The MBA Admissions Studio

Getting the tone right in MBA Admissions essays — particularly a fine balance between self-confidence and humility — is really tricky.

There are no hard and fast rules for this, and the exact mix depends on the candidate. The swaggering quant at BlackRock, NY, is going to have to adopt an altogether more modulated tone than the doe-eyed violinist from Vietnam, and so on.

As I’m consistently helping candidates get this element of tone right in their essays — not by doing it for them, but by reflecting when I’m feeling the self-tooting trumpet is too loud or not loud enough — I’m always looking for ways to think more intelligently about it.

Recently I found myself nodding at a unique device suggested by Derrick Bolton, Director of Admissions at Stanford GSB, as quoted by Matt Symonds on Forbes. Bolton’s advises candidates to write the application as if they were writing it for themselves and not going to turn it in.

Why might this work?

Says Bolton: “You don’t need to lie to yourself. [Private] self-reflection allows you to think about the things that bring meaning to you, and the knowledge and experience you need to aspire to be the person you want to become.”

There’s a lot in this. If you were to write strictly for yourself, you’d only be BS’ing yourself if you weren’t 100% honest about your motivations and intentions, and reasons for “Why an MBA” or “Why Stanford,” etc. You would hardly set out to “impress” yourself or to write what you think you want to hear.

Were you to be writing in your own private journal, you would sift honestly and reflectively through your experiences, and genuinely try to join the dots between your past accomplishments and future aspirations via an MBA at the particular institution.

The suggestion therefore offers a compelling device to cut through a lot of the preening and bluster that turns good candidates into bad applicants. It is a way to raise transparency and find that “genuine voice” that MBA admisions directors want to hear.

Having said all this… let’s not for a second be fooled that Bolton or any other admissions gatekeeper lives anywhere other than the real world. Neither Bolton, nor anyone else, got to be where they are by turning in their private reflections.

So, stay smart about the process. Once you’ve written your essays absolutely as-if for yourself, go through them again to add back gentle persuasion, artful promotion, and marketing sass before you hit submit.

Tags: Derrick Bolton, MBA essay tone, SGSB, Stanford, why-an-MBA

Over many years I’ve written extensively — both here and in my book — about the weakness-failure MBA admissions essay and how to approach it. In fact, it has to be about 8 years since I pioneered the notion of using the failure essay to position the applicant as a leader, because all successful leaders have failed or will fail at some time or another. Moreover, a real leader will acknowledge not deny a failure, and embrace its implied learning path — demonstrating capacity for personal growth which is the real test in answering this type of question.

Anyway, as you know, this year HBS grew the category from ‘failure’ to ‘setback’ and extended their request from one failure in 400 words to 3 setbacks in 600.

In a sense, not too much new here, but seeing as I’m experiencing a few clients struggling to hit the nail on the head, let me add a few thoughts and go over one or two principles.

First, a setback is broader than a failure. A failure comes from something you did or didn’t do. It implies personal causality and responsibility. A setback can be a failure in these terms, but it can equally be due to no fault of yours — just the big wide world doing what it sometimes does in a way that helped you not.

But, recognize too that the setback category does not cover all negative events. The outcome must be a setback. If you swam too far from the beach but were rescued, you might feel like an idiot and you might have had a wake-up call. But it’s not a setback because you were not held back or slowed down in any meaningful sense.

Choosing setbacks

Assuming you’ve identified various items that count as setbacks, which do you choose?

First the basics: as with the 3 x Accomplishments, you should create a spread from professional to personal to community topics. All work and no play makes Jack a dull admissions boy.

After that, you choose between setbacks the way you choose every topic: by asking yourself “which allows me to deliver the most admissions value?”

These are the kinds of admissions value a setback can communicate:

1. You show you are a leader. All leadership implies exploration of uncertainty and action without full knowledge of the consequences. Therefore all leaders mess up now and then. If you’ve had no setbacks, you have not led enough.

2. You show you are an innovator, and can balance risk and caution. Sometimes innovators go down blind alleys or take risks that don’t pan out. It comes with the territory. If you’ve got nothing here, you are either over-conventional or over-cautious, or both.

3. You show you are determined and can persevere. The “comeback from a setback” allows you to show tenacity and how you don’t give up.

4. You show you are resourceful. Likewise, overcoming a setback may allow you to demonstrate resourcefulness and creativity.

5. You show self-knowledge and self-insight. You are able to do honest introspection, which is the litmus test of maturity. You demonstrate humility.

6. You show growth. You are willing to learn, adapt yourself and your actions, and grow through experiences such as this.

Tags: accomplishments essay, essay writing, Harvard, HBS, Leadership, profile development, setback essay

A few years back I put up this link to a Darden class (particularly it shows “the case method” in action) to make the point that applicants should make themselves aware of what it is like to be part of it. I you’re going to talk about your great affinity for case-method learning, make sure you are informed about what it is really like.

By extension, watch a generous sampling of videos that are freely and plentifully available on the Web to give yourself an overall sense of what the MBA experience and MBA life is like. This mini-immersion will allow you to better express what you hope to get out of the classroom and what you will contribute to it.

I say all this because applicants sometimes come to me with an unrealistic idea of what goes on in the classroom and outside of it: what the instructor does, how instruction occurs, what students do, what MBA students are like, and so on. With the wrong perception, essays start to sound ill-informed, if not downright naive. This is an admissions red flag.

Videos can be found on schools’ Web sites, or MBA information sites, or more generally for example by searching for MBA classroom on YouTube. And don’t just watch the serious ones — the goofy or playful ones like this, below, are just as relevant for getting a sense of what the real MBA experience is all about.

Tags: admissions red flags, b-school, case method, Darden MBA, Kellogg MBA, MBA applicant, MBA classroom, MBA experience, MBA life, MBA video

Some schools, notably Chicago Booth, UCLA Anderson, and NYU Stern, ask for open, creative essays where you set the agenda and can submit (within reason, per guidlines) whatever you think is important. The test is (a) how you deal with unstructured situations, (b) whether you have any creativity/imagination ,and (c) what your broader communication skills are like.

It’s a heaven-sent opportunity to get yourself noticed, but only, of course, if you can do something notice-worthy. Of course this essay prompt causes more unhappiness among applicants than any other.

As an applications advisor, I find myself thinking about new and different ways to tackle these questions. The only sure principle is “pop” — can you stand out? As Adcoms keep telling us, it’s not about evaluation (almost everyone who applies is “good enough.”) It is about selection. If you pop and you’re not in a heavily oversubscribed applicant category, your application becomes hard to turn down.

Here’s one way to pop — a management innovation competition. As the Website blurb says:

“The Management Innovation Exchange, a project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century, and HCL Technologies, a global IT services provider, are offering more than $50,000 in prizes for the best new game-changing management ideas. The HCL MBA M-Prize competition is open to all current graduate business school students and will honor “the best new idea for making organizations more adaptable, more innovative, more inspiring, and more socially accountable.

“One of the people involved in all this is Gary Hamel, director of the Management Lab at London Business School, the author of seminal management books including Leading the Revolution, and one of the most influential management thinkers around. This is what he had to say in a statement:

“Organizations around the world today are challenged to change in ways they have never imagined. Collectively and individually some of the world’s leading management thinkers and progressive CEOs are pushing themselves and their teams to answer the fundamental question: How do we invent ‘management 2.0?’ The HCL MBA M-Prize is not an intellectual exercise or a theory. We are looking for ideas we can test and make work in a real organization. We are looking to reinvent the future of management and let MBA students’ ideas play a critical role in making it work.

‘In addition to a $50,000 grand prize, the winner gets to lead a real-world management experiment, in effect testing the winning idea at a real company. There are also three additional prizes for the best management “hacks”–which the organizers describe as “a bold new idea or radical fix aimed at redistributing power, unleashing human capability and fostering renewal in organizations.”

“The deadline for submissions is Feb. 28. Ten to 15 finalists will be selected by April 15 and the winners will be announced on the MIX site on May 1. Entries will be judged on clarity of thought and originality, potential for impact, feasibility of implementation, and popularity.

“A bunch of the entries have already been posted on the M-Prize web site. One involves giving rank-and-file employees a say in big company decisions, such as mergers and acquisitions. Another proposes an internal market for management talent–allowing employees to choose their own supervisors and rewarding the best. A third suggests an online social network to solicit money-making ideas for the company, and giving a cut of the proceeds from any viable idea to the person who thought of it.

“Not a bad start, but only a start. Surely there must be hundreds of really smart ideas for fomenting the next great management revolution bubbling up in b-school. What’s yours?”

(Yes, it’s open only to current b-school students. But there nothing to stop you telling Adcom what your entry will be next year…)

Tags: Chicago-Booth GSB, communications, essay writing, management, NYU-Stern, UCLA Anderson

Harvard Business School this week announced first moves toward its long-awaited curriculum reform in an email from Dean Nitin Nohria and Senior Associate Dean Youngme Moon to incoming students. The essence of it is: HBS is creating a new required first-year course called “Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development” (FIELD), and will provide greater modularity and student choice in the second year.

By all accounts the reforms are not huge, and not as extensive as those undertaken by Wharton, Stanford, Yale, Haas, and other major programs recently. It appears that HBS’s strategy is to introduce reforms in a incremental, rolling way.

But there is a radical kernel in the FIELD program, something HBS applicants should note. According to the deans’ statement, the course will focus on developing substantively meaningful small-group learning experiences that are “experiential, immersive, and field-based.”

Elaborating on this, Brian Kenny, chief marketing and communications officer for Harvard Business School, was quoted as saying: ”For most of the last 100 years, we have been exclusively using a case study pedagogy. We’re recognizing that the case method needs to be supplemented with experiential things that allow students to balance knowing with doing.”

In other words, “doing” is moving up the list of what’s crucial at HBS. They are looking to graduate “doers” rather than merely “knowers.” Of course Harvard will claim they have been doing this all along, but part of the enduring criticism leveled against business schools, particularly in the wake of the Credit Crunch, is that “book learning” is not enough to make a good business leader.

The case method is in itself a hybrid between a straight textbook learning and the real world, and this is what made it powerful in a world where some other b-schools taught more rote style. But the world has moved on, and “experience” and “immersion-fieldwork” have become central to what all serious b-schools consider valuable in formative management education. Of course, the case method will still be at the heart of the Harvard’s teaching. But there is a clear manifesto to nudge the case method further towards the real world by augmenting it with immersion.

How does this affect admissions? Quite simply, HBS is looking, more than ever, to turn out graduates who are ready, willing, and able to roll up their sleeves and immerse themselves in their leadership projects. So you-the-applicant should look to show where and how you have successfully navigated “immersion” projects in your past, what learning experiences you will immerse yourself in while at HBS and in your near-term future, and how the FIELD experience will help you do it better.

Tags: Haas, Harvard, HBS, HBS Dean, HBS FIELD, mba, mba curriculum, Nitin Nohria, Stanford GSB, Wharton, Yale, Youngme Moon

Let me quote wikipedia: “Empty calories are a measurement of the energy present in high-energy foods with poor nutritional profiles, typically from processed carbohydrates or fats. An empty calorie has the same energy content of any other calorie but lacks accompanying nutrients such as vitamins, dietary minerals, antioxidants, amino acids, or in the case of refined grains, fiber.”

Empty calories define most fast food, sugary drinks, and popular cereals — so much so that regulators have reigned in advertising low-food-value items to children. (Food conglomerates have responded by adding back vitamins, minerals, etc. to cereals and other prepared foods.)

Why do I raise this? Because an MBA admissions essay — like any other piece of writing — is a meal for the reader. The reader’s hope and quiet prayer is that the text will deliver the informational nutrients they are looking for, with little fat or waste.

Consider something like this: “My journey to this point has been challenging, but the lessons I learned have been most meaningful — I truly have seen that a new beginning is an opportunity to start again, that life’s challenges are the best way to show one’s capability and forge memorable experiences, and that through passion and perseverance one can make a difference in the world.”

Or this: “I believe the best leaders are those who do things for the right reasons, grounded in a thorough understanding of economics, business, strategy, and innovation. I want to be a leader who is open-minded, can manage complex situations, and empowers people.”

Forget the turgid writing and cliche’s-running-amok for a moment. That can be fixed. The point is, even if fixed, there is still nothing there. From the Adcom readers’ point of view there is no nutrition in the text, nothing that tells them anything interesting or specific or memorable about these applicants and why they should be admitted to b-school. There is no data, there is no record of action, no unique insights. Just words taking up space. That is, just empty calories.

The task of MBA essays is to explain your admissions value to Adcom, and you can’t achieve this via empty text. You must present nutrition-laden text, or expect to be dinged.

This means excoriating anything and everything that tends towards vacant, weary generalizations. Cut that to create space for reader nourishment — discussion of specific well-chosen experiences that show you in action, developing unique skills and fresh non-obvious insights about yourself, about your future aspirations, and about management and leadership.
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Tags: b-school, communications, essay writing, MBA Adcom, MBA admissions essay, writing style

I spent a few minutes today catching up with the Stanford GSB Dean’s “State of  the School, Fall 2010″ message, which anticipates the GSB’s move into the new Knight Management Center in Spring 2011.

What caught my attention, from an MBA admissions perspective, is the inscription on the new cornerstone of the new center. How is that for clarity in what Stanford GSB is looking for? Dreaming up — and presumably then building — new things is, literally, the cornerstone of the institution.

So if you are applying to Stanford GSB, you need to have some idea of what (ambitious) business or organization or innovation you may dream up, why it’s important to the world, why you are the person to do it, why SGSB can expect you to succeed, and a sense of how they can help you.

Is this saying, “think small?” Is this saying, “comfortable career track?” “Sure, we want to educate you so you can be a trader in an I-bank, or telecoms strategy consultant…?” I think not. They are not demanding mainline entrepreneurship exactly, but they are demanding those ready, willing, and able to build big new things in the world.

It’s also worth spending the 4 minutes it takes to watch Dean Saloner’s presentation, below, because he integrates key elements in the business school education framework, from perspective to foundations to critical-analytical thinking to innovation to personal leadership in a very joined-up way. As an applicant, it’s worth pausing to think how this simple pattern can be used to structure stories and events in your own life that you are trying to tell Adcom about.

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Tags: b-school, innovation, Knight Management Center, Leadership, MBA Adcom, MBA Dean, Stanford GSB

I’d estimate that 3 out of 5 MBA applicants to top-tier schools have traveled widely, for work or for fun. It follows that in their MBA applications they cite travel as an activity they value and put it among the important experiences they have had. They think that journeying across the world speaks for itself as proof of “diversity.” Travel “broadens the mind” and all that.

This is true. But there is a lot of value to be had in travel that MBA applicants often don’t get to. Here I tip my metaphorical hat to the mother of an MBA Studio client who gave her son the following feedback — before he came to me — which absolutely dovetails with how I exhort clients to squeeze admissions value from their travel (and other) experiences. I quote:

“I don’t think you have written something meaningful enough about your travels. You have traveled widely but it looks like it doesn’t seem to have influenced you, affected your outlook about people, society.

“Perhaps write something meaningful about poverty, and yet the ingenuity of people who have very little but are innovative, creative, hard working.

“Can you think of reasons why you chose to travel to these places, culture, philosophy, history, etc.?

“Some insight into the way you and your friend chose to travel, no fuss, not staying fancy places.

“This travel was a test also in being independent, showing initiative, taking calculated risks in foreign places. (You don’t give yourself sufficient credit for these things.)”

If all mothers had this depth of insight, I’d be out of a job. But, seriously, the task here, and everywhere in MBA admissions, is to extract the full admissions value from any activity you have done, experiences you’ve had, or choices you’ve made.

Look at your experiences, look at the skill sets and character traits of middle-to-senior managers, and make the link.

In this case an applicant following this advice would be showing Adcom not just “travel,” but a nuanced outlook on foreign cultures; an appreciation of genuinely alternative value systems and social cohesion including alternative forms of innovation; a non-materialist sensibility; an ability to ride out adversity; practice at calculated risk-management, and so on. Now this is a platform a good b-school can build on, to create a senior manager for significant 21st Century organizations.

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Tags: Diversity, essay writing, manager, MBA Adcom, MBA Admissions, Travel

Wharton’s MBA essays for 2010-11 are great; and very significantly reformulated from previous years, demanding new comment and analysis here.

The required question:

What are your professional objectives? (300 words)

This is in some senses the classic Why-an-MBA? question. What’s new is that it is really short, particularly when compared with the longer questions that follow. The implication is that Wharton, following HBS and others, are putting less and less emphasis on what applicants claim they will do on graduation. They expect to heavily influence that. It is important that you have direction and motivation, but they reckon, and they’re right, that 300 words is more than enough to get that across. Notice that there’s very little space for Why (an MBA) Now? or Why Wharton? If there’s something important to say to that, you’ll have to be really succinct, or work it into one of the other essays.

The optional questions — respond to three of the following four:

1. Student and alumni engagement has at times led to the creation of innovative classes. For example, through extraordinary efforts, a small group of current students partnered with faculty to create a timely course entitled, “Disaster Response: Haiti and Beyond,” empowering students to leverage the talented Wharton community to improve the lives of the Haiti earthquake victims. Similarly, Wharton students and alumni helped to create the “Innovation and the Indian Healthcare Industry” which took students to India where they studied the full range of healthcare issues in India. If you were able to create a Wharton course on any topic, what would it be? (700 words)
   
2. Reflect on a time when you turned down an opportunity. What was the thought process behind your decision? Would you make the same decision today? (600 words)
3. Describe a failure that you have experienced. What role did you play, and what did you learn about yourself? How did this experience help to create your definition of failure? (600 words)
4. Discuss a time when you navigated a challenging experience in either a personal or professional relationship. (600 words)

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Question 1 does a number of things worth noting. First it’s mining for what you, specifically and uniquely, bring to the program. It does not automatically follow that you would create a class around your speciality, but this will be the case for many applicants, and so is a place to show your special attributes, connections, or interests. The question also therefore allows you to show your “fit with Wharton,” not only what you will contribute but what you would like to learn or experience. Further, as the language of the question suggests, it looks toward your innovativeness, which is a core value in MBA admissions. Your choice of class must show innovation with reference to the curriculum as it stands. This of course demands that you demonstrate knowledge of what is already on offer and where the gaps might be. Finally the question tests your realism and knowledge of how b-school electives and/or off-site experiential programs work. You might say “I’ll create a class that goes to visit Nelson Mandela to learn to balance business and policy objectives” but that would show total naivete as to how things really work and what’s really possible, and your application would be in the bin.

Question 2 is a deep, almost wickedly deep, dive into your personal stuff. They are probing the tissue of your motivation, your self-awareness, and self-understanding. The actual opportunity turned down is far less important than why you choose one thing over another, which should takes Adcom right to who you are as a person and what your core values are. Don’t disappoint them in this. Obviously when you turned down an opportunity, it was for a good reason, either a better opportunity or a family obligation or something like that. So what is at stake here too is your judgment and maturity. The question specifically looks to that in asking if you would make the same choice again, in other words, “how have you grown?”

Question 3 is the similar to last year, but the sub-question is new. It is a classic failure question. I’ve written a lot on how to manage failure questions (click on ‘failure essay’ tag,) and in my book. The sub-question that asks about your definition of failure, deepens the motivational, maturity, introspection angles to the standard MBA admissions failure essay. Everyone fails. Not everyone knows why, or demonstrates the self-knowledge or emotional resilience that is core to “bouncing back.”

Question 4 is a fairly typical “challenging situation” question. Of the set it is the one that most clearly asks about your relationship with others — and therefore your role in groups, teams, and so on, although it does focus you on a particular event and a specific 1-to-1 relationship. The ability to manage relationships is key to leadership, and therefore key to business success, and thus key to Wharton Adcom.

All in all, Wharton 2010-11 has put out a really state-of-the-art set of questions. Varied. Behavioral. Hard. But don’t be scared of hard questions. If they were easy you wouldn’t be able to separate yourself adequately from the crowd of pleasantry-and-platitude writers.

Tags: career plan, Failure essay, goals, Harvard, HBS, innovation, judgment, maturity, MBA Adcom, MBA alumni, mba curriculum, Teamwork, Wharton

There’s a little gem of a podcast from the Haas-Berkeley admissions committee, “Admissions and Application Information for Prospective Full-time MBA Students,” answering the question: “What are we looking for as we evaluate candidates?” It’s only 12 minutes long and really worth listening to. It’s up on this link at iTunes (item 10) or click here.

Haas adcom aims to dispel a few mysteries and shibboleths from MBA admissions. The podcast is from 2007, but that’s no matter. Everything they say is still current, and valid for other top b-schools too. The highlights:

Haas looks at three key areas. (1) academic readiness; (2) professional accomplishments and leadership experience; (3) personal attributes

(1) They consider college GPA + GMAT (+ post-grad scores, if applicable.) They also put value on the caliber of undergraduate institution, difficulty of major, trend in your grades, and level of quantitative preparation. There is no preference for any type of major.

(2) Work experience is about quantity (most have 3- 7 years) and, more importantly, quality. They focus on your career progression, why you have made the transitions you have made, how your role has progressed and responsibility increased. Quick advancement and significant progress reflects well. Leadership can be demonstrated on many ways, and closely correlates with how much of an impact you have made in your organization(s).

(3) The Haas admissions committee, like all adcoms, wants to enroll a class with diverse attributes and backgrounds (there is no right or wrong personal or professional past.) The question is “What can you uniquely contribute? They glean this by what you reflect as important to you — what you are passionate about. High extracurricular activity suggests you will be active on campus too, but they do understand and forgive where work and travel issues prevent meaningful extra-mural or community involvement.

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Generally, it’s worth keeping up with b-school podcasts, which are coming online all the time. Some are admissions-related. Others give worthwhile insight and information about the school and its culture, which can feed into essays about fit (“Why this school particularly?”) See for example:

Haas: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/uc-berkeley-haas-school-business/id84968687
Darden: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/podcasts-darden-the-darden/id201480998
Tuck: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/radio-tuck/id154782876
Kelley: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kelley-school-business-mba/id206525433

Tags: b-school podcast, Darden, Haas, itunes MBA podcast, Kelley, MBA leadership, MBA podcasts, Tuck