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The Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) may be known for educating great innovators—think Phil Knight and Jacqueline Novogratz, just for starters—but this year, the school’s admissions office is leaving the innovating to others and keeping its essay questions the same as last year’s. In fairness, maybe we should assume that the admissions office finished its innovation phase years ago and has iterated and tweaked its essay prompts enough to have arrived at its version of perfection. Who knows? And more importantly, does it even matter? The Stanford GSB’s task is to craft the questions, but your task is to answer them. With this essay analysis, we have done our best to help you do so successfully…
Essay A: What matters most to you, and why? (School-suggested word count of 750)
For this essay, we would like you to:
Do some deep self-examination, so you can genuinely illustrate who you are and how you came to be the person you are.
Share the insights, experiences, and lessons that shaped your perspectives, rather than focusing merely on what you’ve done or accomplished.
Write from the heart, and illustrate how a person, situation, or event has influenced you.
Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.
One of the most common questions we hear from business school applicants is “What type of candidate does [Harvard/Stanford/Wharton/Chicago Booth/etc.] want?” Of course, the answer to that question is that schools do not want just one type of applicant. Instead, each MBA program is striving to assemble a remarkably diverse class and thus wants to be able to identify distinct qualities in each candidate.
Although simplifying a school’s approach to admissions (e.g., “Kellogg wants team players”) can be appealing, avoid trying to fit into some perceived mold—doing so will only mask your true distinct qualities and strengths. Rather than pandering to a stereotype with regard to your personal/professional experiences or changing your stated goals to match an imagined bias on the part of an MBA admissions committee, you should spend a great deal of time brainstorming to best understand how you can showcase your unique traits. By demonstrating that you offer something different from other candidates, you have the greatest chance of succeeding.
With regard to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this blog series,Manhattan Prep’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense.
Did you know that, on any particular problem, roughly 80% of your learning comes after you have picked the answer? Turns out, we do not learn much while in the process of doing a problem, especially when the clock is ticking. We are just trying to remember (and use!) everything that we learned before we started working on that problem.
Afterward, though, we can take all the time we want to figure out how to get better—that is where we really learn. Did I understand what they were asking? Did I know how to do the math or reasoning necessary to get to the answer? Is there a more efficient way to do that work? Did I make any mistakes or fall into any traps? If so, which ones and why? How could I make an educated guess?
In a nutshell: if you are not spending at least as long reviewing a question as you spent doing it in the first place, then you are not maximizing your learning.
Take a look at this article: How to Analyze a Practice Problem. It contains a list of questions to ask yourself when reviewing a problem. Take note of a couple of things:
“I had an internship from June to August of 2014. Will the admissions committee count it as work experience?”
“I was running a lab during my Master’s program—is that part of my total number of months of work experience?”
“I ran a small business that ultimately failed—will I get credit for my time as an entrepreneur?”
Business schools have not seriously considered a candidate’s number of months of work experience as a factor in admissions decisions for a long time. In fact, with such programs as Harvard Business School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business increasingly open to younger candidates, work experience on a strictly quantitative level is actually being devalued at some schools. A candidate’s quantity of work experience is just not relevant—quality is what is important. An “average” employee who has merely fulfilled expectations during a five-year stint at a Fortune 500 company could certainly be said to be at a disadvantage compared with an individual who has made the most of a three-year stint elsewhere and has been promoted ahead of schedule. Think about it—which of the two would you admit?
With regard to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this blog series,Manhattan Prep’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense.
Application season will soon be here again, and many candidates are gearing up to take the GMAT. Are you aware that during the last seven to 14 days before you take the real test, your entire study focus changes? Most people have no idea and keep doing more of the same—trying to fix weaknesses and lift their scores. While that should be your focus up until the last week or two, if you continue to focus on weaknesses during the last length of time, you will not likely be able to maximize your score on test day.
Why? You have been studying an enormous number of things, right? (Sometimes, it seems like it will never end!) Toward the end of our study time frame, we have to take time to do two very important things: build a game plan and conduct a comprehensive review.
To learn how to construct a game plan, take a look at the first part of this article: “The Last 14 Days: Building Your Game Plan (Part 1).” That article contains a link to the second half, which discusses how to conduct a review of your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your timing and other strategies.
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