6% of the Harvard MBA Class is from non-profit/government. A larger percentage of applicants from Finance and Consulting have some experience working with a non-profit in long-term collaborations.
When the hours invested are close to 120 every year for a typical Harvard MBA candidate, standing out requires more than just competing on hours. If you are using a non-profit experience aligned with long-term goals as a narrative for your Harvard MBA Essay, use these 3 strategies.
1) Build A Complete Picture
750 words or 1.5 pages should be the target length for your Harvard MBA Essay. At that length, there are sufficient opportunities to expand on the ‘inter-generational’ or ‘complex’ problem you are trying to solve with the non-profit engagement. Often, applicants fearing that the length is not sufficient try to fit multiple examples or narratives into one essay. This leads to minimizing the problem the non-profit is solving.
For the Sample Harvard MBA Essay - Establishing a Cooperative and Transforming Rural Telecom, I had to focus on the previous failures at disrupting the telecom sector in South Africa, the catch-22 situation the government is in prioritizing rural telecom and the competing market forces that are putting pressure on the government from starting a cooperative. Without increasing the stakes and demonstrating the complexity of the problem, showing multiple stakeholders and their influences at play, it is tough to convince the Harvard MBA Admissions team that the non-profit engagement required more than 6 months of groundwork.
2) Harvard’s FIELD Destinations and Non-Profit Engagement
Although you can’t manufacture locations where you offered solutions, I am often surprised by the multiple location-based engagements a Harvard MBA applicant managed with their full-time work in Finance or Consulting.
For the latest HBS MBA Class the themes for the FIELD Courses were:
- Italy; Capitalism - Past, Present, and Future
- India; Development While Decarbonizing: India’s Path to Net Zero
- Israel; Startups and Venture Capital
- London; Entrepreneurship in the UK and Europe
- Silicon Valley; Decoding "Growth" in Silicon Valley
- Ghana; Doing Business Across Africa
- Japan; Rising Sun Ventures: Exploring Entrepreneurship in Japan (also listed under Strategy)
- Denmark and Netherlands; Decarbonization and Sustainable Production
If the location where the HBS MBA team visited doesn’t match the destinations where you offered solutions, matching popular themes is one way to demonstrate fit with the HBS MBA class.
3) Long-Term Commitment
An obvious gap in manufactured narratives about non-profit engagement is the level of commitment. I have a friend who worked in the government. His switch from one department to another was a record. One year, he will be in Customs, another on an infrastructure project, and on another with initiating a skill development program. The LinkedIn updates were too frequent to give him any credibility that he is having any real impact on citizens. He was searching for a career that culminated in quitting the government and starting a consulting company.
Such frequent short-term gigs with non-profits are tough to translate into a meaningful narrative for Harvard MBA Essay. Here, diversity of experience is a weakness.
There should be a thread of connection between each non-profit engagement.
The closer the beneficiary is to the identity of the applicant, the more believable will be the narrative on long-term commitment and goals.
The identity of the beneficiary and the applicant should be similar in gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic background, region, culture, shared history, or language.
