The MBA Admissions Studio

The military style and ethos of management is usually best avoided in MBA admissions, because it is not subtle or complex enough for the real world of business. If Adcom is interested in your leadership style (and they are) they are interested in how you are able to motivate people without threats or force or heirarchy. To go up to someone’s desk and scream in their ear is hardly going to work in your office. In business, pulling rank usually does more harm than good.

However, occasionally there is something to be gleaned from the military, and here is a video worth two minutes of your time. It features Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL, now CEO of ‘The Mission Continues.’

He describes his epiphany during ‘Hell Week’ when it dawned on him: “This isn’t about me. This test is about my ability to lead and be of service to the people who are in that tent right now.” The irony is he then falls asleep…

Jokes aside, here’s the point from an MBA admissions perspective:

A lot of applicants describe corporate hazing of one type or another. That is, the long hours worked, vertical learning curves ascended, all-nighters pulled, jetlag endured, and so on — in terms of personal gain. “I suffered, I showed perseverance and came though it, and learned a lot, and now I’m a better person.” That’s okay as far as it goes.

But the real admissions jackpot comes from being able to see it and frame it in group terms. How the ‘pain’ was all about bearing the load with the rest of the group, and achieving goals for the group. That is, how your effort was about more than just you, therefore implying what you will do with your MBA will also be more than just about you.

In this regard, note items 2 and 3 on the MIT Sloan guidance (which enumerates principles equally true of all top tier MBA admissions.)

“We seek to enroll well-rounded individuals with the following characteristics:

• Success in your professional endeavors (whether you are well into your career or a college senior)
• Ability to collaborate to accomplish a common goal
• Drive to inspire others to achieve success
• Vision to seek alternative solutions to existing challenges
• Pursuit of meaningful goals”

Tags: b-school, management, MBA applicant, MIT Sloan, team player, Teamwork

The sad news today is Steve Jobs is dead, and America and the world has lost one of the most capable and innovative leaders ever born.

Steve Jobs’ Commencement address to graduating Stanford students in 2005 is the kind of orienting motivational document that is worth reading from time to time no matter who you are and what you do. But, in the spirit of better MBA applications, which is what this blog is 100 percent about, it’s worth going there today specifically to draw some lessons.

Lesson 1: Structure

In his opening few words, Jobs tells his audience: “Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.” What is he doing? He’s saying, here is the structure of what’s to come. Three stories. He’s signposted it in just one sentence, with no artifice and no fuss, and via these few words everyone knows what is coming and where they are all the way through the program. That’s being kind to your listener (or reader.) Kindness is often rewarded.

Lesson 2: Stories

Jobs needs to communicate fairly high-level and potentially abstract notions to do with choice, motivation, learning, patience, luck, love – and so on — to students. He could (so many do…) say something like: “It’s really important to be motivated and stay focused, and keep your focus when things go against you because sometimes adversity has good consequences you can’t see at the time …” Yawn.

Instead, he tells stories – relating concrete situations and events about himself. You are pulled into his life, prickled by the detail, listening or reading on willingly to know what happened next and how it turned out.

The stories make the point he wants to make all by themselves. Just one example: He doesn’t say: “I had no money when I dropped out of college, but I didn’t need much at that age.” He says: “I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.”

Relevant, colorful story detail will make your interesting to your Adcom reader or MBA admissions interviewer; being interesting will get you noticed; getting noticed will go a long way to getting you admitted to the b-school you are applying to.

Lesson 3: Why an MBA?

Job’s again: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

When you answer the ‘Why-an-MBA’ question that all applications ask, this is what is at stake: not how will b-school put you on the next rung of a ladder, but how it will put you on or further along your life path. You don’t need a career blueprint – lot’s will change. But you do need to show the Admissions Committee some sense of what your heart and intuition calls you courageously to become, and how the MBA from their school will help you get there.

* See also How to Dent the Universe (or how to apply for an MBA like Steve Jobs would)

Tags: b-school, career plan, MBA admissions committee, MBA applicant, MBA blogs, MBA Essays, Stanford, Steve Jobs, why-an-MBA

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

It’s July, and a new admissions cycle year starts at the MBA Admissions Studio. As it happens, during my off-season sabbatical time — which new clients have patiently waited out (thank you) I’ve had numerous emails of the “I-was-dinged-last-year, what-did-I do-wrong?” type. So this seems as good a place as any to start the discussion this year, in the spirit of helping those dinged last year apply better, and those who are applying for the first time understand the category of potential pitfalls.

There are three types of ding:

1. You were dinged because there is something or things in your background that make you just not good enough or right enough for the program, in comparison with the average standard of admitted applicants. This could be because of lack of high-quality or brand-company work experience, a low GMAT or GPA, being too young or old at the time of application, and so on. In this category, in other words, your ding is caused by something or things that you are, or are not. You fail to meet minimum qualification standards.
2. You are good enough and fit well — you are a competitive, qualified applicant — but applied badly in that you made a clear mistake or raised a red flag in your application. Your ding was caused by something specific you said or did not say.
3. You are good enough and fit well — you are a competitive, qualified applicant – and you didn’t make any obvious application mistakes, but applied badly in that your admissions value was not clear or somehow you didn’t stand out. This is the category of applicant that Adcom refers to when it says “we had many qualified applicants and we couldn’t take them all.” Your ding was caused by other qualified competitors applying better than you did in a system where there are more applicants than places.

What are the fixes? Let me take them one by one.

In the first situation, the problem is choice of school, or career timing of application or both. Bear in mind that everyone has weaknesses — I’ve never seen an applicant without weaknesses (though they don’t always know it.) But here we are talking about aggregate weakness in an applicant such that, no matter how they apply, they are going to be dinged because they don’t meet the standard of generally accepted applicant. The dinged candidate “doesn’t have the goods” so, logically, the only way to solve the problem is to get the goods, or lower one’s school sights, or both. Getting the goods is realistic only if age is on your side and you can take a few years to drive up your MBA admissions value via new career experiences, greater responsibility or new leadership roles, promotions or awards, new extra-mural participation, and so on.

The second situation is the easiest of the three to deal with. Here the solution has to do recognition — recognizing in advance what creates or exacerbates problems in an application, so-called “red flags,” and staying well clear of these. These problems are, in theory at least, easily fixable once recognized (assuming none of them point to deeper category 1 problems.)

The third type of ding is all about the soupy stuff of competitive admissions. Here the applicant didn’t do anything wrong, just didn’t do as well as others in the application process. The solution has to do with applying all the hard and soft value-enhancement and value-communications techniques that make an application ‘pop’ from the pile. This is not easy, and varies on a case-by-case basis. But there are general principles that apply in optimizing any application.

I’ve written extensively on this site and in my book on the profile principles and communication strategies that can be applied, including creating the foundation of a solid yet differentiated application platform and driving up candidate value and uniqueness through use of memorable proof examples and stories. More to follow as the weeks roll by to R1 deadlines.

Tags: admissions red flags, GMAT, GPA, MBA Admissions, MBA applicant, MBA dinged, MBA extra-murals

Applicants turn to the MBA Admission Studio as a source of reliable information and valuable advice on the MBA admissions process. As a member of the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants (AIGAC), which is conducting a survey to help us better understand MBA applicants’ goals and needs, I’d like to invite all readers of the MBA Studio site to share their school selection priorities and views on the MBA application process.

The online survey should take just 10 minutes to complete. We at AIGAC would love to receive as many responses as possible before the closing date of Wednesday, March 30^th — and will be giving away an iPod Touch and two iPod Shuffles as a token of our gratitude. We’ll also be sharing the results of the survey this spring to help candidates better understand the nature of today’s applicant pool.

Thanks in advance for your participation.

Simply click here to begin: http://surveys.marketpointsinc.com/mba11.asp

Tags: AIGAC, iPod, MBA Admissions, MBA applicant

As promised, more on MBA admissions interviewing. The difficulty with interviewing (of all types) is that it is a test of “total communication.” That is, it is not just what you say, but how you say it. And this how includes judgment of your expression, tone, confidence, body language, and so on.

The further difficulty is that interviewers “read” these communication signals differently in different contexts and cultures. Now, this is not an anthropology dissertation, and I have no expertise in interview styles across the world, so for clarity let me just stick to US cultural expectations and norms, which are often confusing for foreigners (and Americans too!)

MBA applicants interviewing for a US business school face a contradictory injunction. They are expected to be very formal in dress and politesse before and around the interview, but at the same time (read the guidance on the b-school sites if you don’t believe me) the interview is positioned in *very* familiar terms, as a get-to-know-you event, a conversation, a friendly chat, etc.

This is a “mixed message” if ever there was one. Do they want formal or informal? Both, in different ways. You need to be able to play the formal game, but also be “American” in your ability to be casual and egalitarian across age and authority lines. So while you are dressed like a stuffed chicken, you can still, with permission, call your interviewer “Bob” and so on.

This is, all-in-all, a hard thing to get right for 30 min. One of the images I like to use in interview rehearsal is to get applicants to visualize themselves in a “fireside chat.” That is, to strive for a balanced friendly conversation that bubbles along merrily as if one was having a totally relaxed 1-to-1 in intimate surroundings. This is fake of course, because underneath you have your agenda (transmitting admissions value) and they have theirs (judging you.)

The way get the conversation to bubble along is to make sure there is never a one-way question-vs.-answer dynamic. Bear in mind you can’t ask questions of the interviewer until the very end, when he or she will (formally) signal that this is now appropriate.

So how do you do that achieve a more balanced conversation? One way is not to stop dead when you’re done answering one question, but rather look for a natural segue between topics, ending your answer to one question by saying “which leads me to tell you about…” and then marching off onto new terrain you want to cover. For example, you can end your answer to a “why-an-MBA” question by saying “Which leads me to: why MIT-Sloan? …” Or you can finish a question about managing a tricky report by moving on to how this experience will benefit your team-building skills on campus, and so on.

It’s a technique that has to be used subtly, scanning for visual confirmation that you have permission and are on-topic in broad terms. But if used well, the interview will have a better “formal-casual balance,” and that’s to your great advantage.

Tags: American, body language, MBA Adcom, MBA applicant, MBA interviewer, MIT Sloan, US business school, why-an-MBA

Topmba.com recently asked for my brief and succinct summary input for an upcoming story on MBA application essays and letters of recommendation. If nothing else it was a challenge in writing tightly. And as it turned out, it provides a summary of some key deliverables and concerns, so I thought I’d share the experience here:

What should/shouldn’t MBA applicants include in their admissions essays?
Applicants should include points that carry admissions value. What is value? Any attributes or experiences that are relevant to peer education and not common in the applicant pool; anything that will get you noticed or make you stand out as a worthwhile addition to the classroom, on campus, and one day in the alumni network. What not to include? Don’t praise the school (they know they’re good); don’t repeat items on your resume; don’t denigrate anyone or any organization; don’t whine about life’s obstacles or blame others. Finally, don’t state the obvious — if you are talking about water you needn’t add that it is also wet.

Who should/shouldn’t they ask for letters of recommendation?
Reco’s are Adcoms only reliable way of finding out what you are like in a professional environment. Therefore, do not ask one of an old professor, your yoga instructor, your priest and so on. You need a reco from your current work supervisor (if not, explain why not) and other reco’s should come from other current or past professional supervisors who know you well. Don’t go for someone with a great title, who hardly knows you. Whoever you get — make him or her give examples and specific instances to back up their claims about you. Brief them on your application content so their communication is consonant with your own. Ask them to to address and reassure Adcom on any weaknesses apparent in your resume, if applicable.

What are the biggest mistakes that many applicants make in their essays?
One common mistake is to try be like a “business school applicant.” There is no one such thing; you will just sound generic and boring. Be yourself, and you will sound genuine and alive and interesting-to-meet. Don’t forget to give specific examples which create interest for the reader. Further, it’s pointless to claim an experience or attribute without giving some proof (a specific example or event or data or awards that demonstrates the attribute is real.) Also, don’t imagine that your reader is a financial or technical person. Adcoms members have a real mix of backgrounds, but at heart they are human resources professionals, and MBA admissions is an HR function.

What are optional essays? Should applicants bother writing them, as they are optional?
Optional essays are used to mitigate a weakness or explain something that may be confusing about your background or career path. They are not a way to get more text in. It is a statement of strength as an applicant not to have to use the optional essay. Only use it if you have something specific to address, and when you’ve addressed it, stop writing — there is no requirement to go to full essay length.

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Tags: b-school, essay writing, mba, MBA Adcom, MBA applicant, MBA recommendations, optional essay