Haas MBA Career Goals Essay: What are your short-term and long-term career goals, and how will an MBA from Haas help you achieve those goals? (3-5 years short; a decade or more long-term goals) (300 words max)
Most top Business Schools have picked Finance or Consulting as a popular specialization based on their close network with recruiters. At Berkeley Haas School of Business also, Consulting was the clear winner (28.1%).
Pre-MBA Employer: Wells Fargo Securities
Pre-MBA Title: Associate
Post-MBA Title: Associate
Post-MBA Employer: McKinsey & Company
Problem: Presenting the finance applicant as an applicant with strong interpersonal and team management skills.
Problem (Explained): The biggest roadblock in goals essay for technical applicants from Finance and Technology is a narrative that is narrowly focused on a deal or a technical solution.
Feasible Goals: Transitioning from Finance to FinTech is a feasible goal. Although the hype around FinTech has simmered down with the saturation of the payment wallet niche, there are new developments in payment settlement and developing cross-border solutions in the FinTech space.
Short-term Goal: Value from Haas MBA
Travel Experience: The 3-week International Business Development takes candidates to a developing economy and puts them on a real project that involves managing a project, analyzing information from an international context, and providing culturally sensitive recommendations and key observations.
Consulting Experience: Instead of Haas MBA’s Applied Innovation Course, I am choosing S3 or the 6-month Social Sector Solutions as the ideal program for the applicant since FinTech often involves serving customers in low-income families and emerging economies that S3 serves.
The electives that will help the candidate make the transition are:
• Applied Frameworks in Consulting
• General Management and Strategy (Speaker Series)
• Social Sector Solutions (Applied Innovation Course)
• International Business Development
• Negotiations and Conflict Resolution
• Power and Politics in Organizations
• Marketing Strategy
• Pricing
Foundational Knowledge: The candidate can build the foundation in Consulting through Applied Frameworks in Consulting and General Management and Strategy speaker series.
Additional Courses: While recommending solutions, consultants should be aware of the power dynamics in the organization. The Power and Politics in Organizations course enabled the applicant to develop political intelligence by mapping the distribution of power in organizations, developing techniques for influencing people at different hierarchies, and understanding how power influences change in an organization.
Admission Consultant’s Note
1) We are not going to list all the electives or courses in a goals essay. The courses listed above will help you customize your narrative if you have similar goals.
2) The specialist experiential learning in FinTech is lacking in most general management and leadership focused US MBA programs. In such cases, leveraging the larger university resources is one way to address the gap.
Long-Term Goal: Consulting in the Finance and Regulatory space for FinTech
Experience (Applicant): The applicant has extensive experience working cross-functionally and with the C-suite in his company.
Extra-Curricular (Applicant): Although there are diverse extra-curricular experiences in the consulting and financial education space, there wasn’t one single experience that was more than 6 months in tenure or could be categorized under a theme. To address the weakness, I chose to create a narrative about listening skills, a FinTech project example, and working with key decision makers.
The goals essay in itself is unlikely to work for profiles with such weaknesses. The DEI and leadership essays should together build a strong case on the applicant’s leadership potential.
Knowledge Gap: Negotiations, Pricing, FinTech and Consulting
Electives and Experiential Learning: We have shortlisted electives and experiential learning to address the two knowledge gaps.
Negotiation Skills: Pitching your employability as an MBA candidate and your service as a consultant is part of the transitioning process. When there is selling, there will be negotiations. She learned the art of negotiation through the Negotiations and Conflict Resolution course, which offered techniques for negotiation in multiple settings.
Pricing Strategies: For offering strategic advice, consultants should be aware of the optimal pricing and production strategies when information about competitors is limited. They should also understand market dynamics and the influence of government policies on pricing and production. Pricing is a course that gives applicants this understanding.
Experiential Learning: To gain hands-on learning experience in Fintech, we will highlight LIFT - UC Berkeley Lab for Inclusive FinTech as a critical part of the journey.
Opener: To present the applicant as a person with experience working closely with C-suites, I shortlisted a perspective he gained interacting with a CXO.
Strategy: I have used skills for consulting narrative and demonstrated motivation by citing multiple, specific courses for the career transition. I also integrated a Fintech project experience to make sure that the goals are not too disconnected. Just by citing courses with no experience in a niche, you are unlikely to persuade the admissions team.
Challenge: The challenge is the lack of a strong extra-curricular or volunteering around one theme or activity. The applicant is multi-faceted, but the admissions team might misconstrue it as a lack of focus.
Sample Berkeley Haas Short-term and Long-Term Career Goals Essay (Corporate Finance to Consulting) (298 Words)
Initially, in my career, I assumed that Financial Services is all about technical skills. Once I gained mastery of the technical, I realized it was not sufficient to grow in my career. By pro-actively seeking cross-functional opportunities, I interacted with..
