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

If you are having trouble negotiating with your supervisor to ensure that he/she is putting the proper thought and effort into your application, you are not alone. Because of this asymmetry of power, a junior employee can only do so much to compel his/her supervisor to sit down and write thoughtfully. So, before you designate your supervisor as a recommender, you must first understand his/her level of commitment to helping you with your candidacy. In particular, your recommender needs to understand that he/she cannot create a single template and must personalize each letter and answer each MBA program’s questions using specific examples.

If your recommender intends to simply write a single letter and force it to “fit” the school’s questions, or if he/she plans to attach a standard letter to the end of the school’s recommendation form (for example, including it in the question “Is there anything else that you think the committee should know about the candidate?”), then your recommender is not actually helping you—in fact, he/she is hurting you! By neglecting to put the necessary time and effort into your recommendation, your recommender is sending a very clear message to the admissions committee: “I don’t really care about this candidate.”

If you cannot convince your recommender to write a personalized letter or to respond to your target school’s individual questions using specific examples, you will need to look elsewhere. A well-written personalized letter from an interested party is always far better than a poorly written letter from your supervisor.

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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