Harvard Business School (HBS) receives more than 9,000 applications each year. How will you ensure that your essays will grab the attention of an overworked HBS admissions officer? In one of our newest presentations, Writing Standout HBS Essays, we will help you conceptualize your essay ideas and understand how to execute, so that your experiences truly stand out. You don’t need to be actively working on a $5 billion deal or have won an Olympic gold medal to go to HBS. You just need to have done the everyday things remarkably well, and you must make sure that your essays reflect your actions.
mbaMission Founder/President Jeremy Shinewald will lead this session and will remain online to answer any additional questions about the HBS essays and other admissions issues of importance to you.
Date: Monday, June 6, 2011 Time: 9:30 -11:00 p.m. EST Location: Online Price: Free!
Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when choosing a business school, but the educational experience itself is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Each Wednesday, we profile a standout professor as identified by students. Today, we focus on Ralph Biggadike from Columbia Business School (CBS).
Ralph Biggadike’s “Top Management Process” (TMP) course competes in popularity with Michael Feiner’s “High Performance Leadership” class among CBS students, in terms of the number of bidding points needed to enroll. “Biggie”—as a recent alumna affectionately called him in a conversation with mbaMission—is not necessarily known for his charisma but instead, she explained, for the way he makes students analyze organizational challenges from every possible angle, including how such challenges would affect them in their future jobs. The alumna went on to describe Biggadike’s TMP class as a “living laboratory” that focuses on real learning rather than on homework and presentations, and lauded the professor’s availability outside the classroom.
For more information about CBS and 13 other top-ranked business schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides.
Given the date change of mbaMission’s “Constructing a Standout MBA Application” course in Chicago, we have extended the application deadline to Friday, June 3. This extension is for the Chicago dates only, which are now as follows:
Thursdays 6:30-9:30 p.m.
June 16, 23, 30
July 7, 14, 28
Those applicants who are chosen will be notified on Tuesday, June 7, and will have until Thursday, June 9, to pay the $275 deposit. To learn more about the “Constructing a Standout MBA Application” six-week course, please click here.
Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday.
When applying to business school, leave your parents out of the process! Although this MBA admission tip may seem obvious to most candidates, those who are a part of “Gen Y” or “The Millennials” have parents who are likely accustomed to helping guide their children’s choices, having done so throughout the candidates’ high school and college years. These parents naturally want to be involved in the MBA admissions process as well and are now leaving many admissions officers across the country shaking their heads.
Of course, having a parent call to confirm whether an important document was received when an applicant is perhaps traveling/working abroad and/or cannot make such a call him- or herself during work hours, is certainly not the same as having a parent call to ask why his/her son or daughter hasn’t gotten an interview invitation yet. Unless the matter at hand is an entirely practical one, candidates have nothing to gain by having their parents act as their agents. On the contrary, they have everything to lose. An aggressive parent can reflect badly on an applicant for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being that it suggests that the candidate lacks maturuity and perhaps the ability to make independent judgments as well.
Think very carefully before involving your parents in any aspect of the application process except sitting at home and waiting for great news—successful applicants do it all the time!
Columbia Business School (CBS) whittled its essay questions from four to three to two over the past five years but is now back to posing three essay questions. Maybe the school’s admissions committee felt that with just two questions, they were not learning enough about applicants? This year, CBS is offering a variety of creative options in its final essay question, giving candidates greater flexibility—and thus greater control over what the admissions committee will learn about them.
1.Considering your post-MBA and long-term professional goals, why are you pursuing an MBA at this point in your career? Additionally, why is Columbia Business School a good fit for you? (Maximum of 750 words.)
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, via our online store. Please feel free to download your copy today.
For a thorough exploration of CBS’s academic program/merits, defining characteristics, crucial statistics, social life, academic environment and more, please check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guide to Columbia Business School.
A first-of-its-kind, on-demand MBA application experience that delivers a personalized curriculum for you and leverages interactive tools to guide you through the entire MBA application process.
