They have the “numbers” (GMAT, GPA) and work experience to get into a good business school.Students with career goals and a logical, well-thought-out reason for an MBA ALWAYS do better in business school and the job search, good times and bad.
—JENNIFER BROOKS, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA (KENAN-FLAGLER)
Make no mistake. Of all the essays you’ll write for your business school application, essays about your goals, need for an MBA, and reasons for applying to your target program are the most important. These are the essays in which schools most explicitly ask you to answer the central question that underlies your entire application—why exactly do you need an MBA? Yet despite its importance, when admissions officials are asked “What’s the most common mistake applicants make?” failure to describe MBA-justifying goals is frequently the answer. In fact, poor execution on the goals essay has been said to account for more than half of all dings.
The goals essay is key because—surprise—adcoms want to know what motivates you to go to all the trouble, expense, and opportunity cost of earning an MBA. No matter how staggering your qualifications, if you don’t provide a clear reason for needing an MBA, your application stands an excellent chance of losing out to those that do. Business schools use the goals essay to do a reality check on your maturity and career savvy. Do you really have a career plan that extends beyond your next promotion? If you do, is the MBA really an essential tool for advancing toward that goal (maybe you just need more work experience or perhaps a master’s in a specialized functional skill)? Schools know all too well that many applicants seek MBAs for the “wrong” reasons—as a desperate measure to escape a lousy job or looming pink slip or to gain a promotion or bigger salary—not because the MBA really prepares them to do something they could not do without it. A goals essay that implies you need the MBA for purely instrumental reasons or that has the aura of credential-collecting will be viewed dimly. Demanding well-defined goals is business schools’ way of policing the focus and legitimacy of their applicants’ aspirations.
But there are other, less obvious reasons for exerting extra effort on your goals essays. First, goals essays are often the first essay question in each school’s essay set, and first impressions do matter. Anything less than a compelling initial essay will put you in a hole that your subsequent essays, no matter how brilliantly executed, may never dig you out of. Start strong.
Second, admissions officers have a weakness for applicants who are, in the well-traveled term, “passionate”—burning with the right Promethean fire to pursue their dreams. It’s only human to respond to enthusiasm. And projecting a well-defined reason for the MBA makes your enthusiasm much more credible and personal. “I need an MBA to advance my career and deepen my skills” won’t generate much excitement, but a detailed, elaborated paragraph in place of this sentence could. If you can’t define your goals well, you will also be unable to define why a particular school is the best fit for you. The crucial link between your goals and the school resources that support them will be missing.
Third, schools use goals essays to make an indirect read on the quality of your mind and thought processes. Do you think seriously about the problems in your company or industry? Are you a realistic person or a vague or flaky dreamer? Can you craft a compelling case in prose that links your past, your goals, and the school you’re applying to? Finally, the goals essay gives you the least freedom of any business school essay for “creative” responses. This is because (1) you usually need to cover so much ground (career progress, short-and long-term goals, why an MBA, why our school) and (2) your goals themselves need to be grounded and savvy.
For all that, a secondary purpose of the goals essay is to learn about you as a person—that is, the distinctive experiences, values, and traits that make you unique. In other words, it’s quite possible to submit a goals essay that is too factual, impersonal, or boring—that succeeds in answering all the school’s goals questions but fails to introduce you as a person the reader would want to know better.
In this chapter, we discuss practical strategies for ensuring that your goals essay avoids all these pitfalls and touches all the bases, setting a compelling, concrete tone for your entire application. Let’s start by examining the kinds of questions most goals essays ask.
Though most business schools pose the goals essay in some form, the wording they use, the range of topics they include, and the length they require vary widely. Some schools even spread the goals topics over multiple essays.
Goals essays are always about more than your goals, of course. Almost every business school goals prompt also asks you to explain how an MBA from its program will help you achieve them. Similarly, many schools also ask you a backward-looking experience question, such as how your career (or other) experiences shaped these goals. A classic formulation, combining all three of these elements, is: “Briefly assess your career progress to date. Elaborate on your future career plans and your motivation for pursuing a graduate degree at Kellogg.” Because the range of topics you must cover in the goals essay is so broad (your past, present, and future), your biggest challenge may simply be answering everything the school asks in one coherent, readable essay. The remainder of this chapter focuses on how to do just that.
What the Schools Say
Essay 1 carries the most weight. You need to have a very clear sense of your goals and how Columbia can help you achieve those goals.
—MICHAEL ROBINSON, COLUMBIA BUSINESS SCHOOL
The specific focus of your post-MBA goals colors almost every aspect of your application—from school selection (based on goals-relevant study tracks and courses, clubs and extracurricular events geared to your industry, number and quality of organizations recruiting for your industry, etc.) to the content of your nongoals essays to the guidelines you provide recommenders. For this reason, you should begin work on a basic goals essay very early in your application process, perhaps after you take the GMAT, but in any case, before you begin work on your application proper or on other essay topics.
Writing effectively about your goals starts with thinking about them. Many applicants begin the application process believing that sufficient reasons for seeking the MBA are:
They have the “numbers” (GMAT, GPA) and work experience to get into a good business school.
Their peers are in business school.
Their organization expects them to earn an MBA.
It’s the next impressive credential for the fashionably superachieving applicant to acquire.
Post-MBA salaries are high.
They were just downsized or hit a career plateau and have nowhere else to go.
Though these are certainly common reasons for applying to business school, they all share the same drawback: they aren’t goals. Your task is to move beyond these obvious or uninspiring motivations to goals that business schools will find interesting.
This book is not the resource for a crash course in personal career counseling. But if you really don’t know why you need an MBA, abandon the application process until you do. Alternatively, consult your university’s career services department; an accredited career coach; books like What Color Is Your Parachute? and Do What You Are; or sources such as CareerLeader (www.careerleader.com), The Birkman Method (www.birkman.com/), or Strengths Finder (www.strengthsfinder.com). If you do have a vague inkling about your career track, flesh it out by doing some due diligence. Do some serious informational interviewing with alumni or industry elders. Read industry magazines, attend meetings of professional associations in your area, or cruise the Web sites of organizations you’d like to join, noting the career paths of their top managers. Integrate your new knowledge into your post-MBA career story.
Use the following questions to explore the goals that now motivate you to earn an MBA. If they survive intact, congratulate yourself—you’ve done your homework: |
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1. Is your post-MBA career the same thing you would do if you were independently wealthy? Is it the same thing you currently do as a hobby? 2. Recall the evolution of your interest in your post-MBA industry. How did you learn about it? Imagine that the person or experience that made you aware of this career were somehow radically different—would that affect your interest in this goal? 3. Are the aspects of your current job that you enjoy more likely to be found in your post-MBA career? Are the aspects of your current job that you’re best at more likely to be found in your post-MBA career? Think about the most unpleasant task in your current position. How likely is your post-MBA position to regularly present you with this or similar tasks? 4. To what extent will your post-MBA career make it easier or more difficult for you to enjoy the things you consider essential to your happiness outside of work? 5. To what extent are your post-MBA goals associated with a specific lifestyle or geographical location? If your post-MBA career were not associated with that lifestyle or location would you still be attracted to it? 6. Have you confirmed that your short-term goals are logical stepping-stones to your long-term goals? How many of the informational interviews or due diligence conversations you’ve had about your post-MBA career confirmed your plan for transitioning from your short- to your long-term goals? 7. How satisfied are you that you have sufficiently due-diligenced your post-MBA goal? If you drew up a list of the impressions and responsibilities of this field as described by your informational interviewers, would a consistent picture emerge? 8. If everyone you respected told you that your post-MBA goals were ludicrous or unworthy, would you still want to pursue them? 9. If anyone you trust has questioned your post-MBA goals, have you systematically addressed each of their concerns to their or your own satisfaction? 10. What is your Plan B if your post-MBA goals are not, for whatever reason, achievable? What is your Plan B for achieving your post-MBA goals if your primary path toward them becomes blocked or unavailable? |
Let’s assume that you do have a rough sense of your post-MBA path but you just need to refine it so that it passes the high muster of a B-school’s application review. Stating that you want to be a partner at a strategy consulting firm is a start but is not nearly enough. For most schools, you’ll need much, much more. Think of your post-MBA career not as a destination but as an evolving narrative, and take a hint from the short- and long-term language often included in business schools’ goals questions to map out a career trajectory that evolves over time. Goals defined and schools selected, you can now begin to map your goals essay.
As we discussed in Chapter 1, using an outline can minimize much of the potential grief of writing admissions essays. This is particularly true of goals essays, where you’re often asked to discuss multiple topics, while also establishing the themes that unify your whole application. Fortunately, as we’ve noted, many schools’ goals essays come with a built-in structure that can help you organize your material. UC Berkeley’s “What are your post-MBA short-term and long-term career goals? How have your professional experiences prepared you to achieve these goals? How will an MBA from Haas help you achieve these goals?” gives you the same three-part structure we encountered with Kellogg’s goals essay:
Your professional experience or career progress: the broad trajectory (including any evidence of “fast-track” career pace), inflection points, and goal-shaping experiences of your career thus far (not a blow-by-blow walk-through of your résumé).
Your career plans (short- and long-term goals).
Your reasons for needing a Haas MBA (aka “Why Our School?”).
Though Haas asks you about your goals first, it may make sense to structure your outline chronologically, from past (career progress) to future (goals + Why Haas): after all, your career experiences have shaped your goals, which have shaped your reason for needing an MBA from Haas. You still must decide how to start the goals essay and what aspects of your professional experience to include and what to leave out. But you now have a basic organization to guide you.
Don’t assume that each of these three sections must be the same length or that schools care a great deal about the order in which you address these three topics. Just make sure that you address them. Structure your essay in the way that makes the most sense for you. If you’ve been certain of your career goal since high school, you might well discuss your goals first and your career experience second, since your goals have presumably been guiding your subsequent career decisions. Similarly, you could legitimately decide to open the essay with the reasons why a particular MBA program is best for you to highlight your enthusiasm for that school.
Whichever structure you choose, each section of your essay must be tightly integrated with the others. Your past, present, and future must be shown to logically support each other. Your career progress/professional experience section must leave readers feeling that the next inevitable step for you is an MBA and a career in your post-MBA field. Your goals section must describe objectives that seem to evolve naturally from (or are least adequately explained by) your past experiences, and your “why our school?” section must show the school as the perfect place for someone with your goals and educational needs. An effectively integrated outline can help you navigate through your past, present, and future without getting lost in minutiae or turning your essay into a glorified résumé. With your outline in hand you can begin to approach the individual sections of your essay.
What the Schools Say
For me, the question as to why an MBA is important is much more relevant than exactly where you’re going, since goals change. The thought process that brought you to this place in your career is what interests me. I’m looking for a sense of direction and knowing what your needs are. If you have very refined goals, I would say that’s great. But for the vast majority of people, if you really pressed them, goals were often created recently and typically just for the application. And, since the whole point of an MBA experience is to explore, expand, and develop a new understanding and awareness of one’s abilities and passions, I don’t get hung up on goals. I am, however, very interested in path, plan, and knowing one’s self.
—ROSEMARIE MARTINELLI, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
There’s no “right” way to start a goals (or any other) essay, but there are several wrong ones.
Many applicants are tempted to play it safe with a plain-vanilla lead:
“My long-term goal is to become CEO of a major multinational corporation.”
“My career goals stem directly from my professional experiences.”
“I need an MBA so I can help benefit society.”
While these gambits have the virtue of directness, they are catastrophically dull. Other self-destructive introductions include deeply clichéd quotations (“I took the road less traveled,” “Be the change you wish to see in the world”) and exhaustive or superficial autobiographies (“I was born in Sheboygan, the son of …” or “After finishing third out of 9 million test-takers in my state, I …”).
Because goals essays focus on nitty-gritty matters like goals, skills, reasons for MBAs, and career choices, your opening paragraph is one of your few opportunities to inject a little pizzazz into this crucial essay. Creative leads can be divided into two broad types: content-focused introductions (where the emphasis is on what you say) and style-focused introductions (where the emphasis is on how you say it).
Content-Focused Leads
The direct statement of theme: “The choices I have made in my career have been shaped by the constant interplay of two sometimes conflicting traits: my desire to gain broad international business experience and my need to positively impact my community.”
The autobiographical or self-disclosure lead: “I was raised by a family of inveterate dreamers,” or, “I’m the inventor of something you sit on every day but probably can’t name.”
Statement of belief: “I believe nuclear power plants can be designed that surpass solar and wind power sources for safety and sustainability.”
School-specific leads: “Sipping a latte in Huntsman Hall, Ward Dilever, WG’12, described a scene that sounded almost too good to be true.”
The diverse list: “An amateur organist, a rancher in Medicine Hat, a shortstop for the Beloit Bison—I’ve been all these things at one point or another.” The imagined future: “It’s March 2020, and the chairman of Afghan Mobile is admiring the scenic view from his thirtieth-floor Kabul boardroom.”
Grand vision of goals: “A truly global online ‘postmortem’ social net-work—a mall for analog caskets, cremation urns, and headstones but also digital remembrances and i-shrines—will give new life to the $21 billion death-care industry.”
Style-Focused Leads
The vividly described image: “In the clearing stood a huge, delicately carved statue of Hariti, the Indonesian fertility goddess, a quizzical smile etched into her red-lacquered face.”
The “you-are-there” scene or anecdote: “As the Lear jet’s wheels touched down on idyllic Bekoe Island, Nordlink’s CFO whispered two words that forever changed my career vision: …”
The question: “Is there such a thing as a strategy consulting gene?”
The direct address of the reader: “Picture yourself standing before an audience that includes Steve Jobs, Jeff Immelt, and Steve Ballmer, and you’ll understand how I felt when …”
The (unclichéd) quotation: “‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.’ —Yogi Berra”
The outlandish assertion: “I am the president of an invisible company.”
Which of these approaches—if any—should you choose? The key question is which one meshes best with your personality, stories, and themes. The goal is to engage the reader and project your individuality, so choose the lead that best helps you to do that. Whichever type of lead you choose, include a reference to your goals and, if possible, the MBA in your opening paragraph. This signals the admissions committee that your essay will, in fact, address the essay question directly, if not necessarily from the first sentence. Don’t let adcoms think, “Where is all this going?”
What the Schools Say
We [have] found over the years … that the students who are able to do a real thorough self-assessment—an understanding of what their own skills and capabilities are, how those skills and capabilities match with what the companies need, and then are able to talk about them—those are the students who actually do quite successfully find the internships they want.”
—AL COTRONE, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN (ROSS)
Common to longer goals essays, the professional experiences or career progress section is really two sections in one: a highly selective narrative of your career’s key decision or turning points or career-shaping highlights and an explanation of how your career goals have evolved to the point where you now seek an MBA. A goals essay that discusses your career path thus far without linking it to your goals will render your essay’s goals section incomprehensible and your essay as a whole disjointed. No matter how superb your professional experiences, if you can’t show how they relate to your post-MBA goals you won’t come across as the focused applicant every school seeks.
Conversely, a goals essay that explains how you arrived at your career goals but fails to mention key career choices or pivotal moments will be a wasted opportunity to emphasize your strengths, inviting adcoms to give their own, perhaps less favorable explanations for the career choices you’ve left unexplained. Even when a goals essay question doesn’t explicitly ask you to account for your career thus far, all business schools expect you to tell them not only what your goals are but why you have them, a question you usually must answer by referring to past experiences.
CASE STUDY: The Boring Becomes Exciting |
Ankur was an Indian male with the usual profile: after graduating from a top-tier Indian engineering college, he’d earned his technical master’s at a U.S. university and then joined a major technology firm, where because of the long gestation periods of his firm’s products, he had risen no higher than R&D software engineer. Ankur’s GMAT was high, his par-for-the-course extracurriculars showed no unusual leadership, and in conversation diffidence was the dominant note. To say that Ankur was a typical applicant, in other words, would be the understatement of all time: he was the living, breathing apotheosis of archetypal typicalness. |
And yet. Digging further, I discovered that Ankur had suffered some personal stumbles, nothing egregious, but humanizing setbacks nevertheless, which had delayed his MBA plans and lent his profile depth. But the real discovery was that Ankur was not just any software engineer. As an R&D engineer working on advanced technologies at a global-brand firm, he didn’t merely write code; he was an internal technology impresario who championed concepts and marketed their virtues to the company’s global units, seeking their investment. Ankur was no mere software engineer. He was innovation personified—a globe-trotting evangelist of the cutting edge! Impressed by an applicant whose “career progress” was not the yawn it first seemed, Kellogg duly admitted him. |
The biggest mistake applicants make in the career progress section is to assume that “career progress” means blandly marching through their professional history, project by project. In reality, schools want to know only about the inflection points or the key experiences that influenced or refined your goals. Ask yourself questions like:
Why did you start your career with a business development job in interactive media and then jump to a growth equity fund?
Why have you worked for three firms in five years (or the same firm for five years)?
Why did you move from a strategic analyst role at Credit Suisse to a business planning role at Cirque du Soleil?
How have your long-term goals changed over time? Why?
The professional experience section, in other words, gives you the chance to instruct the admissions committees on how to properly view the raw data of your résumé. Laying this interpretive, evaluative narrative over your career gives schools a context for understanding why you now need an MBA.
Your post-MBA goals may have taken shape during on-the-job exposure (even indirect) to the field: you interacted with Deloitte consultants during a reengineering project, you worked with the marketing department while developing technical requirements for a new product, you experienced leveraged buyouts as an analyst for a midmarket regional bank and became fascinated by the operations and investment side of deals, and so on. Your career-switch revelations can be the “takeaways” you learned from the “mini-accomplishments” you work into your career progress narrative. For maximum effect, you should also quantify the impact of these accomplishments in dollar or percentage terms. Always highlight what was atypical or “fast track” about your path relative to your peers.
What the Schools Say
Business school is a place to get it done, not to figure it out. Your résumé will be due as soon as you walk on campus. The first company presentations happen in October; interviews for internships happen in January. That does not give you much time if any for self reflection and introspection. If you’re not really pretty clear in what you want to go do, take the time to figure that out and then apply to business school. You want to maximize the return on the investment and the best way to do that is to have a clear goal as to what you want to be doing when you get out before you even apply.
—ISSER GALLOGLY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY (STERN)
If your work experience didn’t expose you to your post-MBA field, explain what did. Perhaps a purely personal or extracurricular experience opened your eyes. Describe it. Maybe a friend’s advice or a news article hinted that this particular career path might best match your personality, so you followed up with personal research and informational interviews with people in the field. Demonstrate that you did your due diligence in identifying the goals that motivate your application to business school.
Be strategic about the content of your professional experience section. What you highlight will obviously be influenced by the message you’re trying to send across your entire application, by the negatives you’re trying to compensate for, and by the topics of the school’s other essays. If your GMAT quantitative score is lower than the school’s average and you also want to emphasize your leadership skills to offset the fact that you have no direct reports, you could skew your career progress section to highlight accomplishments that show quantitative and leadership skills. Similarly, as we noted in Chapter 1, you need to view each school’s essay set holistically. If a school has a separate essay on leadership, for example, you may not need to press the leadership theme quite as hard here in the goals essay.
How you go about describing your goals in the goals essay will be dictated by the specific wording of each school’s question. Many schools merely request that you describe your goals, period. A larger number insist that you at least divide your post-MBA plan into short- and long-term phases. A logical way to structure your goals section is chronologically, from short-term goals to long-term goals. Devote several sentences to describing what you plan to do professionally for the first three or four years after you graduate from business school. If your post-MBA plan includes an intermediate goal between your short-term career goal and your ultimate objective then briefly detail this middle period. Finally, close the goals section by describing your career’s “end game.” Since most schools don’t expect you to know where you’ll be more than 10 to 15 years after the MBA, you don’t have to go into exquisite detail about what you’ll be doing when you’re 64.
If your short-term goal makes sense only as a stepping-stone toward your long-term goals, it’s perfectly valid to describe your long-term goals first. You can then present your short-term goals as the bridge to your long-term goals. If the connection between your short- and long-term goals isn’t immediately obvious (such as, short-term = consultant, long-term = partner), then make it so. It doesn’t help you to have superbly detailed short- and long-term goals if the adcoms can’t see how one leads to the other.
Regardless of the goals question’s exact wording, you should strive to be as specific in your response as you can. From a purely practical perspective, understand that focused goals tell adcoms that you are more likely to thrive in their program. Instead of the leisurely four years you were given in college, business school gives you two years at most, sometimes only one, to master a comprehensive set of intellectual disciplines. The more focused your educational goals are, the more likely you’ll be to make the right choices, minimize wheel-spinning, and rejoin the workforce as a productive alumnus capable of doing your alma mater proud.
Most applicants state vague objectives like, “To become a private equity partner” and leave the adcoms to fill in the rest. You must dig deeper. What kind of private equity fund will you join? A buyout fund? A venture capital fund? A mezzanine fund? If a mezzanine fund, which ones might you hope to join? Golub Capital? Peninsula Capital? Do you have preferences for geographical location? Which job responsibilities appeal to you—for example, running the day-to-day deal process or fund-raising? Maybe outline some of the challenges you’ll encounter.
If space allows, you can also enhance the credibility of your goals by displaying deeper savvy about your future industry’s fundamentals. Discussing trends or emerging challenges will further drive home the message that you know why you need an MBA. Briefly discussing why specific executives (by name) at the organizations you might join have been role models for you is another creative way to deepen your goal’s believability. These discretionary elements can add value and resonance to your goals essay.
You won’t be dinged if your description isn’t a note-perfect rendition of the occupational realities of that industry. You could be if you sound like you’ve only done cursory homework on your goals.
CASE STUDY: Who Said Goals Are Created Equal? |
Kay was an Asian American “associate” at a major financial advisory firm. Though she was only two years out college (with a respectable 3.3 GPA), her leadership and responsibility levels at work were negligible, her GMAT was a modest 640, and—naturally—she was aiming high. Initially, I despaired. But struck by her never-say-die spirit and her affecting immigrant-builds-new-life story, I looked for angles. Her exchange year overseas enhanced her international profile, she had showed leadership in her sorority, and she evinced flexibility about her post-MBA goals. Seizing on this last opening, I explored her interest in a human resources career, a discipline all but abandoned by MBA applicants, in the finance industry (building on her career thus far). Intrigued, Kay proceeded to research this new goal with the fervor of a true convert. Aided by her atypical (and passionately presented) goals, Kay was admitted by Cornell, her first choice. The delightfully astonished voice message she left to share her good news made my hall of fame. |
What the Schools Say
Admission to business school is like Willie Wonka’s golden ticket. Once you are in, you can choose any path you like. We like to think that what you put on your application for career goal will not change, but it does for many people.
—RANDALL SAWYER, CORNELL (JOHNSON)
Finally, keep in mind that your goals statement doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to your professional goals. Some schools deliberately welcome a wider-ranging discussion of how your professional goals meld with your values and life goals. If space permits, you may therefore want to include a brief discussion of your community/volunteer goals in your goals essay, especially if an MBA will help you achieve them.
The MBA has traditionally been a feeder degree for careers in investment banking, management consulting, venture capital/private equity, and executive management for Fortune 500 manufacturing and consumer goods firms. That business schools embrace nontraditional post-MBA career paths is amply illustrated by the prominence of nonprofit, public-sector, and just plain unique careers pursued by B-school graduates. A random walk through LinkedIn’s directory for Kellogg’s MBA alumni yields a bounty of distinctive careers:
Executive director of a top-tier business school’s part-time MBA program
Film producer at an independent motion picture studio
President and CEO of a major symphony orchestra
President and CEO of the Chicago Botanic Garden
Director of academic and operational evaluation at Chicago Public Schools
Vice president of marketing at a leading test prep and admissions consulting firm
Executive director of strategic marketing at The New Republic magazine
Manager of slot operations and performance at Harrah’s Entertainment
Strategic planning associate for the U.S. Olympic Committee
Nuclear surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy
Did these nonconformists state these particular career objectives in their Kellogg goals essays? Probably not, but the point is that Kellogg’s admissions committee is well aware of the staggering range of career tracks its MBAs follow. They are quite willing—even eager—to embrace such unusual career visions as long as you make them credible in your goals essay.
Business schools love candidates with unusual goals. But they also want to be sure they can place you. So feel free to state nontraditional goals (differentiation is the name of the game), but take the extra effort to prove to schools that your future career actually exists in the real world and that an MBA is an accepted or at least clearly helpful credential for achieving it. If the niche you want to fill is so specialized or new that the adcoms aren’t familiar with it, you may have to educate them. If they are concerned about the marketability of your goals, they may ask a member of their career services office to evaluate your placeability. If you can, provide details of your own plan for using your established network to help place yourself. You can strengthen the credibility of your goals by addressing some the following questions in your goals essay:
Does anyone in this career track have your kind of pre-MBA experience?
Is an MBA a preferred or accepted credential for professionals in the position(s) you’re targeting?
Is your goal one that leverages specific strengths or resources of the business school you’re applying to?
Is this goal related in some direct and explainable way to your past professional or nonprofessional experiences?
If you can show the committee that the answer to these questions is yes (and provide evidence for your affirmation), then your goals will pass the adcom’s credibility test.
Once a nontraditional post-MBA career, social impact jobs are now all the rage. Aside from genuine concern over environmental issues and corporate corruption, this altruism is partly the result of the mainstreaming of corporate social responsibility in corporate boardrooms, the proven success of microfinancing organizations like Kiva, the maturation of green and clean technologies as industries, and even perhaps MBA applicants’/students acknowledgment that consulting and investment banking aren’t always hiring. According to BusinessWeek, half the MBA students at Columbia Business School are involved in social enterprise through classes, student clubs, or the school’s Social Enterprise Program. And nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as diverse as the World Wildlife Fund, Saving the World, Outward Bound, Oxfam, The Bridgespan Group, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the William J. Clinton Foundation India have MBAs in their leadership.
Indeed, social impact goals (encompassing social enterprise, microfinance, sustainability, and nonprofits) have become so accepted that some applicants embrace them as the kind of goal that business schools “want to hear.” Suppose you are the heir apparent of a family-owned widget company in the Midwest. A passionate weekend sailor and devoted churchgoer (you now lead your church’s fund-raising committee), your true goal is to rise to the top of your grandfather’s firm and lead it well, sustaining your family’s legacy. Because of your for-profit goals and poor track record of devotion to saving humanity, you’ve convinced yourself that unless you change your goals to microfinance in Bolivia, your application is doomed. You’d be wrong. Most schools would find your true goals appealing and would roll their eyes at your Muhammad Yunus imitation (the fourth they’ve seen that day).
Stating selfless career objectives to get a leg up on applicants who want to be consultants or investment bankers was a clever strategy 10 years ago. Today, however, when every mother’s son declares a post-MBA social impact goal, you should do so only if it is in fact your true career goal. To ensure that your altruistic goals are taken seriously, you must be able to show through your work or extracurricular experience that public service has been a long-standing motivation for you. Make these past experiences the focus of the career progress/influences portion of your goals essay.
After polishing off the professional experience and goals sections, you may think you’re home free. Not exactly. Many schools (those requesting longer goals essays) ask applicants to detail why they need an MBA and why now. And of course virtually every school insists that you explain why you are applying to its program.
Since schools give you so little space for the goals essay, asking you to explain why you need an MBA and then when you’re done why you need their MBA might seem redundant. In reality, many schools separate the Why MBA and Why Us questions to get you to dig in and truly address the underlying needs or motivations that drive you to business school—any business school. In other words, it’s entirely possible to provide 20 wonderfully specific reasons why Duke would be a great place to earn an MBA without ever really saying why you need one in the first place. Though “Why an MBA?” is an important question, too many applicants answer it with boilerplate, if at all.
The best way to approach the question is to write terrifically compelling career progress and goals sections. If you do those sections right, you will have created so inexorable and compelling a case for needing an MBA that the adcoms may feel they can answer “Why an MBA?” for you. “Of course she needs an MBA. She’s proven she can lead culturally and functionally diverse teams. And since that L’Oreal project, she’s obviously known that operations management is the best way to use her leadership and problem-solving skills.” If you’ve managed to get adcoms rooting subconsciously for you like this, you needn’t belabor the Why MBA section with vague references to “enhancing my skill set” and “honing my soft skills.” (Quick test: if your Why MBA section reads like it could describe every person who’s ever graced the campus of an accredited business school, then you need to dig deeper.)
There are, of course, several solid reasons for wanting an MBA: it is an accepted, even required, credential for advancement in many industries; it’s a universally recognized degree that will enable you to jump from one industry to another or from one function, region, or country to another; it gives you the broad management skills to launch and then lead a start-up business, and so on. These are compelling reasons, but they are so general and commonly held that they almost go without saying. Worse, these reasons aren’t too far from the “I need a shiny new credential” type of reasons that schools are loathe to dignify. Never forget that business schools view themselves as temples of personal metamorphosis, not diploma mills.
So if you do state a general reason for needing an MBA, fortify it with some concrete reasons specific to you, like the functional skills—for example, accounting, marketing, operations—that you lack. Starting with your goals section, (1) list the functional skills usually required in the career track you’ve specified and (2) inventory your own skills. Subtract (2) from (1). In your goals essay simply state which of the post-MBA career skills your education and work experience have given you and which goals you still need. This is the heart of your Why MBA section—what skills will the MBA give you that you don’t already have? A few plain-spoken sentences will usually suffice.
Since it is unlikely that business school is the only route to gaining these skills, you should also note that the MBA is the most accelerated, rigorous, and integrative path to these skills, one that also provides benefits (network, soft skills) that work experience alone can’t give you. It’s perfectly fine to tell schools that you seek the pure intellectual challenge of learning more about market segmentation or financial derivatives; just don’t let them think that such scholastic motivations are your main purpose—there are other, research-oriented or specialized degree programs for that.
If length limits are an issue, consider combining your Why MBA and Why Our School sections. That is, state the functional deficiencies you have that an MBA can fill and then follow this directly by describing the two to three specific resources at your target school that address your needs. You will be fine as long as you show schools that you know that needing an MBA and choosing a school at which to earn it are two separate things.
Some schools explicitly ask you to explain why you are applying now:
“Why pursue an MBA at this point in your life?” (NYU Stern)
“Given your individual background, why are you pursuing a Columbia MBA at this time?”
Why do they ask this? In one sense, it’s another way of getting a fix on how certain you are that an MBA is right for you. That is, the Why Now question is a backdoor maturity and focus question and, as such, a complementary variation on the goals and Why an MBA questions. You may have detailed, rock-solid career goals and an airtight case for how the MBA gets you to them, but if you can’t say why you need to begin the MBA process now—rather than two years from now—adcoms may conclude that you’re applying now for the “wrong” reasons.
So, whether your school asks the Why Now question overtly or not, you need to provide an explicit or implicit answer. The implicit answer will be the subliminal message that should be flashing throughout your career progress section: that the trajectory of your skills, leadership roles, and functional breadth has been rising inexorably, so only the lack of an MBA keeps you from bursting in glory into the management ranks. Your explicit answer will support this subliminal answer along the following lines:
Career plateau: Your learning curve has flattened, and no new challenges are foreseeable in the next two years. If you stay any longer in your current career path, you will risk being pigeonholed as a (insert your job here), and breaking out will only become harder.
Goals epiphany: You have only just recently realized what your career’s purpose (post-MBA goal) is, and now that you know it, there’s simply no reason to delay.
Post-MBA goals have time element: Your post-MBA plans are linked to trends that will begin to gel by the time you earn your MBA. You can’t afford to wait to gain the skills to capitalize on these trends.
Maturity: You finally have the professional and personal savvy, balance, and perspective to make the wise decision to invest in your long-term future. (This is the acceptable way of saying “My age matches the median age of your admits.”)
Natural break in career: You’re approaching the end of a clearly demarcated career phase, such as a bank or consultancy’s two- or three-year analyst program, a corporation’s two-year management training program, or an expat posting overseas.
The Why Now issue is even more important for applicants who are younger (two years of work experience or less) and older (say, 30 years old or older for U.S. programs) than the norm. Younger applicants will have to go out of their way to convince schools that they can’t wait another year or two more. The best way to do this is to show that you are exceptional for your age. You have the skills, career progress, or leadership responsibilities of an older applicant. If you aren’t exceptional professionally, you can compensate by outlining well-defined goals. Schools may admire your career focus and overlook your relative lack of experience. Alternatively, you may argue that, while your work experience isn’t the equivalent of older applicants, you can compensate by bringing other positives to your class—perhaps unusually deep international experience, a personal story that shows maturity and fortitude, or distinctive extracurriculars.
Older applicants will be expected to have more sharply defined career goals. This is partly because they are expected to be more mature professionally and partly because the school’s career services office may have more trouble placing them and will expect them to play a bigger role. For this latter reason, older applicants have to be careful about stating goals that represent radical career switches, particularly into fields like management consulting and investment banking. Entry-level positions in these time-intensive professions are typically filled by younger types with the energy and unencumbered personal lives to work the appalling hours. In their goals essays, older applicants will have to convince the adcoms that they already have the professional network and job opportunities to “place themselves” after the MBA.
What the Schools Say
It is never about age. It is always about realistic goals and how they plan to achieve them.
—LINDA MEEHAN, COLUMBIA BUSINESS SCHOOL
Today, otherwise superb applicants with superhuman numbers and glowing résumés are regularly dinged simply because they don’t show that they’ve given any thought to their potential match with the schools they apply to. Admissions officials do not believe it is their obligation to figure out whether you would fit in well in their program; they expect you to make that case.
Perhaps the best way to view the Why Our School section is as an elaborate courting ritual involving a somewhat conceited future spouse. She (or he) will not surrender to your overtures merely because you are handsome, rich, and charming. You must also flatter her that it’s personal, that despite all those other schools you’ve known, you are sincerely, passionately, and uniquely interested in her tastes and self-image and will defend her reputation and honor as a generous future alumnus. This wooing metaphor is not entirely facetious. The application process is undeniably a human, subjective process, not a scoring system of numbers and indexes. A convincing—that is, a highly specific—answer to the Why Our School question persuades adcoms that despite the marriage proposals you’ve casually tossed out to six other rivals, you will actually pick their school if they say yes. For adcoms, as for potential marriage mates, the yield factor is critical.
For this reason, you should avoid giving any reason for attending a school that can also be said to any other school. “I’m attracted to School X because its flexible curriculum, collaborative learning environment, strong alumni network, and outstanding faculty are unique.” Unique? Virtually every school accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business could claim that this sentence described it. You must refer by name to aspects of the school’s program that will individualize your areas of interest. For example, almost all business schools have some program for getting students involved in the community, but only INSEAD’s Social Innovation Centre will enable you to study the Middle East’s healthcare value chain of delivery systems through INSEAD’s Abu Dhabi Campus. Simply by citing this opportunity by name, you lift your Why Our School section one level above the typical applicant’s.
What the Schools Say—
Don’t even think about starting the essays until you have researched the school and MBA thoroughly.
—DAVID SIMPSON, LONDON BUSINESS SCHOOL
It’s hard for us, especially when so much of the applicant pool is admissible. It comes down to who fits the life, spirit, and culture of an institution.
—ROSEMARIE MARTINELLI, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Any effective Why Our School section must involve serious personal research on the school, not just a quick skim of the school’s website and Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s B-school forums. As Michigan (Ross) tartly notes, “Providing generic reasons for Ross, or quoting information from our materials and Web site, is not helpful.” A visit to the school is essential (whatever the schools may tell you) unless it’s financially burdensome or you live an ocean or two away. Schools like NYU Stern and Duke, which ask you to detail how you learned about their programs, make it even harder to rationalize away the effort of making a campus visit. However, even attending information sessions in your city can give you a better sense of the school than impersonal research. Contact your target schools for names of current students open to answering applicant questions, or use your own network to find alumni and students willing to speak with you. Business schools’ student newspapers can also give you a relatively spin-free, student-level version of campus realities that will help you grasp the school’s all-important “culture”:
Harvard Business School: The Harbus (www.harbus.org)
University of Chicago: Chicago Business (www.chibus.com)
Columbia Business School: The Bottom Line (www3.cbs-bottomline.com)
University of Michigan: The Monroe Street Journal (www.themsj.com/)
There are no rules regarding the length of your Why Our School section or the order in which you should present your reasons. If your belief in the school’s match with your needs is deep and you have many examples that demonstrate it, your school section may be comparatively long. If the school’s curricular resources perfectly complement your intended specialization, then you could devote more space to these academic factors and perhaps launch your school section with this information. Similarly, if your campus visit is what really sold you on the school, consider talking about it first (or even opening the essay with it) and giving it the most space.
The only guideline is to take the space you need to show that your interest is genuine and specific to that school.
You do, of course, want to show that your interest in a program is multidimen-sional—not only academic resources but extracurricular and cultural factors too. The following four categories of school-specific information may help guide you:
1. Academics: This includes everything from academic tracks or specialties, specific courses, and nontraditional learning environments to faculty members (including research interests), teacher-to-student ratio, teaching methods, and joint-degree opportunities. Hint: Research books, articles, or case studies by professors whose interests match yours. Consider mentioning one or two of these publications in your essay to show the school you’ve done your homework.
2. Extracurricular features: This is where you show them that you are a joiner who enjoys people and means to contribute. You can refer to everything from student clubs, athletics, and social groups to the alumni network, overseas or exchange opportunities, internships, business plan contests, and community involvement initiatives. Hint: If the school has no organization in one of your interest areas, consider stating that you will start one (if you would). Adcoms may be impressed by your initiative.
3. General and cultural features (aka “fit”): This is where you show that you understand the school’s specific culture, its self-image—the message it sends about what it believes makes it unique. This is where you might discuss Chicago Booth’s idea-driven culture of intellectual questing, MIT’s tradition of creative innovation, or Michigan’s pragmatic action-based learning. Hint: Refer back to the notes you took during your school selection process. Many of the reasons you originally used to winnow your list can actually be mentioned in this section, as long as you also link them to specific school resources by name: for example, urban versus rural campus, large or small school, proximity to cultural or business opportunities, and so on.
4. Campus visit and personal interaction: Making a campus visit is the best way to show interest. Capitalize on your visit by noting which classes you sat in on, which adcoms and students you spoke with (by name), and what you learned about the school that you didn’t know before. You can use all this information in your goals essay to personalize your Why Our School message. But such personalization can also extend beyond a campus visit. If you know alumni, mention them by name, how you know them, and what you have learned from them about the school. Hint: Consider contacting one or two faculty members whose research interests genuinely match yours and respectfully arranging to discuss your interests with them. You could then refer to these conversations in your essay.
This process of customizing your application to the specific offerings and culture of each school is an essential part of the goals essay. If you expect your application to be taken seriously by a top-twenty business school, don’t write a generic goals essay that you submit unchanged to every school. Customization is all.
Though business schools don’t have “preferred” career goals, they are aware of how well your goals match their resources, whether they stem logically and reasonably from your work experience, and whether they seem typical or distinctive. Schools also have distinct strengths, and they are not always the obvious ones, like Kellogg = marketing. While you will earn no points informing Chicago that its finance resources are top drawer, you may impress its admissions committee if you describe how Booth’s strength in marketing (ranked sixth by U.S. News) will help you launch a career as a market research director. Similarly, Wharton is not just a great finance school; it is also an outstanding general management and entrepreneurship program (ranked third and fourth, respectively, by U.S. News).
You may have mixed goals that allow you to modulate your goals description to emphasize your fit with particular schools. For example, if your post-MBA goal is health-care-related social entrepreneurship and you are applying to Duke and Michigan, for Duke you could emphasize the health-care goal and Duke’s rich health-care management resources, and for Michigan you could emphasize the social entrepreneurship goal and Ross’s deep social responsibility offerings.
The Why Our School section is not the only place in the goals essay where you should be sending your customized school-specific message. The whole essay should be communicating school fit on some level. Revisit your entire goals essay to see if its themes and key words need tweaking to match the school’s particular culture.
Because the goals essay is your application’s first and most formal essay, you need to be extra careful not to commit any of the blunders applicants typically make in conclusions. One is to simply let the essay end abruptly: “Fourth, Stern’s International Passport Day will enable me to share my Estonian heritage (from red beet potato salad to runo-songs) with my diverse classmates.” Even if you have room to insert only one sentence, add a summarizing closing thought, lest the adcoms think you hastily submitted a rough draft.
The most common error in closing a goals essay is to rely on stale boilerplate prose: “I am confident I can succeed at Booth and look forward to making an invaluable contribution to my talented and diverse class.” This kind of language adds no value because (1) it could have been written by anybody, (2) it could apply to any school, (3) it doesn’t reinforce any of your specific themes, (4) it doesn’t (one hopes) echo your opening paragraph, and (5) schools see millions of conclusions like this so it doesn’t help you stand out.
As we discussed in Chapter 1, the safest way to avoid these deficiencies while also creating a nice sense of closure is to echo or refer back to your opening sentence or opening paragraph. Think of this as repeating your lead but with a twist—restating what you began with but with some forward-looking variation on it. Locate the key word, phrase, or idea in your opening sentence and find some way (it can be indirect) to connect it to a positive, flattering, declarative statement about this specific school:
Lead: “When I asked my friends what they thought of my decision to leave Lance & Boyle, they replied in unison, ‘You’re out of your mind.”’
Close: “Earning my MBA at Haas makes the best personal, professional, and educational sense. In fact, I’d be out of my mind not to.”
Lead: “In 2010 I was the key client contact for the largest strategy consulting engagement in Chinese business history.”
Close: “With an Anderson MBA the next historic engagement I witness will be the one I lead.”
Lead: “My father once told me: ‘Put your trust in friends, your faith in hard work.”’
Close: “Put my trust in friends, my faith in hard work? Of course, but I’ll also put them in the transformational power of a Stern MBA.”
Echoing your introduction like this is a convenient way to avoid the generic ending. If your introduction is, as it should be, personal and engaging, then your conclusion in echoing it will borrow some of that flair. Finally, the short-is-sweet rule of thumb applies to goals essays too. A brief, punchy final sentence can give your essay a nice closing jolt like an exclamation point:
“More than ever, I’m ready to seize that chance.”
“I can’t wait to begin.”
“My next step is clear: a Columbia MBA.”
Now, that you’ve finished your goals essay, go out and treat yourself—you deserve it. You’ve cleared a major hurdle on the way to a successful application.
1. Start your essay with a bland lead paragraph: “My career goal is to …”. The range of topics business schools ask you to address in the goals essay prevents you from getting too creative, but this doesn’t mean you should start the essay like an auditor’s opinion letter. An anecdote, a vivid moment, a pivotal scene from your career—each of these can give your goals essay a bit of color while projecting your themes.
2. State the obvious or the impolitic: Increased salary, promotions, or the prestige a top-ten degree confers on your résumé are not the reasons for earning an MBA that schools want to hear.
3. Be vague: You must be specific about your career progress thus far, your goals, and your reasons for applying to this business school. If you’re avoiding concrete details (1) because you think the schools aren’t interested, think again; (2) because you don’t think you have enough space, then find an editor to help you make it all fit; (3) because you don’t want to think that hard, then you’re not taking the application process seriously enough. Specify!
4. State goals that are too creative or off the wall: Yes, you want your application to be distinctive and stand out from the pack. But off-the-beaten track goals must be thoroughly nailed down and domesticated so the adcoms don’t have to worry about your placeability. Anchor your goals in reality by doing thorough research into actual career paths for MBAs in your desired field.
5. Make the mistake of writing your essay without an outline: A good outline can help you ensure that your goals essay’s three sections—your relevant career experiences, your goals, your reasons for an MBA—all interconnect and comment on each other.
6. Fail to connect your goals to the past experiences that shaped them: It is imperative that you explain what experiences or influences prompted your decision to earn an MBA and select the post-MBA path you hope to pursue. If your goal is strategy consulting, perhaps you worked with strategy consultants on a key company project, learned about it through a friend in the field, or saw an Economist article that prompted you to read The McKinsey Engagement. Whatever the reason, explain it.
7. Neglect to create a Why Our School section that discusses resources unique to that school: The garden-variety goals essay will chatter on unctuously about the school’s “student-driven learning environment and sense of community,” “powerful alumni network,” and “balanced teaching methods and flexible curriculum.” But since these things can be said about 90 percent of all business schools, you must go several steps further and connect these “selling points” to specific resources (by name) at the target school.
8. Write a résumé in prose: Career progress does not mean a blow-by-blow account of your work experience since college. It means explaining why you’ve made the career choices you did (think inflection points) and using brief descriptions of a few of your key accomplishments to account for the origins of your post-MBA goals.
9. Forget to explicitly address the Why Now question: You don’t need to devote an entire paragraph to explaining why this is the right time to earn the MBA, but adding at least one declarative sentence about the timing of your business school decision will show the adcoms that you’re answering the question.
10. Fail to inject some of your values, personality, or nonwork uniqueness factors into your essay: Even if the school does not explicitly ask you to, try to communicate the scope of your contribution: “In turn, I will offer my classmates my intensive experience in the bioinformatics industry, multicultural depth as a Japanese-Canadian who has lived and worked in Europe, and creativity as reflected in my award-winning poetry and saxophone compositions.”
The following six sample essays—written by actual applicants admitted to Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, Kellogg, and Columbia (though somewhat disguised for confidentiality)—show the room for creativity and variety even the staid goals essay topic allows you.
What is your career vision and why is this choice meaningful to you?
9:43 a.m. August 29, 2017. Delhi, India. The meeting regarding Project Swabhiman, an effort that helps domestic violence victims through job training and ethically-sourced garment businesses, has been a success. Project Swabhiman—meaning “self-respect” in Hindi—is a program co-supported by Gap and will continue receiving sponsorship from local partners. Smiling, I shake hands with the Director of Delhi’s Social Welfare Department and local NGO executives. The meeting adjourns, and I jump in a cab full-speed to the airport. [←Effective use of ‘imagined future’ introduction nicely showcases Joyce’s social impact goals.]
Four hours later, I’m in Sri Lanka leading 60 Gap employees who have volunteered to join the Gap Foundation—Gap’s charitable arm—Community Corps. We’ve partnered with Habitat for Humanity to build houses in underserved communities; this time the project has taken me to Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. My team and I race against the setting sun to drive the last nail into the wall and I’m beaming the whole time, wiping sweat caked with dust from my brow. [←Adept use of vivid language and physical details to hold reader’s interest] I’m Chief Foundation Officer of the Gap Foundation—and I love this job.
Looking forward ten years from now, my career vision is to combine my two distinct career interests—retail and nonprofit work—and become executive director of an international retailer’s charitable arm and focus on corporate responsibility. [←Direct declaration of the goals that the first two paragraphs illustrated.] Community service has always been my passion, from nonprofit consulting with Inspire, to my work on L.E.K.’s pro-bono initiative, to personal volunteering at hospitals and homeless shelters. However, I’ve also had a lifelong love affair with retail; I pore over fashion magazines, am helping to build L.E.K.’s Retail Practice Group, and collaborate on the monthly Retail Sector Report highlighting industry news and trends. [←In two meaty sentences, Joyce both explains why her goals are “meaningful” to her and cites examples that make them more credible.]
Although I have a strong foundation in business strategy, retail, and nonprofit work, an HBS education will provide me with the platform to achieve my career aspirations and combine my interests. Firstly, I’ll need the rigorous general management training HBS provides to give me greater business sophistication and in-depth understanding of day-to-day operations. Secondly, by participating in the Retail and Apparel Club and Social Enterprise Club, I’ll develop long-lasting relationships with a network of individuals who share my passions. Lastly, Harvard’s Social Enterprise Initiative will enable me to explore issues in corporate social responsibility and equip me with the skills to run a successful nonprofit organization with ties to a for-profit retailer. While I’ll take full advantage of Harvard’s exceptional resources, I also believe my unique background of for-profit, nonprofit, retail, and international work experiences will make me a valuable member of the HBS community. [←Solid paragraph establishing HBS’s social entrepreneurship credentials is weakened somewhat by a generic-sounding conclusion.]
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?
“Sachin’s Master Blaster” was a computer game that pitted cricket’s best batsmen against each other in gruelingly realistic matches. My friends enjoyed it, and I got a real kick out of teaching myself the programming skills to design a functioning computer game all on my own. But while some might see this early demonstration of technical wizardry as proof that I had a great software career before me, I’ve always seen it as the first act of a budding entrepreneur. My programming skill was just a tool; it was creating something tangible that others enjoyed that really mattered. [←Uses a childhood anecdote to not only personalize himself to the admissions committee, but to establish the “why” behind his goals.]
In one sense, my entire life since then has been about finding a way to get back to that act of creation. [←Deftly pivots into his “career progress” section.] Following my technical talents, I earned degrees in electrical engineering at IIT Kharagpur and computer science at University of Arkansas. But with the dot-com jobs disappearing in the bursting bubble, I had to get creative and soon discovered a role managing club card promotions for Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club headquarters. I was quickly promoted to a pricing analyst role with increased scope in which I managed regular retail prices. In my spare time I built a system that integrated with our mainframe and automated my department. This not only hugely increased efficiency and reduced cost but also caught the attention of Wal-Mart’s director of pricing strategy, Susan Benitos (WG ‘00). She promoted me to analyst on her strategy team to create business solutions for pricing. I completed a major overhaul of our pricing systems, producing a cost savings of $2 million a year, yet after two years at Wal-Mart my role still remained highly technical. [←Integrates accomplishment into his career narrative.] To own more of the business and drive key business decisions, I accepted an offer to join J. Crew Group’s inventory management team.
J. Crew gave me the freedom to take both technical and business lead roles in a redesign of its systems for end-of-life inventory management. Promoted to manager for my efforts, I then led a three-person team plus one off-shore contractor in building an inventory management application that fundamentally changed J. Crew’s inventory distribution process and saved over $27M annually. [←Works in another accomplishment without interrupting the flow.]
After two years on J. Crew’s inventory management team, my learning curve started to flatten so I began to look for new “stretch” opportunities. My old mentor, Susan Benitos, offered me a job on Saks Fifth Avenue’s Strategy team in New York and convinced me that a role on her team would expose me to a broader part of a company with a strong brand. Today, as manager of corporate strategy at Saks, I shape the strategic direction of the organization by driving analytics on and insight into our brand proposition and future growth potential. Working with MBAs from top schools (including two Wharton grads), I provide recommendations directly to Saks’ executive leadership team, including C.E.O. Steve Sadove, on such diverse topics as real estate growth, pricing architecture, and store cannibalization. [←Unusual career role helps him stand out; repeated references to Wharton colleagues don’t hurt either.]
I’m thrilled that I’ve managed to exploit my technical skills to create a fasttrack career in strategy at the very top of a retail leader. However, over the last two years I’ve become heavily involved in a quite different enterprise that has reignited my teenage dreams of entrepreneurship: my family’s franchise, Tandoori Bites. In building a site evaluation model to select a location to purchase, a sales forecasting tool to make more profitable labor and inventory decisions, and a price elasticity analysis to determine our promotion strategy, I’ve leveraged my experience and abilities to drive real profitability to the store’s bottom line—and had a blast doing it! Our small Tandoori Bites’s franchise has reminded me that I really want to lead and grow a business. [←Somewhat surprising secondary career connects essay back to opening entrepreneurship goal and sets up direct statement of post-MBA plan.←]
Therefore, my short-term post-MBA goal is to enter a general management rotational program at a strong retail brand such as H&M or Gucci and gain management experience across functional areas. For example, Gucci’s Europe-based management development program offers rotations in finance, sales, HR, brand marketing, and supply chain. After gaining this broad holistic experience, my long-term plan is to lead, as CEO, a small growing retail brand in the apparel or accessories niche—whether my own company or a start-up that enables me to set its strategic direction and brand proposition, and drive its growth.
To gain the broad management perspective to make sense of my deep operational knowledge I’m convinced an MBA is essential and that now is the right time. With seven years’ work experience in three different retail industries, intensive exposure to three diverse operational areas, and a technical/engineering foundation, I bring a breadth of experience that will enable me to both benefit enormously from and contribute enormously to business school. [←Rohit’s Why Now argument is that he’s done enough to know what he wants and is ready to contribute to his classmates. Why wait?] And I’m convinced that Wharton is the best place to complement my experience and goals. I first learned that Wharton is a great fit for me from one of my good friends in New York, Atul Shekhar (WG ‘07). In discussing how amazing his experience was, he really drove home for me how much Wharton’s students shape it, citing the 110 student-run clubs and his own experience as president of the Marketing Luxury Club. On my subsequent campus visit and tour, I thoroughly enjoyed Prof. Jonah Berger’s Consumer Behavior class and in speaking with him I learned more about the strengths of Wharton’s Entrepreneurship program, from the Business Plan Competition to the Venture Initiative Program. [←References to class visits and student/alumni interaction are always a good idea.]
But Wharton’s retail and marketing programs are just as strong! Classes such as “Retailing” and “Marketing Management: Strategy” and clubs such as the Fashion and Luxury Goods Club speak directly to my educational objectives. [←Rohit does a nice job of showing that Wharton has the resources to match his goal.] Wharton also offers broad strength in its finance, real estate, and strategy programs, as well as in its multitude of clubs, collaborative students, and strong alumni base. The relevance of Wharton’s strengths to my goals truly cannot be overstated.
What are your career aspirations? How will your education at Stanford help you achieve them?
My long-term career goal is to build an art auction company as a social enterprise that discovers talented artists in isolated regions, especially South America; develops the Latin American art market globally; and reinvests the profit into public exhibitions and art education for Latin American communities. [←Because Stanford’s essay length limits are tight, Markus cuts right to the chase with a direct assertion of his goals.]
My aspiration formed in 2007, when I traveled with my brother, a glass-blower, for five months in South America holding art exhibitions with local artists in Bolivia and Guyana. Seeing villagers shed tears because they were touched by beauty they had never seen before abolished my prejudice that art is a mere luxury in areas where subsistence is a daily struggle. [←Effectively explains the “why” behind his unusual goals.]
At Boston Consulting Group I have learned how to apply economic mechanisms to the nonprofit sector through KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art and Sibelius Academy projects in Finland. Desiring to directly implement initiatives, I became involved with The Foundation for Contemporary Art Guyana in 2010. However, in Guyana, I discovered that funds from World Bank and elsewhere often never reach the artists or art organizations. Lack of grant monitoring enabled the foundation directors to purchase $500 chairs and hire personal cooks, neglecting the mission. Meanwhile, for five years the Castellani House, Guyana’s national art gallery, could not afford new exhibitions. I developed an intense commitment to bringing business acumen to arts promotion in South America. [←Establishes that his goals will solve a problem, fill a gap.]
My short-term career goal is, therefore, to work in an established art auction house such as Christie’s or Sotheby’s that have developed emerging art markets in Russia and Poland. As a buyer, I will learn how to identify and market new artists effectively, how to finance and value artworks, and how to build relationships with collectors, ideally based in New York or Moscow. I am already enrolled in Bonhams and Butterfield’s program in London to start my preparation. [←Evidence that Markus has already initiated his career transition before business school gives his goals much greater credibility (it helps that they’re also unusual).]
I believe Stanford GSB is the best bridge to develop the global management and social entrepreneurship skills my goals require. Stanford GSB appeals to me because it will enable me to take tailored courses even during my first year and offers me opportunities to deepen my interest such as the Global Management Immersion Experience and Service Learning Trips in the public management program. By giving me unprecedented access to renowned faculty like Jonathan B. Lovelace, who has researched the economics of Sotheby’s online auction, and the Center for Social Innovation’s Dale T. Miller, James A. Phills, and Jesper B. Sørensen will help me learn more by applying management theory to real-world business problems. [←Identifies Stanford resources that are directly relevant to his goals.]
Through interactions with alumni like Veijo Lano (MBA ‘08) I have learned how Stanford GSB’s alumni connection and Career Services office epitomize Stanford GSB’s collaborative culture. That culture will help me build a strong network of future business partners, friends, and mentors such as Ernesto Casona (MBA ‘80), who established Casa Museo Nuñez del Prado, one of the first not-for-profit, independent art centers to be developed in Bolivia. [←Mentioning the names of Stanford people he’s spoken to shows that Markus personalized his Why Our School due diligence.]
Briefly assess your career progress to date. Elaborate on your future career plans and your motivation for pursuing a graduate degree at the Kellogg School.
For me, there is nothing as amazing as a photo of an evening cityscape: the lights, the traffic’s constant motion, and most of all the buildings’ dazzling steel and glass. To some, these soaring structures are nothing more than offices, condos, or hotel rooms, but to me they are concrete masterpieces. In them, I see beauty, yes, but also opportunity. I’m a future real estate investor. [←Vivid, straight-from-the-heart intro explains the “why” behind Diane’s goals and adds a little color to an essay about a subject, real estate, that could sound dry.]
I’ve been fascinated by real estate since I first laid eyes on a photo of Manhattan as a young girl. Focusing my college studies on general business and real estate with an emphasis on finance, in my junior year I began interning with K. Bellow Sons, a private shopping center syndicate, to learn more about real estate investment. For the next two years I interned in virtually every part of the business, from finance and accounting to acquisitions. Gladly accepting a full-time position at Bellow after graduation, I worked for the next fourteen months on the acquisitions and dispositions team, sourcing and underwriting more than 100 prospective acquisitions. While the exposure this position gave me to the industry truly crystallized my passion for real estate investment, I also learned that by becoming an analyst at a large firm I could develop core competency in institutional transactions, sharpen my analytical ability, and gain a strong due diligence background—all essential to one day running my own broad-based real estate investment fund. [←Foregrounds goal to let reader know where essay is going, but delays full goal statement until end of “career progress” section.] I began the search that led me to AMB Property Corp., the world’s leading provider of logistics real estate.
Moving to AMB in October 2007, I joined the North American due diligence team, which handles financial analysis and due diligence for AMB’s $1 billion in annual transactions. Doing financial modeling of potential acquisitions and single-building acquisitions in major industrial markets, I began to understand the due diligence process and how institutions perceive the risk/return relationship of assets across the country. Not incidentally, earning the responsibility for tracking all the investments approved by our Investment Committee and Board of Trustees also gave me my first exposure to “green” development, from solar panels on a building in Spain to energy efficient buildings in Japan. The focus of AMB’s senior management on environmental impact gelled with my own growing conviction that green development is the future of commercial real estate. [←Introduction of “green” angle gives Diane’s goal depth and helps position her “for-profit” goal as socially impactful.]
Gradually working on larger and larger transactions, after a little more than a year I was selected to lead our five-person team through the due diligence and secured financing of an $800 million portfolio that would seed our latest North American Joint Venture Fund. Since then, I have led more than $400 million in additional secured financings, work typically reserved for Associates. When I’m promoted to Associate in the next year (more than a year ahead of the typical pace), I will become AMB’s youngest Due Diligence Associate ever. [←These two “fast-track” sentences send very strong signals about Diane’s impact and potential.] While I’m excited by the challenges and successes of my current role, even as an Associate I will not gain the exposure I need to achieve my long-term goal: becoming a principal or partner with a private equity real estate company such as Blackstone Real Estate or Colony Capital who manages an opportunity fund that seeks out real estate worldwide. Ultimately, I envision building and developing a fund that invests in “green” buildings, whether office, retail, or industrial space, built by developers who understand how important environmentally sensitive buildings are to their clients, employees, and communities. Toyota Motor Sales USA’s office campus, for example, was constructed with such energy-saving improvements as a solar rooftop and low-flow water taps—all at a cost comparable to traditional construction and yielding Toyota a 10% ROI. [←Fine to devote only two sentences to goal statement since preceding paragraphs have established that Diane knows her industry.]
To realize this ambitious goal, I need an accelerated, rigorous way to more fully develop my financial skills, knowledge of marketing and management (vital elements in development and investment funds), and understanding of real estate beyond the analysis. Kellogg’s full-time MBA program precisely answers my needs. First, Kellogg has outstanding ties to key figures in the real estate community, such as John Montaquila, Principal, Macquarie Capital Partners, and Jeffrey Johnson, Chief Investment Officer, Equity Office Properties, both of whom spoke to Kellogg students in recent years. The Real Estate program’s independent study projects will also enable me to pursue a broader understanding of the kinds of capital that seek institutional real estate and their reasons for doing so. Similarly, “The Human Element in Private Equity Investing” (ENTR–926–0) will expand my knowledge of the specialized private equity world and its key players. Outside the classroom, the Real Estate Club, Private Equity and Entrepreneurship @ Kellogg (PEEK), and Energy Management Club will help me strengthen my real estate network and align myself with other professionals with similar career interests. [←Diane effectively convinces the reader that Kellogg is an appropriate program for someone with her goals.]
Conversations with Chad Bevington (Class of ’10) have convinced me that I will excel in Kellogg’s aggressive curriculum and thrive as a team member and leader in the collaborative environment that Kellogg is highly regarded for. With a Kellogg MBA, in other words, I can not merely admire cityscapes; I can help build them. [←Refers deftly back to introduction and forward to Kellogg.]
What are your career aspirations and how can an MBA help you to reach them? Why now?
I plan to devote my career to building successful businesses in health-care, an industry expected to grow from 15% GDP to 19% in the next 10 years. I am attracted to the financial and social benefits of this industry, which has ample room and high demand for improved quality of care. Recent Medicare and other reforms, combined with an aging population and increased utilization of health benefits, create favorable reimbursement and demographic trends. I will leverage my private equity experience and network (entrepreneurs, consultants, lawyers) to build service businesses that improve my customers’ quality of life. [←Opening paragraph directly states goals but also explains the “why” behind them.]
I hope to change the way that health-care services are delivered, starting with outpatient surgery, a highly fragmented and mismanaged market with no company holding more than a 5% market share and many standalone centers operated unprofitably. My focus will be on the patient experience: creating a comfortable environment like a hotel, where surgeries are performed in a soothing setting. Additionally, by improving billing standards, I will create a business model that withstands regulatory changes and cracks down on unethical billing practices while improving the economics for physician owners. Starting with the acquisition of an unprofitable surgery center, I will turn it around, building a network of profitable centers, which will then expand across regions. Eventually, I will create a base to branch into other health-care arenas including home health and hospice care. [←Meaty paragraph lends credibility to Stuart’s highly specific goals.]
Now is the time to pursue an MBA. With 3 years of private equity experience, I have built health-care industry expertise. [←Stuart briefly answers Why Now?: he has sufficient private equity and health-care industry expertise.] I now need to examine the industry from the viewpoint of corporate decision-making: coordinating business units, reacting to competitive threats, hiring competent managers, and efficiently allocating financial resources. I am a competent advisor and investor, but I need exposure to issues that CEOs face daily. An MBA will provide this through case studies, coordinated projects with companies, and discussions with other students of different professional backgrounds. [←Directly tackles Why an MBA question.]
Post-MBA, I will return to private equity as a health-care-focused VP, spending substantial time on corporate boards, collaborating with management teams, and applying my MBA lessons to portfolio companies and deal opportunities. The MBA and a return to private equity is my bridge to my entrepreneurial goals and the health-care industry leader I envision becoming in the future. [←Makes judgment call to omit Why HBS section so he can devote more space to fleshing out his goals. Chose wisely—HBS admitted him.]
How have you enhanced your candidacy since your previous application? Please detail your progress since you last applied and reiterate your short-term and long-term goals. Explain how the tools of the Columbia MBA will help you to meet your goals and how you plan to participate in the Columbia community.
As I sliced through the ribbon in front of GridSys’s new Mexico City office this past February, a crowd of executives, clients, and city officials broke out in applause. [←Opening anecdote is visual and immediate but also shows that Jang has filled VIP roles.] Since my transfer to GridSys’s Los Angeles office in summer 2006, I’ve been working with our Mexico distributors to expand GridSys’s territory into Latin America through a joint venture called GridSys Ltd. Mexico. As the CEO of this 12-person satellite office, I have led my team in leveraging promotional marketing to achieve 20% revenue growth and established partnerships with distributors in Guatemala and Honduras. [←Immediately begins using impact examples to show he’s continued to grow since his first application.]
This is only one way I have strengthened my candidacy since my first Columbia application in June 2008. Because of my familiarity with Spanish culture and language (I spent two summers there during college), GridSys assigned me its Spanish account in summer 2008. Knowing Spaniards prize personal business relationships, I flew to Barcelona that August and, building trust, convinced them to choose our products over price-competitive Chinese batteries. Consequently, last December we convinced Spain’s biggest wholesale supermarket, Spemax, to supply our batteries to its 50 customers—a $500,000 contract. [←Another impact example that also shows Jang’s impressive international credentials.]
Because of these accomplishments, this past January I was promoted to Director of GridSys’s new $6 million Flexible Lithium Polymer batteries division. [←Director of a $6 million division? Impressive stuff.] In March, I exploited the tracking capability that paper-thin FLP batteries make possible (when combined with radio frequency identification [RFID] tags) to implement FLP-powered tracking into GridSys’s inventory system. After I led a five-person team in launching the tag-scanning system and embedding the product codes into the tags, our inventory loss rate fell by 15% and the shorter time-to-warehouse improved turnover tremendously.
Finally, beginning in May, I led GridSys’s sales/marketing team in convincing smart-card manufacturers such as Omaxx ID and security software companies like STB to choose our FLP batteries for integration into next-generation bank smartcards (capable of online banking authentication). After marketing efforts that included major trade shows such as CARTES in Paris, in August I convinced the card suppliers of Citibank of America and PayPal to sign $12 million agreements to use our FLP batteries over China BAK’s batteries beginning in January 2010. To increase the production capacity to drive these sales, in September I also approved $2.5 million in production line investments, which will lower our unit costs. [←Relentless exposition of impressive examples creates momentum toward inevitable conclusion: This time you should let me in.]
All these successes have only deepened my commitment to pursuing the goals I stated in last year’s application. In the short-term, I will return to GridSys to lead the growth of our FLP battery unit, whose products will be embedded in smart cards and for RFID applications such as supply chain management. Longer term, I will develop the FLP division so it can be spun off from GridSys and ultimately achieve an IPO on the NASDAQ. My ultimate career vision is to return to GridSys to continue my family’s sixty-year-old business legacy, not only by growing the company in its core businesses—dry-cell and lithium polymer batteries—but by transforming it into a “green” innovation leader producing solar and hydrogen fuel cells. [←Ambitious goals with a nice green twist to show Jang’s social conscience.]
A Columbia MBA is the most efficient and intensive way to strengthen the managerial and functional skills I’ll need to realize these goals. Since applying to Columbia, I’ve reached out to more students and alumni and revisited the campus to better understand my fit. Bill Asté (MBA 2010) inspired me by describing the wide range of leadership opportunities Columbia offers, such as serving as a representative for the Hermes Society. Doug Kapproff (MBA 2010) stressed the January program’s advantages and suggested valuable entrepreneurship classes such as Professor Low’s “Introduction to Venturing.” Amanda Carlson’s Los Angeles information session in September confirmed my decision to reapply. [←Amply demonstrates that he has continued to personally explore Columbia since his ding.]
My appreciation for Columbia’s entrepreneurial resources—the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center, courses like “High Technology Entrepreneurship” and “Entrepreneurship in Large Enterprises,” the Entrepreneurial Sounding Board—has only grown since my first application. The family business panel events hosted by the Family Business Network and Professor Michael Preston’s courses (such as “Family Business Management”) also speak directly to my plans for GridSys. [←Makes a good case that Columbia’s resources are relevant to his goals.]
My initiatives for GridSys in Mexico, Spain, and the U.S. have taught me that “localizing” one’s understanding of each culture’s business environment is the key to global business success. Completing the advanced-level Spanish courses at Institute for Spanish Language Studies in Los Angeles, for example, is helping me to maintain strong partnerships with our exclusive distributors in Spain. The Chazen Institute’s language program and Columbia’s exchange program at IESE will enable me to continue studying Spain’s language and business culture. I also look forward to organizing a study tour for my classmates to GridSys’s solar cell plants in South Korea.
Finally, after speaking with the presidents of Columbia’s Energy and Green Business club, Kathleen Gabarro and Herminia Reardon, respectively, I’m excited about sharing what I know about GridSys’s renewable energy initiatives by sponsoring events such as Clean Tech Month and participating in the Green Business Club’s campus greening projects. [←Jang clearly knows Columbia’s program.]
In taking on extraordinary new responsibilities—managerial, international, and operational—at GridSys, I’ve substantially improved my candidacy over the past year. More than ever, Columbia’s January accelerated MBA program is the best place to continue my education in leadership.
