How to give the finishing touch to your MBA essays

So, the final stage of your MBA application has come and you are thinking on doing the final check and give some finishing touches to your MBA essays. While you must have put a lot of thought and slogged through the entire process, here are some tips to help you give final touches to the MBA essays

1. Be Fresh before you read-

Before you do the final round of review for your essays, please ensure that you have given yourself a break and have a fresh mind. You may decide to have a lazy day, watch a movie, meet friends or anything else but just keep the b-school essays out of your mind for some time.

This helps in removing the clutter from your mind and look at essays in a peaceful manner.

2. Do not show your essays to too many people -

Everybody has a different style of writing and also a different thought process. While it is fine to show your essays to a person who knows you and hasn’t seen the essays so far, you must not show your essays to too many people. Please note that too many opinions will create a mess for you.

Also, please note that it is preferable that the person reviewing your essays has some experience with MBA application process.

3. Do not start from scratch-

You are doing a hygiene check and not writing your essays from scratch. Do not even think of making major changes in the storyline or points you have highlighted unless you discover some major blunder in the essays.

Any major (or near major) change has to be in sync with the overall storyline and persona of the application. Also, any such change at the last moment is stressful and time consuming and is never recommended.

4. Language corrections –

This is a must during the process of giving finishing touches. This is a must do hygiene check because mistakes in spellings, punctuation, usage etc are considered careless.

In case you know somebody having a better command on language than you do, it is advisable to run your essays through that person.

5. Word Count

It is imperative that you do a check on word count and make any corrections. This should ideally be done twice. First check should be at the beginning itself and second at the end of your final read.

6. Remember, this is your final Read

Be calm and confident while doing this exercise. Do not become hassled and end up reading the essays over and again before the final submission. That just doesn’t help.

How to write the “Why MBA/ Short term and Long Term Goals/ why this school” essay

I’ll address the why MBA-goals-why this school essay in this article. This is the most important essay of your application. While the other essays help the admissions committee understand you as a person, this essay gives them a glimpse of your ambitions. Every B-school prefers taking people who are clear about their goals and this essay gives you a platform to showcase your clarity about your goals.

The essay should start with a brief description of your career progression till date. Next, you should write about your short term and long term goals. The point to be taken care here is – career progression, short term goal and long term goal should be well aligned. Even if you are planning to switch career post MBA, the reason should be a plausible one. So if you are planning to move into finance from an IT background, write about the transferable skills that you’ll bring from your IT background to the finance job. Here you can also mention the efforts you have made till date to achieve your short term goals. So you might have taken the CFA exam to switch to finance or you might have written a business plan for a venture you want to start post MBA.

Next part in the essay is typically “why MBA”. This part should be written keeping in mind the short and long term goals. You should focus on – what is it that you intend to learn during your MBA which will take you closer to your goals. Most common mistake in this part is that people tend to generalize the answer for this question and do not align it with their goals. So if you are from a background where you did not have any client interaction and post MBA you want to move in a relationships management role, your MBA would help you polish your soft skills. If you want to start your own venture, the B-School might give you the opportunity to connect with the venture capitalists or with people from similar background. Somebody planning to move to consulting would like to interact with diverse set of people but somebody planning to get into the healthcare sector would focus more on people from the healthcare background.

The point is – everybody would be looking for something different to take away from his MBA, so do not use generic statements but make it more relevant to your own goals.

Once you have defined the journey from your current career to MBA to your goals, you should write about “why this school”. This is the most important part of this essay and the best place to impress the admissions committee. The biggest mistake people do in this part is that they do not research well about the school and end up writing some general stuff which can be easily copy pasted for any B-school. Go to the website, talk to the alums, read blogs and understand what opportunities this school is going to give you to achieve your goals.

It’s very important to structure this essay nicely. Don’t leave any unanswered questions about your goals. Again, think deep about every aspect and try to personalize this essay to your best.

How to write the “Personality Essay – experience in leadership, dilemma, challenging situation”

I will talk about the structure of the personality essays in this article. Personality essays are the ones where you are supposed to write a story about your leadership skills or about some challenge or ethical dilemma that you faced.

This essay should follow the START framework. S – Situation, T – Task , A – Action, R – Result, T – Takeaways. Try to pick up a professional story or a story from your work place.

The essay should start with a brief description of the situation. This sets the context right in the beginning. This part should tell the reader the challenge that you were facing. Ideally there should be a single situation/challenge in the essay. The most common mistake people do is they write about more than one challenge. The problem arises when you have to write the “action” part. Each action that you take should address the challenge. If there are multiple challenges, there will be multiple actions and the essay gets lengthy.

The second part is the task. Here you should write about the actions that you were supposed to take in the given situation.

The third part is the action part where you should elaborate on the actions that you took to meet the challenge or handle the situation. Here you should take care that the challenge and actions are aligned. For example, if the situation was that there was no unity in your team, the action cannot be that you started the culture of brainstorming in the team before solving any problem. It should be something that makes sure that in the end there is some unity in the team, say, you started the concept of monthly team building trips.

Next, you should write about the results. Here you should write that the situation/challenge was successfully resolved and briefly write a story which shows that the problem was solved. Again this should be aligned with the situation/challenge and the action you took. So for the given example, the result should be – after the implementation of your actions, there was a marked difference in the bonding of people. This was displayed in the way the team executed the next project.

The last leg of the essay is the takeaways. This is the most important part of the essay. No matter how strong or weak your story is, this part of the essay will give the admissions committee to understand you as a person. Most applicants tend to ignore this part and just write a few common leadership traits in the end to complete this part. So think deeper about the actions and then write the takeaways accordingly.

Cracking the GMAT - GMAT planning and preparation Tips

GMAT – the first step towards any foreign B-School Admission is intimidating for quite a few. The amount of material available to cover is enormous and the time limited because most of the aspirants have professional commitments to attend to. It becomes critical to be selective, prepare using the optimum study material and build the right strategy.

I’ll narrate the strategy, which I believe will help you mellow down your initial intimidation and subsequently succeed. Before start preparing, it’s essential that you take a complete mock test, which includes writing the essays. Analyse your score - where all did you get stuck, was it because you forgot some concept or because you don’t know about it. Do you really have the stamina physically and mentally to stay focussed for the long duration of this test? Many people solve few questions from here and there and try to judge there preparedness for GMAT based on that. A verbal critical reasoning question might appear very simple if taken stand alone. But the same verbal question may be daunting when you have already spent over two hours in the actual test writing your essays and solving quant questions. So the first mock test will give you some idea about your strength and weaknesses. Following this you have to make a realistic estimate about how much time you can devote and at what speed you can cover the material.

It always helps to solve questions in batches and try to prefix the amount of time you want to spend on each batch. GMAT is a race against time. Besides, I believe that the material mentioned below is the basic minimum which you should cover:

• Manhattan Sentence Correction (considered as the bible for SC).
• Official guide (12^th, 11^th and 10^th edition if possible) - All these have different set of actual questions which appeared in exams. Here it is not only important to get the questions right but also to understand why they are right. Religiously read through the explanation given at the back in OG’s.
• Kaplan Quant Diagnostic tests, Princeton review notes and Free GMAT flash cards.

Also it’s important to track your mistakes and visit them again later to see whether you have grasped the concept or not. Besides these you should at least take 6 tests in the two-three weeks before exam and save the GMAT Prep, available as free software at www.MBA.com site (Test 2) for the last mock as it feels exactly same as the actual exam.

All the Best!!

Deconstructing the MBA trail

High on caffeine and short on sleep, I found myself pondering the obvious a few days back. Why do sane, smart, sensible people risk all their hard earned fortunes on a post graduate degree called the MBA? I reckon the thought provoking moment had autobiographical tinges since the loan EMI was staring at me from a point blank range. Why not try the horses instead? Or Ladbrokes? Or better still, why not Vegas?

An excerpt of the answer as I painfully deconstructed is below:

Like they proclaimed in old times, there is no one road that leads to Rome. There are many. The same I reckon holds good for an MBA. There are many trails and my humble attempt is to describe a few.

The academic trail: Some people can’t seem to stop studying. The portals of an institution are where they find security, an identity and probably even more. So they graduate out of school, top that up with a Masters and in a quest for continuity choose business school education. Where they head after this, is anybody’s guess.

The corporate ladder trail: Have you ever been stuck in a bumper to bumper traffic jam? Climbing the corporate ladder would be a metaphorical equivalent. So when suddenly the prospect of becoming the boss to your boss lies in an MBA, you very often don’t think twice. Those Monster.com job adverts on television were always aspirational.

The career shift trail: Your job description begins and ends with drinking endless cups of coffee and writing 2000 lines of code, day in, day out. You yearn for a real job. How romantic it is to sell soaps and detergents to one half of a big country. Or sit in a leather panelled office room like Gordon Gecko and scream ‘Buy, buy, buy’ into the telephone. I need a career change. I need an MBA. Period.

Money trail: To some an MBA is the high road to riches. Man will be man. Any road that leads to gold will be taken; and if you don’t believe that ask the folks who headed to California in the 1850’s. Six figure salaries and other rosy stories have always lured the unsuspecting to the MBA.

The ‘Big experience’ trail: Years of corporate monotony, makes many a person, yearn for that big experience. To the beat generation of the sixties the answer would lie in a stash of white powder, but for the less hedonistic and the career minded, the MBA is as good as it gets. So little wonder that it happens.

So that ladies and gentlemen, was the tip of the iceberg; and believe me there are many other trails that you and I don’t know off. So go find yours. I can vouch it’s a good ride.

( Contributed by Preeth PM - ISB Class of 09)

goisb.com - Largest community of ISB aspirants

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MBA Tips and Preparation for the Business School Interview

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