Apart from a personal narrative for the Yale MBA Commitment Essay, you may also include two professional themes for the essay - Building Leadership Skills and Mastery.
1) Commitment to Building Leadership skills
Yale SOM MBA is leadership-heavy and believes in the power of internal motivation and purpose in your work.
The core of the Yale SOM full-time MBA program, unlike other top MBA programs, is not divided into themes based on job function or industry but strategically looks at the foundation of the management program through fundamental expertise – Accounting, Economics, Managerial Decisions, Negotiations, Managing Groups & Teams, Economics, Negotiation, and Statistics. The school also has added Global Virtual Teams – a highly relevant course for modern organizations.
Following the foundation courses, Yale SOM trains students in roles – Customer, Competitor, Investor, Employee, Executive, Innovator, and from the perspective of the state and macroeconomy.
A defining characteristic of Leadership is the ability to think from the other person’s point of view and create incentives for each personality type. By assigning roles, candidates learn to think from multiple angles and understand the problems faced by each role.
An applicant strategically mentored a peer who had weak communication skills. By accompanying her to teaching engagements on weekends for Grade 3 students, he could apply his communication skills to a less demanding audience. Because the subject was Math – his favorite, there were no unnecessary pauses. Soon, the applicant realized that it was not the peer’s English that was a problem but the stress of being perfect in client meetings that forced him to fumble his thoughts.
Her leadership was in sensitively dissecting the communication problem in a different context and using the learning to gain new insight about him.
Switching on the camera on his laptop made him self-aware. By turning them off, he was communicating with a command over the subject matter that surprised even the team.
Your journey to empower your team and help them reach their true potential is a classic leadership trait.
To demonstrate your commitment to building leadership skills, use a 3-step narrative process:
a) Recognize the value of leadership in your growth
b) Cite the importance of leadership in your team
c) Share a mentorship narrative to reiterate the point
2) Commitment to Mastery
For applicants planning to continue in their pre-MBA industry, a mastery narrative in a commitment essay needs a strong story element.
The best narratives are from career switchers who entered the pre-MBA industry after a career pivot. They don’t take the opportunity for granted. Now, they plan to build the network and expertise to take their career to the next level.
From the many I read; the ones that remained in my mind all had a sense of ‘sacrifice’, innovation, and ‘preparation’ in the narrative.
One applicant – passionate about entering the Finance industry after failing an engineering course, shared her determination to study the Asian market and find patterns that AI and traditional analytical tools were missing.
The secret to her mastery was LinkedIn requests to connect with niche specialists from each market and then get on a call with the person.
Before the call, she prepared a set of 20 questions; then, she began recording the answers to each question. The ones that felt like obvious questions were cut off from the list. The answers where she stumbled were marked as the question for the ‘expert.’
The iterative elimination process created a crisp 10-question list that the expert felt alive to answer.
When she started to feel stuck understanding customer behavior in a market for a portfolio company, she traveled and went to the typical persona for the market. Instead of her tried and tested questioning technique, she dressed for the culture, extensively studied rituals and beliefs of the culture, and connected with the person before understanding the context in which the product is used. Here observation was more important than questioning.
In two scenarios - understanding a trend and understanding a customer, she used two different techniques of mastery. But the interesting aspect was the willingness of the candidate to commit 100% to the process.
Such commitment to mastery and a few techniques that you employed will teach and inspire the reviewer.
