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You work for your family-run business and have decided to pursue an MBA. But now you are left wondering if your family business experience will bolster your candidacy or if admissions committees ultimately view this kind of background as a weakness. You may be wondering how you will translate your unique business experience to the admissions committee or perhaps even how to legitimize your success compared to the rest of your target program’s applicants—which can number in the thousands!

In some ways, the MBA Admissions Office’s job is to place shrewd bets on applicants ultimately becoming strong business leaders. So, those who seek to join (or rejoin) their family business post-MBA can be a coveted subset of the applicant pool, because they have clearer avenues to professional success.

However, those who already have family business experience can face challenges in legitimizing their workplace accomplishments, securing credible recommendations, and proving that they will be solely committed to the MBA experience—along with other important elements of crafting a compelling application. Meanwhile, those with external experience to date can be concerned that they will be perceived as suddenly transitioning to the “easy” path or that they may not be able to demonstrate that they are ready to assume significant leadership positions immediately after completing their MBA.

As a family business applicant, you can build a compelling application that sets you apart and eventually earns you that coveted letter of acceptance—you simply need the tools to do so! Join us on Thursday, June 14, 2018, for Challenges and Opportunities for the Family Business Applicant, a brand-new, completely free webinar for family business applicants. In this webinar, we will advise on precisely the kinds of issues that can affect your candidacy, including recommender selection, resume construction, and how to tactfully discuss certain topics in essays and interviews.

Join us to learn how to bolster your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses as a family business applicant so you can be at your most competitive throughout the admissions process! Space is limited, so be sure to reserve your spot by enrolling for free today.

*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2018-2019 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season.

The Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan must have liked the essay questions it used last year, because it has made only the smallest of tweaks to them for this season. Previously, the school gave applicants nine options for its 100-word short answers—this year, candidates have just six. One has to wonder whether the admissions committee received an abundance of responses to the prompts that were kept, while those that were largely ignored by applicants were discarded. Similarly, Michigan Ross has maintained a second 300-word career goal essay but has refined it, dropping verbiage about long-term goals and asking only about applicants’ short-term goals. Again, we will make an inference here: Michigan Ross is saying that most long-term goals are so vague and prone to change that it is interested in learning only about the short term, which the school can more directly influence. Anyway, those are the tweaks; our analysis of the essay prompts themselves follows. . .

Part 1: Short Answer Questions

Select one prompt from each group of the three groups below. Respond to each selected prompt in 100 words or fewer (<100 words each; 300 words total).

Group 1
I want people to know that I:
I made a difference when I:

Group 2
I was humbled when:
I am out of my comfort zone when:

Group 3
I was aware that I was different when:
I find it challenging when people:

Interested in learning how to tackle this year’s Michigan Ross application essay? Watch the short video below before you continue reading the full analysis!

In a blog post last year, Michigan Ross Managing Director of Full-Time Admissions Soojin Kwon said of the then new short-answer prompts, “[We want to] get to know more about you than we would in a traditional essay where you’d talk at length about one topic.” So, we encourage you to thoughtfully brainstorm and carefully consider which response in each group feels most authentic to and revelatory of who you are as an individual. You might be tempted with a 100-word response to just start writing, but thinking strategically about who you are as an applicant is critical to making the most of these “short answers,” which we think of more as mini essays.

We recommend starting by reading through all the options for the three groups and considering each one thoroughly in turn. You want to be able to “own” your answer—as we like to say—meaning that no other applicant could write the same thing as you do. Using the second prompt of the first group as an example (“I made a difference when I …”), writing something like “committed the entirety of myself to a public service project” would be far too general a response and could easily be stated by a large number of applicants. Although this person may very well have committed him/herself to this project in a fiercely original manner, the reader does not have a window into how he/she performed. Instead, something much more specific like “…ignored the objections of countless peers and launched a charity pie-eating contest” would stand out for its originality and paint a clearer picture of the candidate who wrote it with respect to his/her values, persistence with an unpopular idea, and sense of humor in executing an idea. We suggest that in treating this as a mini essay, you use a narrative approach to allow the reader to enter into your story. With only five sentences (or so), you can still craft a visual of how you conduct yourself and engage and guide a reader with a compelling story that has a clear beginning, middle, and end. If you choose to simply discuss a trait without a narrative, at worst, you will risk bragging, and at best, you will waste an opportunity for the admissions reader to get to know you.

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*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2018-2019 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season.

Columbia Business School (CBS) has just released its essay questions for this year, and the Admissions Office is offering applicants “a little bit old and a little bit new.” Its micro essay (really just a goal statement, to be fair) and first essay remain unchanged, while its second essay is a repackaging of a prompt from two years ago, and its third is brand new. In the past, for its third essay, CBS applicants could choose from two prompt options, generally pertaining to their personal lives and passions; now, candidates must respond to a question about a team failure instead. In short, this year, applicants have less choice with their essays (though the word counts have not changed), and the topics involved skew slightly in favor of the professional and academic and away from the personal. Let us jump into our analysis…

Interested in learning how to tackle this year’s CBS application essays? Watch the short video below before you continue reading the full analysis!

Goal: What is your immediate post-MBA professional goal? (50 characters)

Twitter’s recently expanded character count from 140 to 280 looks positively luxurious next to CBS’s miserly 50 for this goal statement—and that includes spaces! To get a sense of how brief your opportunity really is, note that the school’s prompt is itself exactly 50 characters. With such limited space, this can hardly be considered a true essay, but you will need to approach this with the same level of thought and focus as any of your other written responses for the school. During mbaMission’s recent Q&A with several admissions officers, CBS Assistant Dean of Admissions Amanda Carlson told our audience,

That 50 characters really helps people to just break it down very simply for themselves and simply for us . . . . Pursuing business education, it’s a huge investment in time, in money, in effort, in energy, and I think this 50-character exercise is as much for the candidate as it is for our team, and we want to know that people are serious, they’re focused, and they’re ready for this kind of adventure.

So, this prompt is a no-nonsense request for information that is all about getting to the point and telling the admissions committee what it needs to know—that you have a clear and achievable goal. In the past, the school has provided a few sample responses, including “Work in business development for a media company” and “Join a strategy consulting firm,” illustrating that conveying the requested information in such a tight space is definitely doable and that you do not need to worry too much about grammatical issues (in other words, you do not need to start your statement with “I want to” or something similar). We like to offer the statement “Reveal true goals, not what you think CBS wants” as both our own example of keeping things concise and our advice on how to approach and fulfill this request.

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As the 2018–2019 admissions season quickly approaches, many MBA hopefuls have burning questions that they wish they could ask the admissions officers of top-ranked business schools. mbaMission is here to help!

Our founder and president, Jeremy Shinewald, recently hosted an online Q&A session with admissions officers from Columbia Business School, the Yale School of Management (SOM), the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and the MIT Sloan School of Management. Check out some of the highlights and most pressing questions below before delving into the video:

• One question on many applicants’ minds is whether the percentage of international applications declined in the most recent admissions season, and by how much. According to the admissions officers, international applications are indeed on the decline, but perhaps not as dramatically as some might think.
• Many exciting things are happening at each of the schools represented in the chat. For example, Chicago Booth welcomed a new dean recently, while Yale SOM has welcomed a plethora of new faculty members.
• Stay tuned for Yale SOM essays and deadlines for the 2018–2019 admissions season. Those will be out within just a few weeks!
• Applicants who choose to take the GRE in lieu of the GMAT can ease their minds—all admissions officers agreed that there is absolutely no preference for one over the other!
• Other popular questions included the following: Should applicants shy away from applying in Round 3, and does applying in Round 3 put one at a disadvantage? How about at Columbia Business School, which accepts applications on a rolling basis?
• Deferred admission programs are attracting more and more interest. Are the schools taking advantage of this? Columbia Business School and MIT Sloan say yes but stay mum on the details for now.

For the entire in-depth discussion on these topics and much more, click play!

Last week, the entire mbaMission team gathered in Washington, DC, for our three-day consultant conference. Hosted annually at the start of the MBA admissions season, mbaMission’s consultant conference is an irreplaceable part of our firm’s culture. It is where our admissions consultants share best practices, transfer knowledge, renew their bonds with one another, and—of course—catch up with each member of our incredible full-time team! We believe this kind of ongoing training and interpersonal connection within our team is important to our clients’ success—and therefore important to you as you consider your business school admissions consulting options!

The mbaMission annual consultant conference is one thing that sets us apart from other admissions consulting firms. Because consultants at other firms work with MBA clients only part time while maintaining a separate full-time job, they cannot take the time away from their true careers to host or attend such an event. At mbaMission, however, admissions consulting is our sole job and focus—so we can dedicate this time to gather and ensure that we are at the top of our game to benefit you.

We at mbaMission are absolutely committed to hiring, training, and continuously educating the best admissions consultants in the world—and we are truly a team. Our consultants know each other well, not just because they see each other face to face at our yearly conference, but also because they connect at our biweekly Tuesday meetings, collaborate on admissions-related presentations throughout the year, and communicate every day via email, Skype, and other media. Our conference is a manifestation of our team approach.

So, what did we accomplish at our conference this year? Here are just some of the sessions we held:

• A deep dive into demographic and statistical trends in Harvard Business School (HBS) acceptances
• An analysis of GMAT vs. GRE scores among admits
• A discussion of how to better manage clients’ work and time
• An in-depth assessment of successful Chinese and Indian applicants
• A Q&A session with Shelly Heinrich from the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
• A teach-in with a 10+ year HBS interviewer
• An analysis of video essays with standout examples

In addition to these and other rewarding conference sessions, our team was fortunate enough to enjoy various Washington, DC, attractions, including early morning walking tours of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and Reflecting Pool; dinner at The Source by Wolfgang Puck; team building and cooking at CulinAerie; and a private tour of the Newseum!

Over three days, we learned a lot, enjoyed each other’s company, and strengthened our team’s bond—and that last element is a positive for you, too! Because our team members can call on one another with questions and to exchange guidance, you benefit not just from your personal consultant’s experience and knowledge, but also from that of our entire company. Our full-time team was on display last week, and it was quite the sight—more than 30 committed professionals learning, sharing, and enjoying their work!

On behalf of the full-time mbaMission team, we wish you all the very best going into the 2018–2019 season. We cannot wait to work with you!