MBA Candidate - Focus on values, passion and authenticity

MBA applicants are frequently beleaguered by internet-induced anxieties regarding their demonstrated student leadership, professional accomplishments and net impact. In their MBA admissions essays, they spend copious amounts of time on positioning, and finding ways to distill (or embellish) management responsibilities from a number-crunching  senior analyst position. The resultant problem here is: most applicants are hard at work engineering the same kind of boring “super-candidacy.”

What will make your candidacy different?

We find that the biggest issue in our clients’ writing rarely lies in their academic or professional pedigrees, but in the authenticity of their prose, and the specificity of their point of view. MBA programs are becoming increasingly concerned not just with finding business leaders, but finding energized community members, values-driven students and passionate people. Net impact and business acumen are no longer enough. Consider the following prompts from Harvard Business School, Duke Fuqua and Stanford GSB, respectively:

What are your three most substantial accomplishments and why do you view them as such?

Describe your vision for your career and your inspiration for pursuing this career path.

What matters most to you, and why?

Application Mistakes

In all of these prompts, most applicants will make the mistake of focusing on what is most concrete (accomplishment, vision, what matters), simply because what is abstract is infinitely harder to put into words. However, the more abstract dimensions of each prompt—the why—are where you can really bring dimension and humanity to your candidacy.

Applicants that adequately answer ‘why’ are able to tether their accomplishments and viewpoints to values, a keen self-awareness, and the seasoned EQ required of today’s business leaders. In a recent study, when given a list of a dozen words to describe their CEO, only one in five employees picked “caring” or “warm”; ironically, CEO’s picked these words twice as often to describe themselves. The business and academic communities are becoming increasingly sensitive to this alarming disparity. Your ability to answer the “why “ gives a powerful window into your soft skills, and your potential to develop them to lead tomorrow’s top organizations.

Applicants within a competitive group will particularly benefit from this ‘authenticity first’ approach—Indian males with an IT background, Caucasian males with a finance background. Your story and your net impact may not be that different from an applicant in your niche, but your point of view can make you exceptional.

Your MBA candidacy does  not boil down to concrete career achievement, GMAT scores, and academic pedigree. MBA programs across the U.S. and the world are looking to build student bodies that are diverse in the broadest sense of the word. So, before you have your candidacy assessed and regression analyses run on your chances of admission, take a more humanistic, critical self-appraisal of your application. Take greater risks in articulating your values and exploring the forces that really drive you. Strive to be more authentic.


Thoughts Originated from Janson Woodlee

Janson Woodlee graduated from Yale University, his studies focusing on cognitive science and music. As a college student, he was a Senior Editor with EssayEdge immediately after graduation, he worked with Katzenbach Partners, a management consulting firm and McKinsey offshoot. Ivy Eyes Editing was founded on the elements from his diverse background--including grammatical rigor and client collaboration--as well as a distinctive commitment to strategic admissions guidance, writing with style and authenticity, and deep ethical standards