Columbia MBA Essay #2: We believe Columbia Business School is a special place. CBS proudly fosters a collaborative learning environment through curricular experiences like our clusters and learning teams, an extremely active co-curricular and student life environment, and career mentorship opportunities like our Executives-in-Residence program.
Why do you feel Columbia Business School is a good fit for you academically, culturally, and professionally? Please be specific. (Maximum 250 Words)
Opportunity-Seeking Mindset - Narrative
If you are naturally connecting the dots and finding what the company could benefit in the long-term outside your current responsibility, you have a rare entrepreneurial quality – opportunity seeking. In our evaluation, applicants with this trait are extremely rare in Fortune 500 companies as the roles and responsibilities are well-defined in larger firms with cross-functional interference often looked down on by supervisors.
In start-ups, opportunity-seeking becomes the habit that translates to a new client, an interesting project, a portfolio of new products serving a new market, or growth into an international market.
Within the confines of the rigid rules of a hierarchical organization, you can mention opportunity-seeking by the way in which you offered a value-added service that increased the lifetime value of the customer or found a flaw in implementation that addressed a flaw in the strategy. Any feedback loop that changed how the strategy or the management team approached the market, product, or service is a classic example of opportunity seeking.
A client found an interesting way to mix two services that existed in Silos. One powered by AI served as an internal tool for analyzing the productivity of each employee based on the rest, play, and work time in the office, while another tool offered an internal chat system triggered by email. Instead of wasting time during work on emails, the applicant cleverly integrated the playtime with email chat that interfaced in the real world with augmented reality. The ‘gym’ time became the email response time. Such opportunity-seeking could easily be called ‘creative thinking.’
If you are working in Consulting, Marketing, or Business development, opportunity-seeking is much easier as the interaction with clients and potential clients is on the regular. Customizing the pitch based on the latest market trends or development in an industry or a policy change in a region are all routine tales that could easily translate to opportunity-seeking in the essay.
Another example is ‘networking.’ It doesn’t matter whether you met the person in a cab, at a fund-raising event, or while picking up your partner in a yoga class. The ‘always on’ personality is a true asset in an organization and for Columbia MBA’s stellar record at facilitating opportunities in niche industries and with the regulars in Consulting, Finance, and Technology.
