How do you plan to use the Wharton MBA program to help you achieve your future professional goals? You might consider your past experience, short and long-term goals, and resources available at Wharton. (Professional Gain)(500 words)
Reverse Advertisement – With Substance
The professional goals essay is a reverse advertisement of the Wharton MBA curriculum, learning environment, and networking opportunities. As we had mentioned in other school essay tips, a plain vanilla description of the program has low recall when the admissions team is reading over 6000 applications. To stand out, you must understand what Wharton values.
The school’s insistence on accepting most students with a GMAT score above 700 is from the expectations of a quant-heavy program like the Wharton MBA. Since 2012, when the school changed its curriculum in favor of an analytics-heavy core and elective, Wharton has been seeking applicants who have a history of learning aggressively, growing meteorically, and solving complex industry and functional problems.
The learning starts with your Academics. If you don’t have a 3.5+ GPA on a 4.0 scale or an 80% or a B+ grade, the next data point that the admission team has is your work experience.
Learning – Levers of a Business
Learning doesn’t stop with exam taking in your undergraduate years. You must demonstrate learning technology, processes, markets, team dynamics, customer preference, and policy in your professional career on a consistent basis.
Past Action – Future Potential (Collect Proof)
Most top Business Schools believe in the learned philosophy that your past actions and achievements are an indication of your capability to achieve post-MBA goals.
The resume and recommendation letter become a crucial source of information to validate the feasibility of the professional goals essay.
Capture only the achievements that have a high recall for your background (profession, nationality, ethnicity, and education).
Don’t fill the resume with trivial achievements or ask the recommender to quote mundane daily responsibilities as examples of strengths.
Wharton MBA Goals Narrative - Meaningful learning and Growth milestones
One of our clients from an accounting background included due diligence of accounts as an achievement. The only problem - the scale of the achievement was not clearly defined in the resume or the recommendation letter. When we dug deeper into what it takes to do due diligence, the complexity of the problem became clear. He had to coordinate with over 100 accountants spread across seven departments on a $12B deal.
Now, the admission team realized the pressure the applicant faced while verifying data from over 500 financial reports and building a financial model incorporating the data that consolidated the accounts in a neatly summarized 2-page snapshot.
The summary determined the feasibility of the $12B deal.
Without context, your ability to learn and grow in a professional environment wouldn’t be believable. The first iteration of our review service with the IMPACT table is to shortlist such achievements.
Massage Wharton’s Ego for Curriculum & Experiential Learning
Another example that applicants miss is the cultural similarity of the undergraduate college/university.
Wharton pioneered the learning teams, but the meme of small teams, group study, and working with divergent personalities on real client problems have passed onto the far corners of Beijing, London, New Delhi, and Singapore.
Most universities have some form of experiential learning, group projects, and industry visits – although not to the same scale as what Wharton offers.
Don’t hesitate to mention such engagements at an academic level if you don’t have similar professional experience working with a global team on dynamic client problems.
