As a former MBA applicant and a consulting firm-sponsored business school alumna, here are my notes:
What do admissions committees care about? Admissions committees care about answering two questions which affect perception and ranking of their school:
- Will this applicant be employed with a good salary within months of graduating from the MBA? ⇒ This impacts their employment reports, including three-month employment rate data, salaries, and other statistics about industries, roles, etc.
- If I give this applicant an offer, will they accept? ⇒ This impacts acceptance rate (how many people are admitted out of those who applied) and yield rate (how many applicants who receive offers accept).
In optimizing for these metrics, committees are looking for sure bets - applicants likely to be successful and choose their school if given an offer.
How to approach the essay? As a result, the essay is not like those for undergraduate degrees; admissions committees are not looking for a sob story or personal growth tale from childhood. Rather, it is a cut-and-dry persuasive argument. The goal is to make it obvious that you will succeed by including these components:
- I have a goal to do x
- In my career so far, I have gotten to y
- However, I am missing z (e.g., skills, network, experience) for which I need an MBA
- Specifically I need a, b, and c from your school ⇒ Online research, interviews with alumni, and in-person tours will yield relevant classes, clubs & programs, and other features unique to their MBA offering. This specificity shows an active interest in the school, which you should have regardless if you are applying.
- With this professional (and personal growth) through the transformational MBA experience, I will be closer to achieving my goal
Boom! You get to the end of this structure, how can they not be convinced?
One resource I found particularly helpful during the application process is ApplicantLab. I did not use this tool for my first round of applications and it showed; I got into 0 schools. In the second round, I got into 80% of the schools I applied to, using this tool and the other tips listed here. For a fraction of the cost of admissions consultants (~$300), it provides guidance around how to approach applications and chunk the process into easier-to-swallow steps so it isn’t so daunting. It’s a great way to do a little bit of work every day starting early versus having to do it all in one go.
Take credit for the appropriate scope in your resume. While I was taking credit for the day-to-day tasks that I had full ownership of, this did not accurately reflect the larger picture I was contributing to in my roles on my projects. I had to reframe my accomplishments to show the results of the contributions I was making. For example, instead of talking about how I built three machine learning models, I reframed it to show the magnitude of the impact the models would make in dollar amounts, future sales, etc. There’s a lot of resume advice out there already that I won’t repeat here around quantifying impact wherever possible, leading with active verbs, formatting, and so on.
Strategically submit applications. In the first round, apply to one school that you have a good chance at and another that might be a reach. If you get into one and not the other, the story is likely not the issue. If you don’t get into either, you might want to revise the basis of your story, your resume, and other components of your application before applying to other schools.
Applications may contain an optional question to list other MBA programs you’re considering. I personally don’t believe it’s harmful to fill this out truthfully. The larger takeaway I had when I was going through the list of schools I was applying to was this: a mentor mentioned that one school was vastly different in location, size, program focus, etc. from the other schools. I realized I was only applying to it because of its ranking and not because of a genuine interest in the program. ⇒ Examine your list critically to see whether you even know what you want, so that you are able to communicate it effectively to others.