The MBA Admissions Studio

Keeping up with Adcoms’ blogs as I do (and I suggest MBA applicants do too) my eye stopped on this recent post by Dee Leopold, Director of Admissions at HBS.

It offers two things: First it clears up some of the shibboleths of who’s noticing what in your b-school visit and how it is weighed in admissions. (What is true of Harvard is broadly true of other schools too.) Second, just as important, it’s worth noting as a writing sample. Here’s the text:

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Tags: b-school, Director of MBA Admissions, essay writing, HBS, interviews, MBA Admissions, writing style

Readers of this site will know that I’m a big fan of the book Made to Stick, for MBA admissions messaging. The book will NOT tell you anything about what your message should be — how to understand and position yourself in MBA applications — but it is a great and simple guide to communicating a message effectively once you know what you want to say. This was my post on it from November 09.

Anyway, I discovered a fabulous and free, if slightly zany, summary and commentary of the book up at bookrapper.com – Australia, well worth sharing.  The full 13-page pdf can be downloaded here. (There are many other topical business book summaries for free download too.)

Here is a flavor of some of the charts and summaries – making the reader to care enough to take action; overcoming the expertise trap; and the 6 elements of sticky messages:

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Tags: admissions red flags, business books, essay writing, Made to Stick, MBA applications, writing style

The criticism / weakness / failure essay is common in MBA Admissions essays because it is a test of an applicant’s maturity, self-knowledge, honesty, and ability to learn from mistakes. It is, in other words, the biggest indicator of real leadership ability and potential.

Sample questions are:

Tuck 3. Discuss the most difficult constructive criticism or feedback you have received. How did you address it? What have you learned from it?
Wharton 3. Describe a failure that you have experienced. What role did you play, and what did you learn about yourself?
HBS 2. What have you learned from a mistake?
Columbia 3. Please provide an example of a team failure of which you’ve been a part. If given a second chance, what would you do differently?

Applicants to business school very often struggle with these essays because they feel that admitting a weaknesses or sharing a time when they failed erodes their candidacy. In fact, it does just the opposite. Leaders know their weaknesses, and can admit them to themselves and others — in order to work on them, or work around them. It shows self-insight and points to seniority. No one is comfortable talking about their weak spots and failure. But nobody is perfect or has not failed. Not Bill Gates, not Richard Branson, not me, nor you, nor the admissions officer.

So it is not admitting a weakness is what will get you dinged, because it’s like waving red beacon that betrays inexperience and a junior mindset. If you “have no weaknesses” that just tells Adcom that you don’t know what they are yet or that you’re too immature to face them. It says you don’t know yourself, therefore you don’t yet know where you will mess up. You are a liability to yourself and your company

Take a tip from George Soros, self-made billionaire, philosopher, philanthropist, social reformer, and fund manager extraordinaire – famous for “breaking the Bank (of England)” by shorting the pound sterling in 1992 – who shares this candid account of his weaknesses …

“I’m a very bad judge of character. I’m a good judge of stocks, and I have a reasonably good perspective on history. But I am, really, quite awful in judging character, and so I’ve made many mistakes. It took me five years and a lot of painful experiences to find the right management team. I am please that finally I found it, but I cannot claim to be as successful in picking a team as I have been in actually managing money. I think that I’m very good as a senior partner, or boss, because I have a lot of sympathy for the difficulties that fund managers face. When they are in trouble I can give them a lot of support, and that, I think, has contributed toward creating a good atmosphere in the firm. But I’m not so good at choosing them.”

– ‘Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve,’ Wiley & Sons, NY, 1995, p.18

See, the greatest business leaders all have weaknesses and all have made significant mistakes in their careers and their lives. The point is not to prove that you don’t fail, or won’t fail. It is to prove that you have the insight into yourself to be able to recognize and compensate for your weaknesses.

What Adcom wants to know is not how you avoided failure, but how you managed it, what you learned, what insights into yourself you gained, and how you grew from there. They want to see that you have the will and the insight to locate and understand the source of your mess up – the underlying weaknesses that caused it – and that you have the maturity to face and work on the issue.

To summarize: the weakness / failure essay is not testing to see if you have weaknesses. We all do. It is a test of your self-knowledge and maturity. The committee wants to see if you can candidly face, discuss, and work on your flaws, or if you will you try to hide them or blame circumstances or other people. This is a significant test of your readiness for senior leadership.

A note on tone
Soros is candid, straightforward, and objective in his self analysis. He shares measured self-insight with the reader. He doesn’t try to slip in softening or deflecting phrases, or hide behind humor; nor is he self-excusing or whining and looking to blame others – the mark of a too-junior applicant.

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Tags: b-school, Columbia, essay writing, Failure essay, HBS, maturity, Tuck, Weakness essay, Wharton, writing style

“How strictly do I have to stick to the essay word limit? How much can I go over? Does it matter if I’m under?” is a question I get a lot from clients and people who pop up on email.

To answer this, it’s essential, as always, to think about any process or task or limit in admissions from AdCom’s point of view. Put yourself in their shoes. Why do they ask for it? What are they trying to achieve? How does it help them?

So, what is AdCom trying to do with word limits? First, if there were no limits applicants would ask incessantly: “Please Miss, how long must it be?” Second, some applicants would write the great American novel, which would waste their time and the Committee’s. Third, limits provide a way of getting essays from different applicants to be more directly comparable, being the same length.

But there is play in the system. The purpose of the essays is to get to know the applicant via their writing, and everyone knows that writing is a creative process and certainly nobody expects you to hit the word count on the nail. This is not engineering or accounting. (Believe it or not, some clients fuss the word count until they have exactly the number asked for, taking touching comfort in a detail that will provide them absolutely no refuge.) Anyway, application forms often talk about a word “guide” rather than word “limit.” So you can clearly go a bit over, but by how much?

My advice to clients is not to go more than +5% in any essay. This kind of margin is a natural “rounding error” in finishing up what you have to say and will not hurt you if your reader is a reasonable person, which we assume she is. More than this will start to look like you are taking advantage and/or asking for an indulgence that your competitors are not getting.

However if you write a number of essays that are noticeably short it is fine to have one or two that are commensurately longer, so that the whole comes out more or less right. In fact, Stanford GSB explicitly allows this: its guidance is both per essay and for the essay set as a whole (1,800 words), so you are invited to trade off between essays as you see fit. How well you do this is, by the way, a test of your communications judgment.

Can you go under the limit? Similarly, I advise clients not to go less than -5% on any essay. In one sense, like all professional communicators, I believe strongly in “say what you have to say; say it once, strongly and clearly and then stop talking.” This is the royal road to more powerful communications. Certainly there’s no merit in padding, wafffling, and repeating yourself. But admissions essays are relatively short pieces of writing, and you — if you merit a place at a top b-school — are a multifaceted, talented individual with an valuable track record, and if you can’t find things to say to take up the word count this in itself flags that you have not been able to (or haven’t bothered to) properly investigate your own motivations or fully argue your merits.

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Tags: accounting, admissions red flags, b-school, communications, engineering, Essay word count, essay writing, motivations, Stanford GSB, track record, word limit

One of the biggest problems I have as an MBA admissions adviser – friend, coach, confidant, drill sergeant, etc., to applicants trying to crack top-tier schools – is explaining to clients that “good is nice, great is nicer,” but neither will get you into a top-tier MBA program. Only “good + special” will get you in.

Everyone knows that there are far fewer places than excellent candidates, but not everyone understands the implication of this, which is that the standard “good profile” application is more likely to fail than succeed. I do ding analyses: often there is something clear to point to, but often there is not. I’m left saying “there was no juice,” and I don’t mean this as a carry-all cop-out. What I mean is – putting it another way – the applicant has provided reasons for Adcom not to reject them, covering all bases, saying the right things, but has not given Adcom a compelling reason to say yes.

Easier said than done. What if there is no specialness (distinctiveness) there? “I haven’t done anything that special,” they will say. “I have not won Olympic medals; never hot-air ballooned over the Atlantic; not pulled anyone from a burning car …”

I won’t kid you – it’s great if you’ve done something memorable like this. But there are two types of specialness. Specialness of what you have achieved AND specialness of who you are. Not everyone has the first type in their bag, but everyone can have the second.

Here are examples of the second type:

1. Distinctiveness of insight, self-reflection, and self-understanding. Unfortunately (but fortunately for you, dear applicant) it appears these days that it takes a special person to be willing to reflect on their path, their roles, their identity, their motivations. But this is exactly what Adcom wants of you. That’s why they ask complex, motivational questions. The quality of genuine self-reflection is so unique among 20-something-year-olds (and so highly correlated with real leadership ability) that if you can do it right, you’ll be special just for this.

Note: doing it right means being open and honest, but also circumspect, professional, to-the-point, and focused on the essay question using practical examples and stories. It does not mean wallowing self-indulgently as if your essays were for the Agony Aunt magazine column or your personal diary.

2. Specialness of communication. Writing and (in the interview) speaking is the basis of your interaction with Adcom. Words are your tools. You do not need to be a fancy creative writing major to write a wonderful MBA admissions essay, but there are basic tools of storytelling and essay building that make a piece of text stand out. Be aware how much turgid, timid, repetitive prose your Adcom reader has to wade through. Getting your point across in a bright, clear, and organized way will make you stand out. (More about the how of this to come in future posts, and in my MBA Admissions Strategy book.)

3. Specialness of direction and goals. You can’t change your past. You should present it in the best light, but for better or worse, it’s set. Your future is ahead of you. It can be anything — you can make any claim, within reason. It is a “free hit ” in the sense that you are pretty much invited to distinguish yourself from the crowd through the extent of your ambition, and the relevance, interest, and worthiness of your career path.

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Tags: Adcom, ambition, b-school, career plan, communications, ding analysis, distinctiveness, essay structure, essay writing, interviews, profile development, self-insight, top-tier MBA

Many b-school ask for a resume as part of the applicant’s package. Fair enough. It is professional school and they want to see your professional record. But, in fact, MBA admissions resumes do make subtly different demands and it’s crucial to know what these are (see below).

However, of course much is also identical in a normal resume and an MBA admissions resume, so you should start by getting your resume as good as it can be as per conventional requirements. There are thousands of guides to this, many free on the Web. I won’t dwell on the principles at length here, but be certain to take note of at least these basic points.

A resume should:

• Be in reverse chronological order, education last
• Contain tight clauses rather than full sentences, and not use the first person singular
• Start items with verbs: “Managed at team of…”; “Assigned priority to …”; and so on
• Contain evidence, particularly quantitative amounts of budget managed or people supervised, etc.
• Not contain obvious age, gender, race or other similar bio-data. (More latitude allowed in Europe)
• Be easy on the eye (text at readable point size; layout not too dense)
• Be absolutely, completely error-free

Those are the basics. And this is first base for Adcom too. They want to see you can do this common business communications task effectively.

Once you have that, then it’s time to adapt it to the needs of MBA admissions particularly. Good resume builders will always advise you to show as much experience relevant to the job you are applying for as you can. This it true of an MBA admissions resume too, only doubly so, because doing an MBA heavily implies that you will be transitioning to or accelerating quickly along a management path. It applies a leap in career.

The mistake that most of my clients make on their first draft is to proudly present their past experiences and achievements, which are very often technical or specific to the field they are leaving. Success is always good, but MBA Adcoms don’t really care whether you cracked a complex software conundrum or isolated a biological compound or develped prefabricated housing units. What they care about is whether you will make a good manager or leader, that is, the management portion that was there (or is implied potential) in what you did.

So that is where you should focus: the management, leadership, organizational (teamwork) or innovation implications of your past experience. Don’t say: “Developed molecular compound BN6R in 3 months using ‘BitPro’ software analytics.” Say: “Was part of team that developed unique molecular compound; led presentation to the Board; liaised with company PR in media announcement.” And so on.

The other key part of making your resume an MBA admissions resume is to work carefully with the knowledge that, unlike a typical employer, Adcom has various overlapping sources of information about you – not least all your file data. So you want to augment that rather than simply repeating it, in order to get your file data, resume, and essays to elegantly dovetail rather than simply overlap.

Obviously, your resume must not leave out the basic resume attributes: dates, places, company names, and so on, even if this is already in your file data. But there are often ways to cut out repeating subsidiary information – names of products or service units and so on – that often just “block up” a resume. This should leave space to go longer on quantitative evidence of (management-oriented) experiences and successes. In fact, I counsel admissions clients to put as much quantitative data in the resume as they realistically can which, in turn, frees up the essays to be a little more personal and reflective.

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Tags: communications, essay writing, Leadership, management, mba resume, organization, Teamwork

As an MBA applicant one of the things to get straight is who you are talking to, in general, when you write your essays. This doesn’t mean you should be looking to target or “game” your essays in a narrow sense. But getting your head around who is on the other end is a crucial part of your role in creating effective communication and therein getting admitted.

I was struck by this introduction to a Business Week interview with UCLA Anderson director of MBA admissions, Mae Jennifer Shores. [The full text of the interview is here: UCLA Anderson: Admissions Q&A - BusinessWeek.]

“The assistant dean and director of MBA Admissions at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, 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 at Anderson.”

Every admissions officer is different of course. But what they have in common is, well, it is unlikely that a person plans and studies 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 applicant 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. If your life experience or perspective is limited, and so your ability to reflect deeply and persuasively on your life and career path is therefore also limited, you’re not going to fool the likes of Mae Jennifer Shores.

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Tags: admissions red flags, b-school, career path, communications, essay writing, UCLA Anderson, writing style

Stanford’s essays are notoriously “introspective” and give many applicants trouble. Stanford Adcom do really want to get to know the real you through your writing. This year the flavor is the same, but (and possibly to avoid waffle) some important tweaks have been made in the optional essays to shift the focus squarely towards communicating successful results.

Why results? Because successful outcomes are hard to achieve. Anyone can tell a good story, particularly about what great things they may do in the future. That’s important. But if you can twin it with proof of past success, then it sounds like you are likely to hit your targets in life.

Stanford GSB Application Essays

1. What matters most to you, and why? (750 words recommended)
   
2. What are your career aspirations? How will your education at Stanford help you achieve them? (450 words recommended)
   
3. Answer two of the four questions below. Tell us not only what you did but also how you did it. What was the outcome? How did people respond? Only describe experiences that have occurred during the last three years. (300 words recommended).
   Option A: Tell us about a time when you built or developed a team whose performance exceeded expectations.
   Option B: Tell us about a time when you made a lasting impact on your organization.
   Option C: Tell us about a time when you motivated others to support your vision or initiative.
   Option D: Tell us about a time when you went beyond what was defined, established, or expected

Here is where successful outcomes results-orientation has been upgraded. In Option A they have added “whose performance exceeded expectations.” Option B used to be “Tell us about a time when you felt most effective as a leader.” Now “the lasting impact” demands a results-oriented perspective. Option D remains from last year: this is a directly results-oriented question.

Stanford GSB Application Deadlines are:
Round 1: October 7, 2009
Round 2: January 6, 2010
Round 3: April 7, 2010

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Tags: Adcom, b-school, communications, essay writing, profile development, Stanford GSB, success record, top-10 MBA, writing style

Harvard has released their new essay questions, and deadlines for 2009-10, adding a cover letter essay (optional) which MIT Sloan’s has as a standard request for years. Still only four essays are required for HBS, and the first two compulsory questions remain the same:

1. What are your three most substantial accomplishments and why do you view them as such? (600)
2. What have you learned from a mistake? (400)

For essays essays 3 and 4, applicants now have five topics to choose from (up from four) two of which are new. One , a cover letter “introducing yourself to the Admissions Board,” is equivalent to the MIT Sloan signature essay.

This is no surprise. Cover letters are deeply difficult to get right because they require acute balance between brevity and detail. They test your ability to extract and communicate what is really important – demonstrating a key management skill.

The other new question: “Tell us about a time when you made a difficult decision,” is familiar ground in admissions, and something well covered in MBA Studio’s profiling process that focuses on your key life transitions (why?) and prepares you for questions like this in your essays and interview.

The full set of options for HBS essays 3 & 4 are:

Please respond to two of the following (400-word limit each):
1. What would you like the MBA Admissions Board to know about your undergraduate academic experience?
2. Discuss how you have engaged with a community or organization.
3. Tell us about a time when you made a difficult decision.
4. Write a cover letter to your application introducing yourself to the Admissions Board.
5. What is your career vision and why is this choice meaningful to you?

The deadlines are (all 5pm EST) R1: October 1, 2009; R2: January 19, 2010; R3: April 8, 2010

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Tags: accomplishments, Adcom, admissions red flags, application timeline, career plan, communications, Community Service, cover letter, difficult decision, essay writing, HBS, interviews, mistake, MIT Sloan, profile development, profiling, undergraduate experience

FT.com / Business education – A word in your ear this week reports: “At the Anderson school at UCLA, applicants this year were asked to submit their essays in audio format. Although the scheme was voluntary, some 70 per cent of applicants for the class of 2011 chose to record their essays rather than submit them in a text format, says Mae Jennifer Shores, admissions director. …

“The audio clips have been useful on a number of fronts, says Ms Shores: they show how well the applicants can communicate, how well they have grasped the use of English and how they perform under pressure. Also they demonstrate how creative students can be: some added music – either commercially produced or self-generated.

“It also enabled some students to demonstrate a sense of humour. “It was a joy for us,” says Ms Shores…

“Ms Shores says the Anderson school may choose to make the audio clips compulsory next year, or alternatively it may consider using video clips instead.”

MBA Studio’s take on this:

(1) If given the option of audio or video – Take It! You don’t need to overly interpret “it was a joy for us,” to know what their preference is. Not doing it is almost a red flag.

(2) In the original article the FT reporter also suggests the audio essay is a way of nulliflying the effect of admissions consultants. That’s poor reporting. Consultants can just as easily help applicants with communication in any media.

Responsible admissions advisors advise and edit and coach, like any advisor in any field. MBA Studio, for one, would never cross the line and prepare a candidates submission for them whether written, audio, or video.

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Tags: Adcom, audio essays, coaching, communications, essay writing, ethics, red flags