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Many MBA candidates struggle to define their long-term goals. Although your short-term goals should be relatively specific, your long-term goals can be broad and ambitious. Regardless of what your short- and long-term goals actually are, what is most important is presenting a clear “cause and effect” relationship between them. The MBA admissions committee will be confused by a long-term goal that lacks grounding. Still, you should not interpret this to mean that you need to choose one industry and state that you will stay in it for your entire career. You can present any career path that excites you—again, as long as you also demonstrate a logical path to achieving your goals.

For example, many candidates discuss having ambitions in the field of management consulting. Could an individual with such aspirations justify any of the following long-term goals?

A) Climbing the ladder and becoming a partner in a consulting firm
B) Launching a boutique consulting firm
C) Leaving consulting to manage a nonprofit
D) Leaving consulting to buy a failing manufacturing firm and forge a “turnaround”
E) Entering the management ranks of a major corporation

The answer is yes! This candidate could justify any of these long-term goals (and many others), as long as he/she connects them to experiences gained via his/her career as a consultant. With regard to your goals, you need not feel constrained—you just need to emphasize and illustrate that your goals are logical/achievable and ambitious.

Recently, we at mbaMission were fortunate enough to speak with Ankur Kumar, the new director of admissions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Here are some highlights from our conversation, followed by the full transcript below.

• During the upcoming admissions cycle, Wharton plans to pilot a group interview exercise, which could become a mandatory application component in the future.
• Students often see class profiles as a set of preferences, but they only reveal the industries that students came from immediately prior to business school; industry experience is much deeper than it may appear.
• Wharton is seeking quality experience, not a target age or number of years of work experience.

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Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.

Every once in a while, a concerned business school candidate calls us and says something like “Star491 wrote that Wharton won’t read past the 500-word limit, but IndianaHoops09 wrote that 10% over the limit is fine. Meanwhile, WannabeTuckie says….” Some of you may be guffawing as you read this, but the truth is that many people have difficulty not reading the various message boards, and some have even more difficulty not believing everything they read there. So, at the risk of stating the obvious, message boards are completely unregulated, and the opinions expressed by the anonymous posters should be viewed skeptically. For every individual who claims to know something authoritatively, there is always another individual who claims to know that the opposite is true. Round and round we go…

So, our message is to ignore anonymous posters. Although this should be valuable advice for you now, as you complete your first-round applications (ideally with your sanity intact), it will become even more valuable to you as the year progresses and many posters begin to make unsubstantiated claims about admissions statistics (offers given, GMAT scores of accepted candidates, etc.). If you tune out such noise now and put your energy instead into creating your best possible application(s), you will be far better off.

MIT Sloan takes a slightly different approach with its essay questions than most top schools do. The admissions committee has stated explicitly in various admissions chats that Sloan’s application is unique in that it focuses exclusively on candidates’ past behaviors. The committee is more interested in the details of an applicant’s story and in his/her actions and decision making than in results, conclusions or even the candidate’s ultimate success.

The committee also requests that applicants use fairly current examples in their essays, ideally from the past three years. A successful accomplishment that occurred more than five years ago is less appealing to the committee than one that may not have turned out the way the applicant had intended but that took place more recently.

In short, when writing your essays for Sloan, keep in mind the phrase “past behavior is the best predictor of future success.”

Cover Letter

Prepare a cover letter (up to 500 words) seeking a place in the MIT Sloan MBA Program. Describe your accomplishments and include an example of how you had an impact on a group or organization. Your letter should conform to standard business correspondence and be addressed to Mr. Rod Garcia, Director of MBA Admissions.

You will note that unlike most schools, Sloan does not ask its applicants to discuss either future goals or “why Sloan.” This is not an oversight! In keeping with its conviction that past behavior is the best predictor of future success, Sloan wants candidates to emphasize their past actions and thought processes in their essays, rather than their long-term aspirations. In fact, in an interview with Fifteen, the MIT Sloan newspaper, Director of MBA Admissions Rod Garcia explained that the “admissions committee does not explicitly ask applicants for their future goals to prevent candidates from telling stories that they think the admissions committee wants to hear.” Garcia added, “That’s why we don’t ask the ‘Why Now?,’ ‘Why MBA?,’ and ‘Why Sloan?’ type of questions that every other business school asks because these questions are leading questions, i.e. they lead the interviewees to tell the interviewer what the interviewer wants to hear. So, to go around this trickery, we ask candidates to talk to us about past examples instead.”

Our advice? If you believe that you absolutely must outline your goals in your cover letter to provide context for your stories, do so, but discuss them as minimally as possible. Similarly, explaining “why Sloan” is neither expected nor encouraged, but if you feel you absolutely must address this topic anyway, again, keep your statement(s) brief, relevant and specific.

Although the MIT Sloan cover letter differs in some ways from a typical Personal Statement, some fundamentals still apply. We therefore suggest that you consult our mbaMission Personal Statement Guide —which we offer free of charge via our online store—before writing this essay for Sloan. Please feel free to download your copy today.

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Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.

“I am self-employed.”

“I am a vice-president in a family business.”

“I am a freelancer.”

“I am a contract consultant.”

If you can describe your professional situation using any of these statements—or something very similar—you may very well be thinking (and worrying), “I have no supervisor! Who is going to write my recommendations?!”

Before we address this problem, let us first remind you that MBA admissions committees have indeed seen it all. Your situation is most likely not unique, so you do not need to fret. Let’s consider the example of the family-business vice-president and add a detail—that the family business is in manufacturing. This hypothetical MBA candidate could contact one of the company’s long-standing clients or suppliers, who may be able to write about the applicant’s integrity, growth, sense of humor, determination and more, all in relation to other comparable individuals.

If these constituents were not able to offer adequate feedback, however, the MBA candidate might instead ask the head of a trade association or possibly even a respected competitor to write on his/her behalf. If the applicant really needed to get creative, he/she might even consider asking a service provider; for example, getting a letter of reference from an architectural firm that collaborated with the candidate to build a new manufacturing facility could be an interesting solution.

In short, most MBA candidates have more potential recommenders to choose among than they realize. Keep looking and try not to get discouraged—someone out there knows you well and can write objectively on your behalf.