Blog

*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2015-2016 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season. 

The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College’s essay questions are remarkably straightforward this application season—no curve balls here. You must submit a professional essay explaining your need for an MBA, or more specifically, a Tuck MBA. Then, you must write a leadership experience essay that highlights an instance when you shone. Thereafter, you can craft an optional essay to mitigate any weaknesses in your candidacy, should any exist. With a workable limit of 500 words for each essay, Tuck seems to have created a rather applicant-friendly set of questions. Our analysis of the individual prompts follows…

Tuck Essay 1: What are your short- and long-term goals? Why do you need an MBA to achieve those goals? Why are you interested in Tuck specifically?

Because personal statements are similar from one application to the next, we have produced the mbaMission Personal Statement Guide, which helps applicants write this style of essay for any school. We offer this guide to candidates free of charge. Please feel free to download your copy today.

For a thorough exploration of Dartmouth Tuck’s academic program, merits, defining characteristics, crucial statistics, social life, academic environment, and more, please check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guide to the Tuck School of Business.

Tuck Essay 2: Tell us about your most meaningful leadership experience and what role you played. How will that experience contribute to the learning environment at Tuck?

“Meaningful” is the key word in this essay question. Tuck is not necessarily asking you to share your greatest triumph, but rather your most meaningful experience. For some applicants, the two may be one and the same, but this will not necessarily be the case for all candidates. Therefore, you should think carefully about your boldest achievements as a leader and for each one, consider not just the experience itself, but also the values you represented therein. Tuck is not asking simply for a narrative that shows you have experienced some sort of achievement; the admissions committee needs to know that the incident you have chosen to showcase held some personal value for you.

We suggest that you forego any kind of general introduction and launch into your story right away, immediately placing your reader in the middle of the action. From there, let the narrative unfold naturally, making sure that your actions are very clearly explained and that your anecdote involves an obvious conflict that you either resolved on your own or played a definitive role in resolving. You must then explicitly address why this experience was meaningful to you in a way that is neither trite nor clichéd—and that does not come across like a throwaway statement. In short, writing, “This leadership experience was meaningful to me because I challenged myself and was ultimately successful!” would not work. You must demonstrate self-awareness, and the “meaningful” aspect of the experience must be the clear and logical conclusion of your narrative, yet it must also be a thoughtful exploration of that logical conclusion.

A thoughtful example might be something like this: “Speaking out against our existing bonus plan was clearly risky, because any change in compensation structure risks upsetting the apple cart. I was surprised to find that it galvanized my team, but I also knew that our new structure had to be transparent and fair to work. By giving my team ownership of the design of the new bonus criteria and acting as an approval mechanism, I was able to not only get the best results—our sales clearly took off—but also push myself into a place where I was far more hands-off than ever before. I know that my management style is now different, because I have a new tool to deploy when appropriate.” In this fictitious reflection, the writer explores his motivation and learnings, rather than simply reiterating his essay’s thesis.

Read the rest of this entry  

*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2015-2016 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season. 

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania must have been pleased with the submissions it received in response to its essay questions last year, because the school’s admissions committee is back with the exact same pair of prompts this season. Confusing matters slightly, Wharton also gives you an opportunity to write an “optional essay” of 400 words as well as to discuss “extenuating circumstances” in 250 words. We distinguish between these two essays in our analysis, which follows…

Wharton School Essay 1: What do you hope to gain both personally and professionally from the Wharton MBA? (500 words maximum)

In many ways, this prompt is asking for a typical MBA personal statement. In a mere 500 words, you must discuss your goals, giving very brief context for why they are realistic for you. You will then need to reveal how you will engage with Wharton’s resources in pursuit of these goals, by showing that you truly understand what the school offers and that you have a well-thought-out game plan for immersing yourself in the Wharton experience. You will need to familiarize yourself with the school’s various resources and pinpoint those that truly pertain to you and the direction in which you hope to go—definitely do not just present a list of classes you think sound interesting.

Wharton adds a slight twist to this essay by asking you to discuss personal growth as well. This request might perplex you, but before you get too bewildered, take a step back and ask yourself what personal areas you genuinely need to develop. Maybe you need to challenge yourself to become a better public speaker, so you look forward to debating ideas in the classroom and as part of your learning team—not to mention pushing yourself out of your comfort zone by taking a role in the Wharton Follies. Do not worry about finding the “right” answer for what or how you want to develop personally—no such answer exists!—but focus instead on demonstrating self-awareness and showing that you truly grasp how Wharton in particular will best serve your personal needs.

Because personal statements are generally similar from one application to the next, we have produced the mbaMission Personal Statement Guide, which helps applicants write this style of essay for any school. We offer this guide to candidates free of charge. Please feel free to download your copy today.

And for a thorough exploration of Wharton’s academic program/merits, defining characteristics, crucial statistics, social life, academic environment, and more, please check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guide to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Optional Essay: Please use the space below to highlight any additional information that you would like the Admissions Committee to know about your candidacy. (400 words maximum)

As we noted in our introduction, we feel that this is not a prompt for a typical optional essay, in which you would discuss a problem area (e.g., a poor grade, a low GMAT score, an employment gap), but is instead an opportunity to discuss aspects of your candidacy/profile that you have not yet been able to explore or include in your application—which, in Wharton’s case, is basically the greater part of your entire personal story. We have joked that this is actually a “non-optional optional essay,” because forgoing a chance to flesh out and add color to your application by not writing it simply would not make sense (or be prudent). Interestingly, Harvard Business School noted this year that not a single one of its applicants failed to submit an optional essay last year. We would be curious to know whether Wharton saw similar results with its “optional” essay prompt last season—if the school offered such stats, we imagine that the number would also be miniscule.

Read the rest of this entry  

We are pleased to announce our 2015 MBA Application Boot Camp dates!

Through seven hours of live instruction, two hours of recorded materials, direct review of your work and 30 minutes of one-on-one feedback from your expert instructor, we will guide you step-by-step through the process of creating a compelling MBA application that will reveal your unique character and catch the attention of the MBA admissions committee. In a classroom workshop environment over the course of one weekend day, you will brainstorm for creative ideas, practice the techniques of effective storytelling and resume construction and learn how to structure and draft your essays for your target school. You will also get a head start on your recommendations and interviews in the two additional hours of recorded content and develop a process for completing the rest of your applications. This class is designed to jump-start your application process and get you headed in the right direction.

Throughout the course, you will benefit from direct feedback from both the instructor, an mbaMission Senior Consultant, and your classmates. And after the formal instruction is complete, you will have one half hour of one-on-one coaching from your instructor on some of the specific work you developed during class.

Class Dates:

• Saturday, August 1
•  Saturday, August 15
• Saturday, December 5

All boot camps are held in our online workshop environment from 10:00 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time, with ample breaks. Then, about 7-10 days after your boot camp, you will schedule your one-on-one review session with your mbaMission instructor. The cost of each boot camp is $799.

For more information or to register for one of our MBA Application Boot Camps, click here.

On June 24, GMAC (the organization that makes the GMAT) made two announcements that change the GMAT testing game. Read on to find out what they are!

Canceled scores will NOT show on your score report

In the past, we have counseled students not to worry much about canceling scores, because the vast majority of business schools are interested only in your highest scores (and this is still true). Besides, the school would have been able to see that you took a test and then canceled the scores, so they could guess that you had a “bad” test on record.

As of July 19, if you cancel the scores from a test administration, those scores will not even show up on your record. The schools won’t have any idea that you took a GMAT that day!

As such, the conversation about when to cancel becomes trickier. I need to think about this some more, but I think I am going to advise my students to keep any scores that are within 100 points of their goal scores.

Why? There are two possible scenarios. #1: you eventually get to your goal score. In this case, schools will see that you buckled down, studied, and really improved. Obviously, that’s a win. #2: you do not eventually reach your goal score. (Perhaps your goal score is unrealistic.) In this case, at least you still do have this other score on your record. It would be terrible to have taken the test three times, with scores in a certain range, but to have canceled all those scores; now you have nothing on record!

As I mentioned, GMAC has announced that this policy change will take effect on July 19. It will apply retroactively. If you have not yet sent your scores to a particular school, then when you do finally send the scores, they will remove the canceled scores from your report.

The re-take period has been shortened to 16 days (from 31)

As of July 19, instead of waiting 31 days to re-take the exam, you’ll only have to wait 16 days. This is fantastic for someone who got sick during the exam or got really nervous and seriously messed up the timing.

Note that this could create a problem for those students who really should take longer to study for a re-take but instead try to cram it in too fast. In my experience, most people need a solid 4 to 8 weeks (if not longer!) before a re-take. Maybe 10% to 15% of the students with whom I talk could reasonably re-take in 2.5 to 3 weeks and expect to get a different score. So just be careful about this one—it’s a double-edged sword.

Thanks, GMAC!

These changes are huge so I just wanted to say that. Oh, and if you want to read the full official announcement, here you go.

*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2015-2016 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season. 

Once again, the University of Virginia’s Darden School has started the MBA application season with a single essay question. Before you get too comfortable, though, we must inform you that for the past two years, when the school has released its official application, it has snuck in few additional queries—albeit short ones—to which applicants must respond. Last year, for example, the Darden essay prompts related to personal contributions and career goals, thereby requiring two mini essays totaling 400 words. So, we suggest that you begin working on the primary essay now, but keep in mind that you may not be done with Darden quite so easily and will likely need to pen several more brief pieces to complete the school’s application. We will update our essay analysis here after Darden releases its full application.

Essay 1: Describe the most important professional feedback you have received and how you responded to it. (500 words maximum)

With this question, Darden definitely wants to know more than just what others may think of your professional capabilities. The admissions committee also wants evidence that you are capable of reflecting, learning, and growing. If you are not able to do this, the school might assume that you are simply not cut out to become a standout manager. To craft an effective essay response to this query, focus on describing a “before and after” situation in which the suggestion or input you received served as an inflection point that triggered a dramatic change in you. If you start your essay by simply leading with the feedback you received, you will kill any mystery in your story. Instead, consider relating a narrative that involves a lot of momentum in one direction that is suddenly derailed when you are disarmed by someone else’s input—input that leads to clear and tactical change.

One thing to keep in mind is that feedback is a response. Many applicants will mistake or interpret the word “feedback” in Darden’s query to mean “advice,” but these are two very different things. If your father always told you, for example, that “hard work is the most important thing in life,” that aphorism may have indeed shaped your professional career, but it would not necessarily be considered feedback offered in response to or in light of a specific effort. Some candidates might confuse general advice with feedback and in doing so, will essentially fail to answer the school’s question. Do not let this be you! So, to reiterate, ensure that the incident you choose to highlight in your essay has that element of response and change, and your submission should be an effective one.

And for a thorough exploration of the UVA Darden academic program/merits, defining characteristics, crucial statistics, social life, academic environment and more, please check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guide to the UVA Darden School of Business Administration. 

The Next Step—Mastering Your UVA Darden Interview: Many MBA candidates find admissions interviews stressful and intimidating, but mastering this important element of the application process is definitely possible—the key is informed preparation. And, on your way to this high level of preparation, we offer our free Interview Primers to spur you along! Download your free copy of the UVA Darden Interview Primer today.