The MBA Admissions Studio

MBA Studio’s mantra is, “when Adcom talks, listen.” Don’t just hear. Really, really listen because these are the people who are choosing the few and dinging the many. The Chicago-Booth 2011 MBA application essay questions were posted on July 7, along with a post from Rose Martinelli, Chicago-Booth’s Associate Dean for Student Recruitment and Admissions, explaining the thinking behind each, including the new “blank pages” essay:

“Our essays continue to be a wonderful way for us to learn about what makes our applicants unique and determine if they are the right fit for Chicago Booth. Here is some insight as to what we’re looking for in each essay.”

1. The Admissions Committee is interested in learning more about you on both a personal and professional level. Please answer the following (maximum of 300 words for each section):
a. Why are you pursuing a full-time MBA at this point in your life?
b. Define your short and long term career goals post MBA.
c. What is it about Chicago Booth that is going to help you reach your goals?
d. REAPPLICANTS ONLY: Upon reflection, how has your thinking regarding your future, Chicago Booth, and/or getting an MBA changed since the time of your last application?

“These short essays will require you to know yourself. You will need to understand where you have been and where you are going. Before you begin drafting the responses to these essays, take some time for self-reflection. Why do you want to return to school? Why is the MBA the right degree for you?

“We know that many of you will use your MBA experience to help you figure out what kind of job to pursue next. Even though your future career plans may not be clear at this time, you should still be able to discuss your goals and how they relate to obtaining an MBA.

“For our reapplicants, question 1d is where you can tell us what, if anything, has changed since the time of your last application. What has occurred in your life or career that has either reinforced or changed your goals? What lessons have you learned or how have you grown since you last applied to Chicago Booth?”

2. Chicago Booth is a place that challenges its students to stretch and take risks that they might not take elsewhere. Tell us about a time when you took a risk and what you learned from that experience (maximum of 750 words).

“You’re probably wondering, “What kind of risk do you want me to discuss?” To be honest, we’re not looking for one kind of risk in particular. It can be a risk related to your professional, academic or personal life. It can be a risk that resulted in either a positive or negative outcome. We want to hear about a time when you challenged yourself and what you learned from that experience. How has that experience influenced your future actions?”

3. At Chicago Booth, we teach you HOW to think rather than what to think. With this in mind, we have provided you with “blank pages” in our application. Knowing that there is not a right or even a preferred answer allows you to demonstrate to the committee your ability to navigate ambiguity and provide information that you believe will support your candidacy for Chicago Booth.

“Earlier this year, there was some discussion as to whether we would continue using the presentation as part of our evaluation process. With the presentation proving to be such an important tool in helping us determine who is a good fit for Chicago Booth, we decided it was necessary to include in our 2011 application. However, this year, we are giving applicants even greater freedom to decide what information they want to convey in the presentation.

“Since we’re providing you with “blank pages,” what you decide to address in your presentation is up to you. Look at the other aspects of your application. Are there messages or activities that you have not yet been able to communicate to the committee? If so, then the presentation will be an opportunity for you to provide us with this type of information. After reviewing your presentation, we want to have a better understanding of who you are and how you think.

“Also, please remember that it is the content – not the design – that should be the focus of the presentation. We understand that not everyone is a design guru. So, whether it’s through photos, images, graphs, or just words, the goal is to communicate your messages as effectively as possible.”

So what is Rose saying? The essays tell her and her committee who among the applicants is unique, and why so, and (conversely) whether they will fit in. They demand you know yourself well, that is provide evidence of genuine self-reflection. They value risk-taking and the self-insight it brings. Like many other programs these days, Chicago-Booth doesn’t expect you to have a career blueprint, but does expect you to have thought carefully about your goals, and therefore why you need an MBA now.

When it comes to the blank pages essay, Martinelli hasn’t said much, at least not yet. The core of it is clearly contained in the term “navigate ambiguity.” My take is Chicago-Booth wants to see what the applicant can produce in unguided, unstructured situations. Are you just good at following instructions (such as essay prompts); or are you even more capable? That is, can you determine and select compelling material to share with Adcom without any specific guidance. Can you set the agenda rather than merely follow it?

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Tags: 'blank pages' essay, 'Why an MBA?' essay, Chicago-Booth GSB, MBA Admissions, MBA goals essay, MBA reapplicants

MBA Podcaster’s MBA Pod TV provides this 10-min take-out from Q&A at a recent Forte Foundation-hosted MBA Admission Directors Panel:

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In the video, Pat Harrison refers to one of the key mistakes applicants make in MBA admissions: they leave Adcom to make connections and assumptions in joining the dots (as to their prior education choices, career path decisions, reasons for wanting an MBA, etc.) Doing this leaves applicants open to clumsy misinterpretation. As Harrison puts it: Adcom will “guess wrong!”

The solution is not just to be clear. That’s obviously good, but just first base. They key way to get beyond the problem is to consciously take care to provide insight into the reasoning and decision-making behind each important past (and planned future) choice in your life and career.

Other topics covered in the video segment are: how to strengthen an MBA interview; who to get letters of recommendations from; appropriate use of the optional essay; and managing “over-sharing” of personal information.

The panel is Pat Harrison, Associate Director of Admissions, Tuck School of Business; Sharon Thompson, Director of Diversity Initiatives, Duke Fuqua School of Business; Analilia Silva, Associate Director of Admission Kelley School of Business, Indiana University; and Erin Nickelsburg, Director of Admissions and Recruitment, Wisconsin School of Business.

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Tags: admissions red flags, Duke-Fuqua, letter of recommendation, mba interview, optional essay, Tuck

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.

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

The Carey School? Never heard of it? It is Johns Hopkins University’s school of business, as renamed in 2006 when the university received a $50 million endowment from banker William Polk Carey.

It’s well known that JHU has been a bit of an oddity — a top-tier university with relatively little offering in business management. It has had a part-time program available at its Washington, D.C., campus, but nothing that attracted serious attention. Now that’s all changed. As reported in BusinessWeek, Johns Hopkins University is launching a new MBA program in August, in Baltimore, and it intends to become one of the world’s best.

The admissions implications are this: for a while — a few years — Carey will be relatively easy to get into. It will quickly move up the ranking based on the stellar JHU brand (it is particularly renown medical and public health schools) and soon will be as hard to gain admission as at any top program. If you’re prepared to think a little creatively, and move quickly, you can have a top-tier MBA ticket even if you’re likely to face a lot of dings from the established schools.

As BW reports, the Carey School is seeking to distinguish itself by designing a curriculum that will capitalize on Johns Hopkins’ strength in medicine and public health, have a focus on emerging markets and ethics, and encourage innovation and entrepreneurship.

Yes, there will be challenges. As a prospective student you should be aware that the Carey alumni network will be nascent at best, and career services won’t have a lot of clout in the market. The school’s inaugural dean, Yash Gupta, is busy recruiting top faculty and still working on AACSB accreditation, and this could all fail. But, brand capital in the bank says chances are it will succeed. And, as with Oxford-Said and Cambridge-Judge in the early days, top-tier admissions is currently there to be had even if you’re a long-shot applicant.
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Tags: AACSB, Business Week, Cambridge-Judge, Carey, Johns Hopkins, MBA Admissions, MBA alumni, Oxford-Said, top-10 MBA

I try to keep this MBA Admissions blog fresh and personal (like an MBA essay should be!) and don’t just rehash or repost keyword-rich MBA admissions news. In this spirit I offer you a bit of whimsey from The Wall Street Journal “Speakeasy” where Teddy Wayne explains how his job as an MBA essay editor provided the inspiration for his novel Kapitoil.

He says:

“Of the many jobs I held during my desultory postgraduate days in the early 2000s, the one that made the deepest impression was editing MBA application essays for a Web site. For two and a half years, I downloaded essays from strangers, made comments and suggestions, copyedited grammatical errors and uploaded them without any human contact. It wasn’t very rewarding work — but it did help inspire my debut novel, Kapitoil.”

So here’s insight number one. Dare I point out that if you go the big-MBA-admissions-consulting-shop route, this is the kind of person who is reviewing your essays. The business model is: your work is outsourced to unemployed graduates in the arts and humanities. These editors may not be empowered to have interactive contact with you, and they may not be highly motivated. (Yes, there are exceptions.)

Anyway, Wayne goes on to his main point:

“The applicants’ knowledge of business jargon was deeper than my own. Everything was “leveraged”; “skill sets” were “broadened”; they were all striving to achieve “short-and long-term objectives.”

“What if, I began thinking, I wrote a novel from the perspective of a character who, like these business-school aspirants, was so immersed in the language of late capitalism, so caught up in its buzzwords and phrasings, that he not only wrote and spoke in it, but thought in it?”

… “We all do it, consciously or not. Friends who are low-paid writers speak about how “at the end of the day,” “the bottom line” is that we have to “touch base” and reach for the “low-hanging fruit.”

“The language of commerce has now fully cemented itself in our vernacular, functioning the way sports, military, mafia and street slang has in the past: as a shorthand for when we’re too unimaginative or lazy to come up with original sentences.”

Here’s insight number two. Adcom members are as sensitive to business jargon as Wayne is, and view it in an equally dim light. Read Kapitoil. Have a laugh. But don’t talk like that in your MBA essays or interview.

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Tags: admissions red flags, b-school, business jargon, mba essay editor, WSJ

MBA applicants are routinely asked “the failure question” either in MBA essays or interviews. It always takes more or less the same form: “tell us about a time you failed and what you learned.”

As I’ve written before here, and in my book, the test is not to see if you have any weaknesses or failures. Everyone does. It is to see whether you are mature enough to recognize your failures and so address the implied weaknesses. Also, failures are more likely to occur in new, challenging tasks, so if you present “no failures” you are simply telling Adcom that you haven’t been adequately challenged.

The other day I picked up an interesting take on failure — creating “intelligent failure” — in the article Are You Squandering Your Intelligent Failures? by Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath, on the HBR Blog.

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Tags: Columbia GSB, Failure essay, HBR, HBS, management, Weakness essay

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

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

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

NYT, March 7, By Robbie Brown (extract) — Last year, Mr. Yankson (UV Darden) was turned down for summer internships by about 15 recession-plagued banks and ended up working for an education nonprofit organization. This year, as he sought a full-time job, Wells Fargo quickly gave him the response he wanted: When can you start?

“The banks this year kept saying, ‘It’s a good year,’ ‘We just approved a lot of hiring,’ ‘The market is clearing up,’ ” Mr. Yankson said. “It was a completely different experience.”

With banks climbing out of the recession, more business students across the country are finding banking jobs and internships, enrolling in finance clubs and going on class trips to Wall Street, universities say.

… On a recent interview day at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, students in pinstriped suits and polished shoes waited anxiously for meetings with representatives from J. P. Morgan and BB&T Capital Markets.

The competition would be steep — with dozens of students applying for each internship — but less selective than in 2009. The number of banks interviewing at Darden this year increased 20 percent, and the number of job offers so far has risen 33 percent, the school said.

“There’s reason for students to be optimistic,” said Tracy Handler, a spokeswoman for the M.B.A. Career Services Council, an association of business school career advisers. “Any signs of recovery are modest. But business schools are looking ahead and seeing a light at the end of what is now a pretty short tunnel.”

Full Story in the New York Times.
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Tags: BB&T, Darden, J.P. Morgan, MBA Career Services Council, MBA internships, mba interview, mba recruitment, New York Times, UV Darden

There’s a heartwarming story for MBAs and MBAs-to-be in yesterday’s Financial Times by Herminia Ibarra, Urs Peyer and Morten T. Hansen, professors at INSEAD. (I must say, surely only among academics does it take three (3) people to write one short Op-Ed piece in the FT, but I digress.)

They say: “The global recession may be almost over but the debate rumbles on. How much were MBA-trained executives really to blame? As MBA professors, we heard arguments that we had been teaching the wrong models, neglecting ethics, forgetting common sense, sitting in ivory towers made of spreadsheets and generally nurturing greed. We listened to the charge that business schools were guilty of short-term thinking, especially when evaluating leadership. MBA graduates, so the argument went, were looking for quick riches.

“So, when we came up with the idea of a ranking of chief executives based on performance over an entire career, we also decided to check the myth of the value -destroying MBA against a large and meticulously compiled data set.

“When you rank the top chief executives in the world, based on return on shareholder investment and change in market capitalisation over their entire time in the job… four of our top 10 have the letters M, B and A after their names. Could it be possible that this much-criticised degree helps a business leader to add long-term value after all?

“Our analysis of 1,109 chief executives from 1995 to 2009 found that those with MBAs performed, on average, better than those without. The difference was not large but it was statistically significant. When we drilled down one more level, we discovered that those who had reached the position of chief executive before the age of 50 benefited particularly from a business school education. In fact, on average, having an MBA sends such individuals a full 100 places higher on our list.

“Of course, the term average is important. There are many high-performing chief executives without an MBA. But the overall tendency among the business leaders we analysed is for an MBA to correlate with a higher position in the ranking, especially for those who get the top job at a comparatively young age.

“Our data set does not explain why this should be the case but there are some obvious benefits to going to business school: an MBA gives you better all-round skills; it buys you credibility and it allows you to build a personal power alumni network.”

Full text here.

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Tags: alumni network, Financial Times, FT, global recession, INSEAD, mba, ranking