Welcome to MBA Podcaster—the only source for cutting-edge information and advice on the MBA application process. I’m your host, Charles Lane. Obtaining an MBA is a challenging and worthwhile process that can lead to greater personal satisfaction and professional success. But one of the first steps is also the most nerve-racking—writing the application essays. If you’re just starting to think about tackling the essays of your application, this podcast will help. We’ll speak to the principals at two established admissions consulting firms to hear how to approach the essay, and specific points of recommendation for this year’s essay questions, and then we’ll speak to the admissions directors themselves at both The Wharton and Notre Dame Business Schools.

Deciding to get an MBA is not a decision anyone would take lightly. So, why would you rush into the application-writing process? At least, that’s what Linda Abraham says. She’s the president of Accepted.com, an admissions consulting firm. She’s helped many applicants get into top schools, and she says the most important work comes before you actually begin writing—in other words—research. “Read the school’s website, attend the information sessions, if possible, visit the school, and talk to current students and recent alumni because you want to understand what the school is about. If a school emphasizes the diversity and breadth of its student body and its offerings, it’s probably going to want people who have a breadth of experience. If they emphasize the intellectual rigor of their program, they’re going to want people who show that they want an intellectually and analytically rigorous program. If the school emphasizes integration of business philosophies and functions, then you should be showing that that’s something that you want in your career—either to run a large corporation, or to run your own firm, or because you’re just the kind of person who likes to examine things from multiple perspective.

Abraham says unlocking the secrets of successful MBA applications lies in this advanced work done before you even take pen to paper. “So, there’s no magic formula for saying, ‘This school wants x and that school wants y.’ But through research you can discover what the schools value, and then take those aspects of your background that show fit. The other two steps, though, that need to be taken before one starts writing the essays is you have to examine your own experiences. And I think before actually writing the essays, it makes sense to make a list of significant experiences. What were formative experiences? What are significant leadership experiences? Teamwork experiences? Perhaps difficult dilemmas—a lot of people have trouble coming up with those and it’s an increasingly common question, and then choose the experiences before you start writing an individual essay. Look at the application as a whole and choose those experiences that best answer the individual question, and when put together, compliment each other and compliment the rest of the information presented in other parts of the application.”

Once the advanced work is done and you have a good idea about what it is your schools value the most, then it’s time to start to write. And, again, Linda recommends outlines that organize broad themes. “Once you’re ready to say, ‘I’ve done my research. I know what I want to write about,’ the next thing is to say, ‘What’s the main point?’ Let’s say we’re focusing on a given essay. What’s the main point of this going essay going to be? Well, that’s your theme or your thesis—whatever you want to call it—and that point should answer the question. That’s number one, and then once you have your theme and you have your point, then you have to choose the order in which you’re going to present the information that supports your theme; that engages the reader and that leaves them with the feeling that a) they should accept you, and b) you are an articulate person with a compelling story who’s going to add something to their class. In writing your outline, and choosing your topics, and then ordering them, make sure your not just talking in theoretical frou-frou, up-in-the-air stuff. Provide examples—concrete examples that will show the committee the qualities they value. And in your writing, make sure you balance description and analysis. So, that’s kind of a background as you structure the essays and outline. As you sit down to write the essays—you now have your structure, you have your theme, you know where you’re going—just write. Don’t worry about grammar; don’t worry about spelling; don’t worry about length; don’t worry about choosing just the right word. Simply write the thing. You can cut it later. You should edit it multiple times. You may want to show it to a few other people. Don’t show it to the whole entire world. But first, first, first just get it down.”

This may seem like broad advice, but free-writing will actually help you get the next step according to Graham Richmond, principal at another application consulting firm, “Clear Admit”. “There are some basic rules that I think apply. And the first is making sure that you provide direct and complete responses to these questions. It sounds obvious but candidates will shoot themselves in the foot over and over again by not really responding to the question that’s being asked. And that happens I think sometimes because people are trying to re-use material that they’ve written for another school. But it also happens because people think they have a certain story they want to get across and they kind of lose sight of the question while doing that—so, obviously, a direct and complete response to the question. You see a lot of questions that say, ‘Why do you want to get an MBA? Please tell us about your career progress.’ And at the end of it it’ll say, ‘And why now?’ and applicants will answer every part of that question but they’ll leave off the ‘why now?’ And that sort of thing is, obviously, a nuisance to admissions officers because they wouldn’t have asked the ‘why now?’ if they didn’t want the information. So, it’s important to be complete and sort of responding to these.”

One of the things applicants can do to add weight to their essays is to dovetail all of them together; using each answer to highlight one part of your application while not repeating yourself. “We really recommend that they look at the group of essays as a whole rather than say, ‘I’m going to write Wharton’s third essay or Harvard’s fifth essay tonight.’ We really recommend that they take the set of essays and brainstorm topics around those essay questions. And what I mean by that is coming up with a few different possible stories that you could assemble for a given essay question. The key is to make sure that you’re obviously responding to the questions that the school is asking, but responding in a way that introduces new information about your candidacy, or in a way that when all four or six essays are brought together for that school that the school is going to see a nice, well-rounded picture of the various things that you bring to the table in the MBA admissions process. So, it really is critical to brainstorm topics, and then look at ‘Well, maybe I can go with option B for this first essay because I’m going to talk about option A later on in Essay 4.’ It’s just a question of balancing things and making sure you have a lot of ideas around each question so that you can assemble a nice set of essays.”

Even though the essay questions change from year to year, the schools are still interested in the same basic information about an applicant. “Every year that I’ve been in MBA admissions, most of the schools have asked a question about the candidate’s career goals and career progress to date. And that’s kind of the centerpiece for most MBA applications. It’s what we call ‘the umbrella essay’ in a lot of cases because it’s an essay about where you’ve been and where you’re going, and then the other essays you might write for a given school sort of fit under that umbrella. They’re kind of specific stories from the timeline you’re describing in the career-goals essay. So, career goals are always popular. Another popular topic would be accomplishments or leadership experiences. There are always essays about impact you’ve had on an organization, or your three greatest accomplishments and why you view them as such—that kind of thing. There are also essay questions about ethical dilemmas. Those have been increasingly popular in this sort of post-Enron environment. There are essay questions about failure or a time that you received criticism. And, again, when I’m mentioning these topics, literally dozens of schools have questions that are quite similar that cover this ground. So, it’s pretty interesting to see.”

The reason why so many schools ask these questions is because it is essential for them to get to know the applicant. So, what does a successful applicant say then? After a quick message from our sponsors, we’ll introduce you to an admissions director who can give us that answer. Stay tuned.

The Wharton School

Many of the questions MBA applicants ask are about what the admissions board is looking for in an essay. And Thomas Caleel, Director of Admissions at The Wharton School of Business gives us some insight. “That’s always the million-dollar question. We get this all the time all over the world. The answer is to be yourself and answer the questions honestly. Our applicants are very bright people, and a lot of times they actually do themselves a disservice by out-thinking themselves. So, they’ll listen to this podcast where I’ll tell them there are no tricks to answering the essays, and they’ll read our essay questions which are pretty simple, but they’ll start to think, ‘I know it says talk about a failure or setback, but I read somewhere that they’re looking for something else. So I’ll try and write the answer I think they want to see.’ And the important thing is there is no right answer to these questions.”

But really—what does the admissions board want? “And, really, what we want to do is get to know the applicant better. So, there’s no right approach and what we really stress is have the applicant sit down and really think about the key questions which are: Why do they want an MBA? Why is now the right time in their career? Why is Wharton or really whatever school they’re applying to the right school for them? What are they trying to accomplish short-term and long-term? And those are really questions they should be thinking through before they start the application process because it will help clarify their message in the application.”

Ultimately, answering the essay questions comes back to basics. “Do you know what catches my attention? A well-written, thoughtful, self-aware essay; one that doesn’t use buzz words; one that speaks truthfully about the person; what they’ve done and where they’re trying to go. And I know that our applicants right now are listening to your podcast and thinking, ‘It’s so frustrating! We have to speak so generally because I want an answer.’ And, unfortunately, that is the answer. There’s no formula; there’s no combination of words we look for. And these are read by multiple people.”

Having a clear direction is a common theme among all top MBA programs. Brian Lohr is Director of MBA Admissions at Notre Dame. “I think that what we look for is somebody that has clearly thought out their progression; that understands completely why they want to go back and pursue an MBA, and then how that MBA is going to impact their career path. I think that’s critical. If a candidate just writes: ‘I want to go into investment banking because it sounds cool. I’m going to make a lot of money.’ That’s really not insightful. And they need to drill deeper and dig deeper and really and truly why they 1) want to pursue an MBA, and then, secondly, how that MBA is going to help them along in their career. So, that’s what we look for—some logical progression and some well-thought-out answers. You’d be surprised at how many candidates will take an essay they’ve written for another school and do a group replace. They’ll say take x-school and replace it with y. And, boy, when they do that it sticks out. You can really tell when somebody has massaged somebody else’s essay and tried to make it fit for your particular school. So, if there’s one red flag or one piece of advice that I would throw out there is “no group replace”. Write an essay that is particular to that school and respond accordingly to the question asked.”

What attracts Lohr’s attention is short answers that don’t bloviate. “Be concise and crisp in your answers. I often tell candidates to treat it like a newspaper article. They should put the good stuff and the important stuff up front, and then support it from there. But what you don’t want to do is make it like a novel and put the final story at the very end. I think it’s important for students to be crisp and concise and tell the story very quickly up front. We ask candidates what their first post-MBA career plan is going to be—what their first job after the MBA will be. And a crisp answer would be: ‘I plan to go into investment banking with JP Morgan in Manhattan,’ and then support it from there. A non-crisp answer would be: ‘I have this background, and I went to this particular school, and I have an interest in this area and this leads me to becoming an investment banker.’ It’s telling a long story when it can be crisp and concise and it should be crisp and concise.”

Above all, both admissions directors and admissions consultants all agree that the most important thing to consider is one’s fitness for an MBA program. Again, Graham Richmond from “Clear Admit”: “But even beyond that, you need to—probably before you even consider schools—take stock of your candidacy. And that’s something we actually work with our clients on. It’s just getting them to understand who they are, what they bring to the table, where they measure in terms of work experience, academic profile—all the things that go into one’s candidacy—extracurricular activities. At the end of the day, before you can properly select schools, you need to know who you are, and what your career goals are, and which schools might be most appropriate—and then beyond that—which topics are going to be most appropriate to select when responding to a school’s essay questions because a lot of that is going to come out of what you know about your candidacy and what your message is going to be in this process.”

For more information, visit us on line at mbapodcaster.com where there’s more information on applying for an MBA. While you’re there, you can also register for free downloads and have MBA advice delivered directly to your computer or MP3 player. Make sure you stay tuned next week when we zoom out and take a look at your entire application from when to apply and key strategies that make for a successful application. I’m Charles Lane and this is MBA Podcaster. Thanks for listening.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.0KB)