Saturday, September 27, 2008

Optional Essays

Let me get the first question out of the way.

No, you do not need to submit an optional essay. By definition, “optional” means you have a choice. And an adcom would rather read fewer essays than more.

Having said that, optional essays can be used strategically to explain a weakness (real or perceived) or include additional positive information that wasn’t included in the other essays. Note that some schools (e.g., Columbia, Wharton and Duke) state specifically that they only want the former. If you ignore their instructions you risk having them think you can't follow directions.

When explaining weaknesses, don’t whine or make excuses. If you have a low GMAT score, for example, don’t tell them how difficult the test was or that you were so busy with work that you could not study properly. The test is difficult for everyone and everyone is busy. Stick to the facts and wherever possible point out your strengths that may compensate for your weaknesses. Also, be proactive. If you know you have a weakness, take action to improve and use the optional essay to let the adcom know what steps you are taking. On more than one occasion I’ve recommended clients take a university extension course in calculus, for example, to compensate for a low quantitative score on the GMAT. Impress an MBA adcom with your self-awareness and your commitment to improve yourself.

You can also use an optional essay to provide balance. Introducing something personal through an optional essay, for example, is a great way to diversify a portfolio of essays that is heavily weighted towards professional topics.

bryan@elite-essays.com

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Recommenders & Recommendations

For most applicants with several years of professional experience, the best recommenders are past and current supervisors. They are in the best position to judge your professional abilities and answer the questions that most MBA schools ask. Their recommendations serve to confirm and expand on the information included in your essays. It’s really that simple. Ensuring that happens though is not simple since you don’t have control over what your recommenders’ write. My advice is: get control, as much as possible anyways. I’ll come back to this later.

The most basic rule when selecting recommenders is also simple: choose the people who know you the best because only they can provide detailed examples to support their claims. Choosing someone who doesn’t know you well simply for their title or position, or for their status as an alum will almost certainly backfire on you because the adcom will see you as more interested in surface than substance. Even worse, they may think you were unable to secure a recommendation from someone who actually knows you. Another good rule is to choose recommenders who can say different things about you, i.e. people who are not going to cover the same topics/accomplishments as each other.

Applicants are not always in a position to ask their current supervisors, especially when doing so might put you in an awkward position. Adcoms know this. It should not count against you either as long as you can find someone who knows you well. However, you should find someplace in your application to explain the situation. You could use an optional essay for this or you could even ask one of your recommenders to explain in his or her letter.

If you haven’t been working long or are applying directly from university then consider professors, bosses from part-time jobs or internships, volunteer coordinators, etc. The basic rule of using people who know you well still applies.

As much as possible, work with your recommenders. Let them know what accomplishments you are describing in your essays and ask them to confirm them. Direct your recommenders to cover different aspects of your career so that they are not duplicating each other, which is a waste of a letter. And while adcoms frown upon it, some recommenders will ask you to draft a letter for them to review and sign. If they give you the option, take it. Not only will you be able to manage the content, you’ll also have more control of the timing and will worry less about your recommenders meeting submission deadlines. Here too, work with your recommenders. Try to “interview” them with a standard set of MBA LOR questions in hand. The more feedback you get, the easier it will be to draft.

bryan@elite-essays.com

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Wharton Essay Topic Notes

Sorry for not posting recently. It's starting to get busy...

Describe your career progress to date and your future short-term and long-term career goals. How do you expect an MBA from Wharton to help you achieve these goals, and why is now the best time for you to join our program? (1,000 words)

MBA admissions committees (adcoms) are like venture capitalists – they want to “invest” in the best people with the best ideas. Your goals essay then is your “personal business plan,” expressing your short- and long-term career ambitions, their connection with your past experience, and why they matter to you professionally and personally. The most compelling goals express an opportunity that you will be uniquely qualified to pursue immediately after graduating. Your goals need to be realistic (i.e., possible given your previous personal/professional experience plus an MBA) and ambitious (e.g., a significant jump in your current organization, changing your career, starting your own organization). If not, adcoms will not be persuaded, and they will read the rest of your essays skeptically. The goals essay is the most important you will write during the application process.

Most common mistake: vague short-term goals that don’t reflect a realistic and ambitious opportunity. As is true with all essays, well-chosen details separate good essays from great essays. In the case of the goals essay, the details of your short-term plan will show how much thought and research you’ve done regarding your “business plan” as well as allow you to make direct connections to each MBA program. For example, if you plan to consult high-technology firms, then you should be looking for classes, projects, research centers, clubs, etc. that relate to those fields.

Describe a setback or a failure that you have experienced. What role did you play, and what did you learn about yourself? (500 words)

No one is perfect, and even the most successful professionals have failed or experienced setbacks. These experiences represent learning opportunities that disciplined professionals use to grow. This question requires you to recognize your role in a failure or setback. More importantly, it requires you show how you recovered and learned from your failure to become a more complete professional.

Most common mistake: not choosing a “good” failure. A “good” failure is something not too recent, perhaps from early in your career, so you can demonstrate that you had time to analyze your mistakes and make the right choices the next time you faced a similar situation. (If the school requires you to write a leadership essay as well, one strategy is to pick a failure that occurred before your leadership success. Your leadership success can often serve as proof that you grew through your failure.) A good failure also has to be a direct result of your actions or decisions, or else there is nothing for you to learn from the experience. Lastly, you should pick a failure that is “understandable” or “forgivable,” perhaps due to youth or inexperience.


Where in your background would we find evidence of your leadership capacity and/or potential? (500 words)

This is similar to a standard leadership essay, which is your chance to show how you have succeeded in “uncharted territory” through the will and ability to see an opportunity, execute a plan to leverage it, and overcome the obstacles that threaten success. Taking leadership often requires trying something new, which in turn requires winning the support of others. For this reason, this essay also presents a chance to demonstrate your teamwork, interpersonal and persuasive skills as important components of your leadership ability. By using the word “evidence,” Wharton seems to allow for multiple examples. And while they say “potential,” whenever possible you should choose an event that was a clear “win” for you.

Most common mistake: not detailing how you overcame various obstacles and instead relying on generic phrases like “persistent negotiations” or “unyielding efforts” that don’t illustrate core abilities.

Please Complete One of The Following Two Questions:

a. Describe an experience you have had innovating or initiating, your lessons learned, the results and impact of your efforts. (500 words)

While similar to the leadership question above, this topic focuses more on the creative aspects of your problem solving ability. If you answer the leadership question above, though, choosing this topic might lead to some redundancies in your application.

b. Is there anything about your background or experience that you feel you have not had the opportunity to share with the Admissions Committee in your application? If yes, please explain. (500 words)

This could be interpreted as an “excuse” essay to explain away weaknesses in your application, but the fact that Wharton offers a separate “optional” essay means this is meant as a personal experience essay. This essay can be approached from many different directions. One strategy is to concentrate on an important turning point(s) in your life to show the experience(s) that lead to your personal growth. This approach can be especially effective if your experience somehow relates to your future goals, e.g., if you spent time overseas in your teens and now you want to work internationally. You could also focus on personal accomplishments, barriers you’ve overcome, or something unexpected about you, such as an unusual hobby. The important thing is to provide insight into your personal experiences that shows your self-awareness, your personal growth, and if possible, how your personal experiences fit in to your professional life.

These notes are for general guidance only and might not apply to your particular situation. If you have any questions, please contact me. 


bryan@elite-essays.com

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Columbia Essay Notes

I've started providing notes to aid with topic choices on selected essays, particularly for new or unusual essays. Last time I covered Stanford's optional essays. This time it's Columbia.  I know the early round deadline is just around the corner, but this will be for all the late birds and second rounders out there.

(Required) Master Classes are the epitome of bridging the gap between theory and practice at Columbia Business School. View link below. Please provide an example from your own life in which practical experience taught you more than theory alone. (Recommended 500 word li
mit) 



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4698876883776961370&hl=en

Last year Columbia asked a different but related question requiring applicants to expound on the value they would receive from an MBA education. They seem to be tackling this more obliquely with this question about theory vs. practice. (One of the criticisms against MBA programs is that they only teach theory. Columbia seems to have developed its Master Classes in direct response.)

This question asks you to walk a thin line. You have to describe an experience (in reality, an accomplishment) before which you had certain expectations, thoughts or beliefs. Then you have to describe how reality got in the way, forcing you to adapt, expand or apply the theory in a different way than expected. In other words, show how theory alone was not sufficient to succeed. You cannot discount the value of theory completely, of course, since theory is a mainstay of any MBA curriculum. By the end of the essay, you should have shown that you can appreciate the synergy of a theoretical foundation supplemented by real world experience.

(Required): Please provide an example of a team failure of which you’ve been a part. If given a second chance, what would you do differently? (Recommended 500 word limit)

This is a fairly typical failure essay with the condition that it has to have occurred in a team context. As with all failure essays, you should choose an experience in which you were directly responsible for the failure, either through your actions or inactions, in order to be able to show what you learned and how you grew as a result. Hint: try to choose something that happened a few years ago so you have the chance to show not only what you would do differently but what you did do differently.

bryan@elite-essays.com

CMU/Tepper Essay Questions

Here they are, finally. Please note that it's unclear what the length limitations are. I'll post them as soon as I can find them.


bryan@elite-essays.com

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Stanford GSB Optional Essay Analysis

Stanford's optional essays deal with multiple dimensions of leadership and teamwork. It is often difficult to separate good leadership from good teamwork, but when it comes to choosing MBA essay topics there is a difference. A leadership story, like Options 2-4, should recount how you, working alone or with a team, confronted and hopefully overcame an external problem.

A teamwork topic like Option 1, on the other hand, should demonstrate leadership that improved the team itself. In both cases, you have to play the lead role in your story. Don’t let the word “teamwork” fool you. Your team is not applying for an MBA. A final note when choosing topics: the best ones will be consistent with the theme you choose for Essay A (What matters most to you and why?)

Option 1: Tell us about a time when you built or developed a team.

If you’ve started a team at work or for a volunteer project, for example, this is a great chance to show how you built a strong team from the ground up, including member recruitment and selection, duty assignment, effective communication, mutual support, and most importantly conflict resolution. A key theme should be pro-activity. Explain what decisions you made and steps you took to avoid common teamwork pitfalls. If you did encounter problems, explain how you solved them.

Meanwhile, a “team development” story should showcase how you fixed a broken team. This involves identifying the main problems (which are often the result of poor communication), devising concrete solutions, and gaining the buy-in of your teammates. In both of these approaches, you are the leader, but your leadership is aimed at building or fortifying your team.


Option 2: Tell us about a time when you felt most effective as a leader.

An effective leader gets things done. This topic, then, requires a story in which the outcome is a clear “win”. You can start by outlining the situation, including all the factors that will eventually challenge you and your team, then explaining in detail your responses and results, and ending with the final outcome. Often these stories hinge on persuading a key person or group of persons to take a chance on an innovation that you or your team is promoting.

Option 3: Tell us about a time when you tried to reach a goal or complete a task that was challenging, difficult, or frustrating.

Despite your best efforts, not all situations end positively. By including the word “tried" this option accounts for that possibility. Instead of focusing on the final outcome, you can highlight your perseverance and problem solving ability throughout the process, much like you would do for Option 2. If you worked with a team, you can also illustrate how you kept your team motivated throughout. Please note that any good leadership story should show how you deal with challenges, difficulties and frustrations, so the main difference between Option 2 and Option 3 is the final outcome.

Option 4: Tell us about a time when you went beyond what was defined, established, or expected

A leader breaks barriers and takes responsibility in situations when other people might say, “Not my job.” Your topic can accentuate your willingness to act alone and take a chance when you have no clear support. If you have a leadership accomplishment in which there was no teamwork involved, then this might be a good option.

This essay also presents the interesting possibility of showing moral leadership, i.e., taking a firm stand on an ethical position that contradicts your superiors or colleagues.

As I mentioned, there is a lot of potential overlap between these options. Feel free to ask me about your particular situations.

bryan@elite-essays.com

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Goals Development #2: Realistic and Ambitious

I mentioned in a previous post the goals “sweet spot,” which falls on the spectrum between realistic and ambitious. In the last few days I’ve had several discussions that made me realize I should explain in more depth.

Here is a typical exchange I’ve been having, much simplified.

Applicant: “My short term goal is to be involved in IT and strategic consulting.”

Me: “What do you do now?”

Applicant: “IT and strategic consulting.”

Stop. This person has certainly provided a realistic goal. It’s so realistic in fact, that she is already doing it. And without any further explanation, an admissions committee (adcom) will likely think that she does not need an MBA.

Here are some questions that could help her refine her thinking. Will she be working with bigger clients or international clients? Will she be managing larger project teams or an entire consulting division? Is there a new opportunity in IT/strategic consulting that she can’t capture with her current skill set? In essence, she needs to define her new challenges in such a way that an MBA is clearly necessary.

Here is another example:

Applicant: “I want to help my company expand its investments overseas.”

Me: “Sounds great, but you’ve been doing that for the past few years successfully. How will these future investments differ from the investments you’ve made in the past?”

Applicant: “Oh. Well, our investments so far have been in developed countries. But in our business that means the growth potential is not as high. Our future strategy is to invest in developing countries where the potential is greater, but so is the risk.”

Perfect. This person just hit the sweet spot. He can show that his goal is realistic by referring to his past success. At the same time, his goal is ambitious because his investment direction is changing and there is more risk involved. Most importantly, an MBA is the perfect vehicle to prepare him for these changes. Finance and accounting classes will help him with due diligence. International strategy and negotiation classes will help him in his face-to-face dealings with potential partners. Study trips and an international network of classmates can provide first-hand, up-to-date information as well as inter-cultural experience that can make a subtle but important difference in closing a deal successfully.

It is also possible to be too ambitious, which is usually less of a problem and also easier to detect, especially when it comes to short-term goals. For example, if you have two years of experience in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, you will not become CEO right after graduation no matter what MBA program you graduate from.

bryan@elite-essays.com

Cornell Questions

Here they are.


bryan@elite-essays.com