect.
2. PROJECTING YOUR UNIQUE BACKGROUND
It is important that you are able to project parts of your personality which will differentiate you from other applicants. The top business schools select applicants who have something unique to show through their applications.
The uniqueness can come from:
- your career progress
- your insight and perspectives
You have to look at the details of your experience, the learning that you got while working on your projects, and how you have applied your learning to constantly improve your performance at work.
You also need to lend an insight into your unique way of thinking. You have successfully handled several challenging assignments, great! But the business schools want to know, what enabled you to succeed? It was probably your ability to analyze complex scenarios, to understand and anticipate needs of the situations you were analyzing. Think about what makes you work well and then project it through your essays.
Some applicants can be very successful with their admissions by lending an insight into their unique ways of thinking and how they perceive what may seem as ordinary situations to others. You may also want to give this approach a try. Look back at your various experiences and recall instances where you performed well under adverse circumstances. What made you succeed and what did you learn from such instances.
When you are able to identify a single trait that was responsible for your good performance in more than a couple of instances, that trait is the likely to be the one that differentiates you from others. Explore it further and make efforts to project it well.
3. PROJECTING YOUR ALL-ROUND SKILLS
While it is important for you to build an approach to project your unique personality through your essays, it is equally important to
be able to project your all-round skills.
To achieve this objective, list down all your past achievements and divide them into the following three categories.
A. Professional
B. Managerial
C. Personal
Remember that to be successful in your efforts, each of the above three are equally important.
A. Professional: This includes skills and achievements in your area of specialization.
Projecting this aspect of your background should not be difficult for you. You must talk about your projects and assignments.
Pick up about three instances in which you performed well and write about them explaining the following points.
- The objectives of the assignments you decide to quote.
- Your personal contribution to the assignment.
- The challenges you faced and how you overcame them.
- The learning you took out of them.
- The end results of the assignment.
Do not focus on your responsibilities in the assignments. Focus on what you actually did, follow the pattern above. And avoid using technical jargon.
By referring to your assignments and writing about them in the format described above you will attempt to project that you have grown in your area of specialization, developed new skills and evolved new ways of doing things. You will show your ability to innovate and develop unique ways of solving problems, and your ability to take up challenging projects.
B. Managerial: This includes the non-technical aspects of your work.
How do you deal with your bosses, colleagues, team members? How do you handle difficult situations? How important is meeting a deadline? How often do you take initiative to do something different and go ahead to achieve what you set out to? Are you comfortable working with others in a project?
You can get a list of attributes that business schools like to assess applicants on when you refer to this article on EssayCom: http://www.essaycom.com/articles/art5.htm
Select attributes that apply to you. For each attribute, write a story describing an incident where you demonstrated the skill. Refer back to your experiences at work, while studying and while pursuing your other interests, to select experiences that would best project you.
This is where lot of content for your essays will come from. Skills under this category and the way in which they are presented can make all the difference. This could get you the admission.
Remember, all applicants make claims about what they did, successful applicants prove their claims. Support all claims by real life instances where you showed the skills.
C. Personal: The person you are when you are not working.
Business schools want to know what kind of a person you are and how you think. A lot of applicants don't write much about themselves outside of work, but that's not a good idea. The successful applicants do lend a good insight into their personal lives.
Business Schools want to know about attributes from your personal life that could be helping you at work, and could influence your future career path.
You must pick at least one essay where you write about your personal experiences. It could be a leadership experience while working for a cause outside of work, teamwork experience through a sport you were involved in, your experience of helping a friend or a family member, your extra-curricular activities and other such experiences.
The experience you decide to write about from this category must also project initiative, teamwork, leadership or convey an aspect about you that you are proud of. Business schools love these attributes and you have to show yourself in the same light. You could write about what you have learnt from these activities or experiences and how they have contributed to your being the person you are?
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4. CONVERTING YOUR STRATEGY INTO WINNING ESSAYS
Now, follow the steps below and you'll be on your way.
Step 1
Before you begin writing your essays:
- Build a clear and concrete, long term career plan.
- Build your unique applicant statement - a paragraph that describes who you are, and how you are likely to be different from others who could be applying for admission.
- List down your thoughts related to each of the three categories (professional, managerial and personal) to describe your all-round
skills.
Step 2
When you begin writing your essays, your first attempt should be to answer the question that has been asked. Having done the exercise above you should not find it difficult. Remember to only make statements that you can substantiate with real life examples. It just adds credibility to your claims.
Step 3
After you have written the first drafts of all essays for a school, refer back to your notes from the step 1 above and check if you have covered most points. If there are points in your notes which you haven't been able to write about, and you feel they can contribute to your application, look at ways of projecting them. There will be certain essays where you will be able to accommodate the left over points.
Step 4
Now, put your essays aside for a few days. Then read them all in one sitting and compare the image formed by your essays with the unique applicant statement you wrote under step 1 above. Make changes to ensure that your unique applicant statement is reflected through your essays.
After once carrying out this procedure start with Step 2 for writing essays of every additional school.
Work hard on your essays and the results will show. It gets easy after you get into it. Remember to tell yourself to go for it all the way, and not to give up.
We wish you a good career ahead.
Best Wishes, |
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