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This post was written by our resident Career Coach, Elissa Harris. To sign up for a free 30-minute career consultation with Elissa, please click here.

Many MBAs use their degree to pivot or enhance their careers. But in order to secure an offer, you must excel at explaining who you are and how you can add value to your target employer. So, how do you build a compelling story?  

Know Your Target Audience

Step 1: Identify requirements for your target role. Seek to understand the skills, experiences, and attributes required for success. Check out our mbaMission Career Guides, review the Learn Educate Discover podcast, talk with classmates who have direct experience in your target areas, and/or listen to employer informational sessions. 

Know Yourself

Step 2: Catalog your pre-MBA experiences. Think about your functional and industry expertise but also the transferable skills you developed doing your job. Review your application essays and performance reviews. Reflect on what you liked most about what you did prior to your MBA program and the skills you used to achieve success. 

Step 3: Find the common threads. Ask yourself the following question: where is the overlap between the requirements of your target role and your pre-MBA experiences? Common threads could be things like serving key stakeholders and convincing them to take specific actions, analyzing data to drive decision making, understanding drivers of growth or company success, or communicating complex concepts in easy-to-understand ways. 

Step 4: Brainstorm specific examples of when you demonstrated each of these common threads. Look at bullet points on your resume for ideas. Brainstorm your biggest accomplishments and how you made them a reality. Think about the situation, your key actions, and the outcomes of those actions. 

Step 5: Identify elements that were missing from your previous role but are desirable to you and exist in your target role. Perhaps your previous role focused on one industry but a different industry excites you, or perhaps your previous role was very operational and you are now seeking to contribute in a more strategic way. 

Prepare Your Story 

Step 6: Curate the information gathered in Steps 1 to 5 to craft your story. Put yourself in the mindset of the employer; start with content that will be compelling to them and use keywords that will resonate with them. Show your excitement and commitment to their company/role. Prepare three different versions of your story:

• A one-sentence version to introduce yourself to a larger group of people
• A 30- to 45-second version to introduce yourself to a smaller group of two to three people or one-on-one for networking purposes
• A 90- to 120-second version to introduce yourself one-on-one in an interview setting

Bottom line: Compile and deliver a relevant, memorable, and concise story that engages the listener while connecting the dots between your previous experiences and your interest in/qualifications for your target roles.  

Prepare for Your Harvard Business School Interview with a Former HBS Interviewer: Devi Vallabhaneni, mbaMission

Meet Devi Vallabhaneni

Devi Vallabhaneni has almost two decades of admissions experience, including interviewing and evaluating Harvard Business School (HBS) candidates, a passion she first developed when she herself was a second-year student at the school. She is a Managing Director at mbaMission, as well as our Harvard Business School Interviewer in Residence, offering HBS Intensive Interview Simulations to HBS hopefuls. In fact, her services are so popular that she always has a waitlist of candidates who want to prep with her for the coveted HBS admissions interview. Here, she answers some questions about the Harvard Business School interview.

How do you prepare to prepare applicants for their Harvard Business School interview?

The HBS interview season is only about eight weeks over the two rounds, so it’s what I do the remaining 44 weeks that’s important. There is a through-line between each year’s MBA applicant pool and current events in business, which is why I think of admissions as being in the business of business.

CNBC or Bloomberg is always on in my office. I love following the markets, which allows me to be several steps ahead of my interviewees, who are working on the most newsworthy SPACs [special purpose acquisition companies], latest innovations across industries, newest business models, and the most pressing societal problems. My job isn’t to give them answers but to ask the right questions and challenge their thinking for them to formulate their own viewpoints.

I hear you give homework to your clients. What does that mean?

Recently, I was helping an interviewee who was sharing his struggles at his service-based start-up. He was advising leadership that to be customer-centric, they had to be employee-centric first, but leadership was having a hard time making this connection. I gave him homework: to study the Service Profit Chain developed by HBS Professor James Heskett. He shared it with his leadership, who started listening to him. Because there is no divining rod of who will be accepted, I make sure to leave them with something tangible they could use on their job as well as during the HBS interview.

How do you address EQ [emotional quotient]?

Some clients haven’t fully processed their emotions around their path and inadvertently infuse their answers with regret and negativity. The interview process can be emotional, and at times, people cry telling me heart wrenching stories about their setbacks or disappointments. The more that is processed during practice, the better. Confidence comes when you understand yourself emotionally, so if that’s the bottleneck, that’s what we focus on. It’s amazing to see the lightness of their persona when emotions are processed in a safe and nonjudgmental way.

Why is Harvard Business School interview prep so important to you?

Prepping clients for the HBS interview is a strangely intimate, intense, and personal experience for me. They know nothing about me, yet I know everything about them. Our exchanges become their biggest priorities for a few weeks. They place their past, their future, their hopes, their disappointments, their goals, and, most importantly, their trust in my hands. I’m constantly thinking, What do I need to ask them to get them to where they need to go or for them to see their path differently? My process is more of an art than a science. I view each client like a protagonist in a case study. Instead of analyzing whether a company should launch a product or build a new plant somewhere, the case study is their life.

It’s a privilege to be trusted with someone’s yet-to-be-written story. It’s a privilege to be the second call after their immediate family to share in their acceptance!

Read the rest of this entry  

You have received a coveted invitation to interview at your target business school, but the school is giving you a choice: interview on campus with an admissions committee member or student interviewer, or interview off campus with a graduate of the program. Which should you choose?

MBA Interview Options

Every business school has different admissions interview requirements. Historically, NYU Stern and Harvard Business School (HBS) offered interviews only with admissions committee members, either on campus or in select locations in the United States and abroad, wherever admissions committee members traveled. Columbia Business School (CBS) and the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) offered alumni interviews all over the world. And Northwestern Kellogg, Dartmouth Tuck, and Duke Fuqua offered a hybrid—candidates could choose to interview on campus or could schedule a meeting with a member of the school’s alumni network in a city near them.

For the past two years, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost every MBA program has relied on virtual interviews, with applicants interviewing with admissions committee members, students, or alumni via Zoom. For the 2022–2023 MBA admissions season, a few schools are offering on-campus and off-campus, in-person interview options. Some, including HBS, CBS, and Duke Fuqua, are using both in-person interviews and virtual ones. At this point, we do not anticipate that the virtual interview option will go away anytime soon for most programs.

Which Interview Format Should You Choose?

If a school offers a variety of interviews options, do they all generally carry the same weight? In short, yes! They are essentially the same. Think of it this way, why would an admissions committee allow alumni to interview applicants off campus if they did not feel that they were getting quality reports on those applicants? And often, the line of questioning is virtually the same for on-campus interviews as for off-campus interviews, especially when those interviews are blind, meaning that the interviewer has not read the candidate’s full application beforehand.

These alumni interviewers are carefully chosen and trained to interview applicants and have a very defined line of questioning that they follow.

Here is one exception, though: if you have not yet visited your target school and doing so would not be an imposition on you, you should use an on-campus, in-person interview (if available, of course) as an opportunity to travel to campus, attend a class, and perhaps meet with a student or two. This will position you to then be able to speak far more intelligently about your target program, potentially even in your interview, depending on how the timing works out. If you have already visited the school or cannot make the trip during the interview period, do not worry! Admissions committees understand when applicants cannot visit, whether because of work, cost, or location. If you are given options, do not obsess over making the “right” choice; just focus on preparing for your interview and then performing your best with whoever ultimately interviews you.

For help with preparing for your upcoming interview, download a free copy of the mbaMission Interview Guide and any applicable school-specific Interview Guides, which include more in-depth information about the types of interviews your target schools conduct, along with sample interview questions provided by past applicants.

For even more preparation support, consider scheduling a mock interview with an mbaMission application expert. You can sign up for a general Mock MBA Interview Session, a Wharton Team-Based Discussion Simulation, or an HBS Intensive Interview Simulation, facilitated by our HBS Interviewer in Residence, Devi Vallabhaneni.

With regard to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. Manhattan Prep’s Stacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense.

The New York Times’ Well blog featured a fascinating post on exercise. Exercise has a whole host of benefits, including ones associated with memory. Two studies delved even deeper into how this works.

How does exercise help memory?

In the blog post, New York Times journalist Gretchen Reynolds details two studies—one conducted on humans and the other conducted on rats.

In the human study, elderly women who already had some mild cognitive impairment were split into three groups. One group lifted weights, the second group engaged in moderate aerobic exercise, and the third group did yoga-like activities.

The participants were tested at the beginning and end of the six-month exercise period, and the results were striking. First, bear in mind that, in general, we would expect elderly people who are already experiencing mental decline to continue down that path over time. Indeed, after six months, the yoga group (the “control” group) showed a mild decline in several aspects of verbal memory.

The weight-training and aerobic groups, by contrast, actually improved their performance on several tests (remember, this was six months later!). The women were better at both making new memories and remembering/retrieving old ones!

Another group of researchers conducted a similar study, only this time, rats were getting some cardio in or lifting weights. (The rats ran on wheels for the cardio exercise and, get this, for the weight lifting, the researchers tied little weights to the rats’ tails and had them climb tiny ladders!)

At the end of six weeks, the running rats showed increased levels of a brain protein that helps create new brain cells. The tail-weight-trainers had higher levels of a different protein that helps new neurons survive.

How can I use this? Get up and MOVE!

Reading this study has made me want to exercise more—and not even for the GMAT! I would like to stave off mental decline in my old age.

The women in the study were performing fairly mild exercises only twice a week (remember, they were elderly), so we do not suddenly have to become fitness fiends. We do not know, of course, exactly how the study results might translate to younger people, but the general trend is clear: exercise can help us make and retain memories. That is crucially important when studying for the GMAT—every last bit will help!

Get a little bit of both weight training and cardio in every week. You do not have to become a gym rat (pun intended). Engaging in some moderate activity every few days is probably enough. Look for ways to incorporate mild exercise into your daily routine. For example, when I go to the grocery store, I carry a basket around on my arm rather than push a cart (unless I really have to buy a lot). I will fill that basket right up to the brim—often, I end up having to use both hands to continue carrying the thing. I figure that every time I do that, it has to be worth at least 10 to 15 minutes of pumping iron!

Studying for the GMAT is tiring, so use this news as an excuse to take a brain break. Get up and walk around the block for 15 minutes, or turn on some music and dance or run the vacuum cleaner (vigorously!). Then sit back down and enjoy the brain fruits of your physical labors.

Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a business school. However, the educational experience you will have is what is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Today, we focus on Kevin Murphy from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

In 2005, Chicago Booth professor Kevin Murphy—who has a joint appointment in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he teaches PhD-level courses—became the first business school professor to win the MacArthur Genius Grant, which he received for his groundbreaking economic research. Murphy’s course “Advanced Microeconomic Analysis” is affectionately called “Turbo Micro” because of its enormous workload. One recent graduate told mbaMission that a typical Chicago Booth class is supposed to be complemented by five hours of homework per week but that Murphy’s course demands roughly 20 hours. So, why would students clamber to take the class? The alumnus with whom we spoke raved that it was taught at the PhD level and that Murphy is deserving of his “genius” title, pushing students to think about their opinions in profoundly different ways. A first year we interviewed identified Murphy’s course as the most impressive he had taken thus far, saying it offered “a very complicated but logical way to view the world.” Murphy also teaches such MBA courses as “Big Problems,” which is open to both business and law students, and “Sports Analytics,” which explores such themes as decision making, causation, and fixation through the context of sports.

For more information about Chicago Booth and 16 other top-ranked business schools, check out our free mbaMission Insider’s Guides.