In this NYU Stern Change Essay Tips series, I will share 2 strategies to approach the NYU Stern MBA Application Change Essay.
1. Mapping the Change Slogans into Three Experiences
The question for the NYU Stern Change Essay is, “In today’s global business environment, the only constant is change. Using NYU Stern’s brand call to action, we want to know how you view change. Fill in the blank with a word of your choice. Why does this word resonate with you? How will you embrace your own personal tagline while at Stern?
Stern has listed five slogans:
Change: Dare it.
Change: Dream it.
Change: Drive it.
Change: Empower it.
Change: Manifest it.
From the five taglines, if you pay close attention, Dare It is mapping your experiences to NYU Stern’s leadership call to action. To lead in a visible way that impacts your company, your industry, or your community, you have to Dare it. Any impactful leadership experiences will fit this narrative.
The second slogan is Dream It. It can be a Consulting solution or an Entrepreneurial vision. This example should not be like a typical consulting solution. It should be a transformative idea or an approach that the client was not able to see.
The third slogan is Drive It. It is all about implementation. If you ask any Entrepreneur who has scaled or disrupted, the first secret they will share is that the idea was just 20% of the game. The rest 80% was about implementation and driving the team toward the vision. Imagine yourself as a driver. There is a destination. Your team is in the Car. There are skeptics. There are roadblocks. But how you drove the solution should be the narrative here.
Dare It = Leadership Experiences
Dream It = Unique Consulting Solutions
Drive It = An Entrepreneurial Approach to Implementing a Solution
The Fourth Slogan is Empower It, and the Fifth Slogan is Manifest It.
Empower It could be any non-profit engagement where you had a visible impact on the community. This slogan can be similar to Dare It or Dream It or Drive, or a mix of all three.
Manifest It is about complete commitment to a vision and channeling all the resources and focus on achieving this vision. The narrative works only if you are an entrepreneur.
The first Strategy is mapping the Change Slogan to Experiences.
The second Strategy is to decide how you will plan for each narrative.
2. Word Planning
If you look at the 2nd half of the question, it goes like this:
Why does this word resonate with you? How will you embrace your own personal tagline while at Stern?
Why the word resonates with you is a cue to explain your leadership, entrepreneurial, or consulting solution to the admissions team.
The second question is
how you will embrace the personal tagline at Stern.
If you have only one credible experience that does justice to the slogan, then you should focus on limiting the narrative to 200 words, and the rest of the 150 words should be about how you will live this Slogan at Stern through various experiential learning programs.
But if the problem that you solved was complex and you need more words to explain the IMPACT you had, allocate 250 words for what you did and 100 words for what you will do at Stern.
This is very important if you want to create an authentic and impactful narrative. There is no one template. There are many ways to approach this essay. I have captured it in F1GMAT’s NYU Stern MBA Essay Guide.
