MBA Adcom, MBA Admissions, MBA Essays

MBA Adcoms: Do You Know Who You Are Talking To?

To be a successful MBA applicant, one key thing to get clear on is who you are talking to when you write MBA admissions essays.

Getting your head around who your reader is, is a crucial part of creating a winning communication and therein getting admitted.

One iconic profile is revealed in this now-somewhat-classic introduction to a Business Week interview with then-UCLA Anderson Director of MBA Admissions (now UC Irvine Paul Merage School of Business Director of Admissions) Mae Jennifer Shores. See: UCLA Anderson: Admissions Q&A – BusinessWeek.

“The Assistant Dean and Director of MBA Admissions … says she ended up an admissions officer the way most people do—unintentionally. She went to Russia to teach public policy, but was assigned to teach negotiations at a business school at the last minute. After two years, she wanted to continue her Eastern European stay and almost took a job teaching in Kazakhstan. Her graduate school loans, however, forced her back to the U.S. There, Shores’ international and business-school experience eventually led her into the admissions department.”

Every MBA admissions officer is different of course. But what they have in common is that it is unlikely they planned and studied for this career. Most come to it “sideways.” They typically have broad interests, are people-focused, and are good communicators. They have lived life in more than one industry and often more than one country. They are generally not business trained, although many have some background in HR or marketing.

This makes the MBA application essay writer’s job harder and easier. It’s easier to engage an interesting person. Almost anything topic you raise will be “valid” for them.

But it’s harder if all your stories are highly technical, or closely work-oriented or if your ability to reflect deeply and persuasively on your life and career path is limited. You’re not going to interest the likes of Mae Jennifer Shores unless you can extract the human interest and personal journey from your life story.

MBA Adcom, MBA Admissions, MBA Essays

Applying for an MBA? Show you know the MBA Classroom Experience

It’s not easy getting into an elite MBA program. The odds are stacked against you. But you do have resources, and none is better to get acquainted with at the start of the admissions season than the many freely available videos out there that take you inside the MBA classroom. Here’s one from Darden (University of Virginia Business School) that focuses on the case method.

The value in watching videos like this is the raw insight you get as to what actually goes on in a b-school classroom. This gives a very good idea of the kind of applicant MBA Adcoms are looking for.

Particularly note how much the emphasis is on discussion, communication, questioning, argument, and independent thinking. Yes, this a case study class, but not only are case classes very common, but even non-case MBA classes are less about absorbing facts or calculating answers than about navigating complex situations and marshaling sound judgments.

If you show you know what it takes to learn the elite MBA way, and position yourself as the kind of student that will succeed in this open-discussion “evaluative” learning environment, you’re on your way to being a successful applicant.

Insights and tools to gain admission to the world's elite MBA programs