Accepted! 50 Successful Business School Admission Essays

CHAPTER

ONE

The Admission Essay: Your First Marketing Test

Marketing Yourself in Your Essay

Your first business school marketing test will not take place in a classroom. It will be wherever you are when you sit down to do your business school applications. Getting into business school takes a lot more than good grades and GMAT scores. While you have many strengths, so do the eight other applicants who are vying for that single spot on the admit list. How will you make your application rise to the top? How will you convince the admission officers that you are the best candidate for admission?

In most cases you'll do it through your admission essays.

Business school admission essays make a big difference in whether or not you get accepted. Yet, you can be the greatest writer in the world or have years of impressive work experience and still fail to capture the attention of the admission officers in your essays.

Writing a successful business school admission essay is not about being a good writer. Nor is it about cataloging all of your work experience in 500 words. The reality is that writing a successful admission essay is a unique blend of art and science. There are some traits that every successful essay shares. You'll learn what these are by reading the sample essays in this book as well as the interviews with business school admission officers. But each essay is also a unique reflection of the writer. We'll show you how to find an original essay topic that captures and highlights your unique strengths and personality. We'll also share with you the 25 most common essay writing mistakes that you must avoid.

Why are admission essays so important to getting into business school? At their most basic level, admission officers use your essays to understand who you are, why you feel that business school is your next logical step and how you will add value to their campus. While admission officers can surmise whether you can handle the academic rigors of business school by evaluating your grades and GMAT scores and they can get a sense of what other people think about you through recommendations, the essays provide the only way they can judge how your background, talents, experience and personal strengths come together to make you the best candidate for their school.

For you, the admission essays offer the best opportunity to market yourself to the business school. You start with a blank sheet of paper and through careful selection, analysis and writing, you create a picture of yourself to impress the admission officers and make them want you for their school.

How this Book Helps You Write Successful Essays

The entire goal of this book is to help you craft the best essays possible. To do so we will explain what admission officers value in essays and how they fit into the overall admission decision. We will reveal how to best present your strengths and skills in writing. We will also share with you 50 admission essays written by students who have been accepted by the nation's most selective business schools. We hope you will both learn and be inspired by reading these essays.

We recommend that you read this book straight through to best understand the importance of the essays, what admission officers are looking for, how to get started and how others have approached the essay questions. Here is a breakdown of what you'll learn in each chapter:

In Chapter 2, you will learn how the admission process works and what happens once your application is submitted to the school. You will see how the essay affects your chances of getting accepted and why admission officers value the essay as one of the most important ways to learn about who you are beyond your grades and GMAT scores.

We have brought together a group of admission officers in a roundtable in Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 to discuss what they are seeking at each stage of the admission process. They describe what has worked, and perhaps more importantly, what hasn't worked for students in the past.

In Chapter 4, you start the essay writing process by evaluating your strengths and selecting topics. This requires you to start asking yourself some serious questions about your background and your future plans. You'll also learn how to test your topics to see if they are the best subjects to write about.

Chapter 6 provides additional insight into mistakes that you need to avoid when writing your essay. You can learn from previous students’ costly errors.

In the following chapters we analyze the essay questions that you will have to answer and let you read the essays of successful applicants. Naturally your essays must be your own, but it is extremely useful to see examples of approaches that have worked before.

Perhaps the most common question that business schools ask is why you want an MBA, which is the subject of Chapter 7. You need to have some good reasons why you want to spend the next two years of your life pursuing a business degree and how it fits into your overall career plans.

Once you've established your reasons for choosing to earn an MBA, the next question you'll most likely have to answer is why you want to attend that particular school. In Chapter 8, we address how to answer this question since it requires some research beyond the glossy brochures from the business schools.

In Chapter 9, you will learn how to tackle questions about what you can bring to an MBA program. You could give a laundry list of your achievements, but on a higher level you can demonstrate how your achievements will help you contribute to the business school's community.

Leadership is a quality that all business schools value. In Chapter 10, you will see how you can demonstrate your leadership abilities and your views on leadership in your essays.

Business schools are interested in learning about your achievements and how they relate to your ability to be a successful businessperson. Essays about your most important achievements are covered in Chapter 11.

Naturally, business schools realize that not everything goes according to plan, that you have weaknesses as well as strengths or have worked to overcome challenges or obstacles in the past. Chapter 12 addresses these types of questions, and you will learn how you can use a negative or challenging experience to demonstrate your strengths in difficult times.

Along with leadership and the ability to overcome challenges, teamwork is also an important skill in business, and business schools want to learn about your ability to work with others. In Chapter 13, you will read essays that deal with this subject.

Essays Do Make a Difference

The essays are very important, says Rosemaria Martinelli, former director of MBA admissions and financial aid at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

While the other pieces of the application are important, the essays hold special significance to admission committees. They allow you an opportunity to make the strongest case for why you should be admitted and can share who you are beyond GMAT scores and GPAs.

They're one of the few areas for applicants to tell their story and to demonstrate to the committee who they are, what their path is and what their passions are both personal and professional. Everything else is just a data point, she says.

Juan Carlos Loredo places similar importance on the essays at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a student member of the admission committee, for which first year students read prospective applicants’ essays and make recommendations about whether they should be admitted.

He says that if he looks at two students with similar scores and grades, The difference is made by the essay.

While you certainly have no two days that are the same, by sharing with business schools a typical day, you illustrate how you spend your time and your priorities. In Chapter 14, you will find essays about a day in your life.

With the growth of international business, it is increasingly important to have international experience, and cross-cultural experience essays are the subject of Chapter 15.

In Chapter 16, there are essays about extracurricular activities, something that business schools value because they can demonstrate your leadership skills and ability to interact with others.

Business schools want to see what your priorities are. You can show what's important to you through your most valued possession, the topic of Chapter 17, and your passions, the topic of Chapter 19.

It is also important for business schools to understand what significant events and people have shaped who you are. In Chapter 18, there are essays about defining moments in your life, people you admire and your family.

In Chapter 20, you will understand the importance of the optional essay, the essay in which you can choose to write about something that hasn't been addressed elsewhere in your application. This essay question can be one of the most influential of all of the essay questions, and you don't want to miss out.

You'll learn finishing touches in Chapter 21, such as how and when to recycle and the important role that editors play in helping you to develop your essays.

Throughout the chapters, you will also find Stories from Real Life. These reflect triumphant and at times even tragic experiences through the eyes of admission officers and students alike. While these experiences can be humorous, they are meant to also be insightful and provide guidance.

Your first marketing lesson begins now!

CHAPTER

TWO

Executive Summary

The Application

Getting into Business School

It would be nice if all it took to apply to business school was a couple hours filling out applications and then tossing those applications in the mail. The reality is that the process takes months of preparation. Some students spend weeks tweaking their choice of action verbs on their resumes.

So you may be wondering what happens once you submit your application. Who are the people who read your application, and what are they looking for? Do they really scrutinize every word?

Unfortunately, not every business school is the same, and some may have slightly different procedures than what is outlined in this chapter. However, what follows is generally true for most schools. Plus, there are a lot of similarities in the criteria that the various business schools use to judge your applications. Let's begin by looking at all of the pieces that make up your business school application.

Application Overview

There are three basic questions that business schools want to answer before admitting you. Can you handle the academic coursework? How does an MBA fit into your future? And, why do you want to attend this specific institution? Business school admission officers try to find the answers to these questions through what they learn about you in the different parts of the application. Let's take a look at these parts:

Application Form. In the application forms, you will describe your work experience, awards or honors, involvement in activities or public service and basic educational background. This gives the business schools information about your schooling, career history and interests.

Grades. Business schools will evaluate your ability to handle the academic coursework from your undergraduate grades and, if you have earned graduate credits, your graduate school grades. They pay particular attention to courses that measure your quantitative skills such as math, economics or accounting classes.

GMAT. In addition to your grades, business schools also measure your academic readiness from your Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) scores. There are three parts to the GMAT: Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA), Quantitative and Verbal. In the AWA section, you will write two essays. AWA scores can be between 0 and 6, with half point intervals.

The Quantitative and Verbal scores are between 0 and 60, although it is rare to receive Quantitative scores less than 7 or more than 50 or Verbal scores less than 9 or more than 44. The Quantitative section has multiple-choice questions on Data Sufficiency and Problem Solving. The Verbal section has multiple-choice questions on Reading Comprehension, Critical Reasoning and Sentence Correction. The scores from the three parts of the GMAT form the total score, which is between 200 and 800. Obviously, higher scores are better.

Admission Essays. Business schools typically ask a series of essay questions. Common questions include why you want to attend business school, why you want to attend their specific school and how your work and leadership experiences make you a worthy candidate for admission. In Chapters 7 to 20, we cover the most common of these essay questions in detail as well as provide examples of essays written by successful applicants. Business schools use essays to understand your motivations for attending business school, to see the fit between you and their school and to get a better picture of who you are beyond your grades and test scores. Many admission officers consider the essays to be the most important part of the application.

Recommendations. In addition to learning what you think about yourself, business schools want to learn how others evaluate you. You will most likely ask managers and professors to write recommendations to describe your preparedness for business school.

Interview. Many schools offer interviews, and some schools require them even if you have to do it by telephone. Since so much of business is composed of verbal communication, these interviews play an important role in the admission process. Business schools use interviews to see how you compare in person to your written application, to see the fit with their school and to gain further insight into how business school fits into your future career plans. They might even throw you a few curve balls to see how you deal with stress.

How Many Schools Do I Apply to?

There are students like Juan Uribe who apply to just one business school, in his case Harvard Business School, and get accepted. For most students, however, one school is not enough. But how many schools should you apply to?

You shouldn't go overboard. Anthony M. Fernandez, another Harvard Business School student, says that when trying to hedge his bet he ended up applying to too many schools.

It was a waste of time and money, not to mention a waste of the schools’ admission resources, Anthony says. He applied to 10 schools.

A good balance between too many and too few is usually between six and eight schools, including one to two each of reach and safety schools.

Even Juan, who was accepted to the single school that he applied to, would probably do it differently the second time around. I was probably foolish in only focusing on one school. I should have seriously considered other schools, he says.

What Happens Inside the Admission Office

As you drop your application into the mailbox, you may feel like it disappears into a black hole of oblivion. You might imagine that it gets dumped onto a slush pile of other applications, never to be read again. Rest assured, this is not how the process works.

Business school admission officers like to say that the admission process begins long before you start filling out an application form. It starts when you decide to apply to business schools and begin thinking about which school is the best fit for you. Part of the admission staffs’ job is to make sure you have all of the information that you need about their schools to make sure their program suits you. They do this by sending out catalogs, creating detailed websites and holding informational sessions throughout the country and even abroad.

Once you've decided to apply to their school, most admission offices have administrative staff who gather all of the application materials together and make sure that the packets are complete. In some cases, they re-enter information from applications that are sent by mail instead of through the Internet.

Why You Should Apply Early

Imagine what would happen if the IRS let us choose when to turn in our taxes—we would all wait until the end of eternity to do them. But most business schools have deadlines where you can choose in which round to apply. So you may wonder why you'd ever want to apply in one of the early rounds instead of letting the natural procrastinator in you take advantage of the later deadline.

In almost all cases you should apply as early as possible. At many schools, the later you apply, the more competitive it can become. In part this is because admission officers can give more time to review applications that are received early. Remember, the vast majority of us are procrastinators. Plus, applying early shows that you are serious about attending a school and that it is one of your first choice selections.

Randall Dean, the former director of admission at Michigan State University, says that each year he noticed that a group of applicants sent in their applications at the latest deadline clearly after having applied to more prestigious programs. This second group of students raised some eyebrows in the admission office. You can't help but question how motivated these students would be if we're not their first choice, he says.

However, while it is generally to your advantage to apply early, if you aren't ready it is better not to rush. If you don't think you are putting forth your best effort. If you don't think your essays are solid and you've lined up people who can speak about how you've added value in their recommendations. In other words, if you are just not ready I would want you to wait. I would rather you submit in the second round so that you can use the time to create the best application possible, says Colleen McMullen-Smith, former associate director of MBA admissions and career services at Carnegie Mellon University.

So aim to get your applications turned in by the first round. Just don't sacrifice quality to do so.

Before making their final decisions, many schools interview applicants. Some interview all students who meet their prescreening requirements even if just by telephone. In some cases, the person who interviews you becomes your personal liaison to the admission office.

When it comes to essays, each is carefully scrutinized by one or more readers. If you're surprised that the business schools read all of the essays received, you'll be even more surprised to learn that they are most often read twice or even three times. Usually initial readers review the application and give recommendations to accept or deny. These initial readers may be admission officers or even second-year MBA students. Then, the director of admission, assistant director or admission officer gives a second reading. In some cases if the first and second readers agree, the decision is made. If not, the application is reviewed by third readers. At other schools, decisions are made in a committee meeting of admission officers that may also include current business school students.

As you return from the post office after mailing your application, you'll probably feel a sense of relief. You've done your part. But for the admission officers at the schools, the work has just begun. By the time the process is over your application will have gone through a thorough review process. Your essays will probably be highlighted and covered with notes written in the margin by several readers. Every scrap of paper that you submit will be looked at and evaluated.

It is only after all this work is completed that final decisions are made and that glorious fat envelope that