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Similar to your community endeavors, personal achievements enable you to differentiate yourself from the indistinguishable masses. While every candidate has his/her work experience and academics, you can offer a far more diversified and remarkable picture of yourself through descriptions of your volunteer and personal accomplishments.

In terms of personal achievements, you should focus on accelerating the timeline of existing endeavors. If you have always intended to publish a certain article and are almost finished with a final draft, then finish it. If you have always intended to complete the CFA exam and only have Level Three left, take the final test this year. If you can run twenty miles and have always dreamed of running a marathon, run it this year. I am not suggesting that if you have never run a mile in your life that you start training for a marathon now, however; I am suggesting that if a goal is in sight and it will be otherwise achieved, accelerate your timeline and ensure that you have completed it before the first-round deadline.

Beyond the examples above, other areas of personal accomplishment include language study (achieving fluency), adventure travel (completing a certain hike/climb, etc.), professional and extracurricular certifications (CA, EMT, etc.) and more. Many candidates often exclusively pursue community activity in the months before submitting their applications, but personal opportunities can also significantly affect your profile and separate you from the field.

We offer specific pre-application services for those interested in charting a clear course to their MBA.

Earlier this week, the Harvard Crimson, explored the profound relationship between those with military experience and the school itself — HBS in particular. For those in the military, planning to apply to HBS, Here from Over There; Harvard’s military veterans look like normal students, but their identity as soldiers rarely fades away, should be an encouraging read. For those who have no military experience, there are still several pearls of wisdom regarding the traits that HBS seeks.

Many candidates are already looking toward next year. Thus, we are reposting our series on Long Term MBA planning, with a keen eye toward helping candidates seize the next few months to maximize opportunities and mitigate problems. Our second entry follows:

As we noted in our previous post on Establishing Application Milestones, if you have not yet become involved in a community organization, now is the time to get started. If you start to volunteer in September, your gesture will seem far less sincere, and you will lack the track record to credibly discuss your experiences in your essays.

When considering volunteer activities, you should – first and foremost – become involved in an organization about which you feel passionate. If you are excited about your volunteer experience, you will be more committed, have a more profound experience and have a far more genuine story to tell.

Ideally, you will have a record of community experience that complements and supplements your profile: the accountant who volunteers with Junior Achievement is complementing his existing profile, showing a commitment to his professional path and the desire to give back in this area; the accountant who coaches soccer in his community is supplementing his profile in that he is offering a new window into his personality. Your community activities have the power to show a true passion for your field (complementary) or enhance the committee’s perspective (supplementary) and thus differentiate you from many others.

In the example above, we use Junior Achievement and soccer coaching to illustrate our point; while a solid commitment to any organization will be helpful to your candidacy, the more esoteric the organization, the more distinct you become. While you should not volunteer in a completely obscure organization just to be different, if you are truly passionate about both soccer and antiquities preservation, you should consider volunteering in the latter field, thus increasing your opportunities to discuss this unusual hobby/interest. Regardless of the organization and the nature of your activities, if you can (to cart out a cliché) “make a difference” within your organization and show true leadership in doing so, you should be able to add an entirely new dimension to your application.

We offer specific pre-application services for those interested in charting a clear course to their MBA.

Many candidates are already looking toward next year. Thus, we are reposting our series on Long Term MBA planning, with a keen eye toward helping candidates seize the next few months to maximize opportunities and mitigate problems. Our first entry follows:

We offer specific pre-application services for those interested in charting a clear course to their MBA.

For those considering multiple admissions offers from top-schools, you may be interested in a recent post for Bob Bruner, Dean of the Darden School at University of Virginia, from his personal blog. In his post, Deciding to Accept an Offer of Admission, Dean Bruner diplomatically takes aim at various rankings and offers three criteria which candidates should consider upon accepting an offer: Passion, Fit and Vision.