I have explained about segue in my new MBA Essay Writing Series. I would highly recommend that you read them to understand the many contexts of Segues.
Theme: Entrepreneurial Thinking, Failure, Diversity
Required Haas MBA Essay #3: One of our goals at Berkeley Haas is to develop leaders who value diversity and to create an inclusive environment in which people from different ethnicities, genders, lived experiences, and national origins feel welcomed and supported. Describe any experience or exposure you have in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging whether through community organizations, personal, or in the workplace?
Required Haas MBA Essay #3: One of our goals at Berkeley Haas is to develop leaders who value diversity and to create an inclusive environment in which people from different ethnicities, genders, lived experiences, and national origins feel welcomed and supported. Describe any experience or exposure you have in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging whether through community organizations, personal, or in the workplace?
Brands have remained neutral to society’s ill and the overreach of organizations, government, and powerful influencers. With social media putting pressure on leaders to follow the pulse of society, businesses have also embraced positions that would categorize them as a pro or against a position.
From a business perspective, this is a risk as any misconception about their position could have an immediate impact on their cash flow as customers demonstrate preferences with their pocket first before verbalizing their opinions in popular media.
Required Haas MBA Essay #3: One of our goals at Berkeley Haas is to develop leaders who value diversity and to create an inclusive environment in which people from different ethnicities, genders, lived experiences, and national origins feel welcomed and supported. Describe any experience or exposure you have in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging whether through community organizations, personal, or in the workplace?
Berkeley Haas MBA Video Essay Question: The Berkeley MBA program develops leaders who embody our four Defining Leadership Principles. Briefly introduce yourself to the admissions committee, explain which Defining Leadership Principle resonates most with you, and tell us how you have exemplified the principle in your personal or professional life.
Pre-MBA Employer: Facebook
Pre-MBA Title: Product Manager
Post-MBA Title: Associate
Post-MBA Employer: Venture Capital Firm
Foundational Knowledge: Because the candidate has extensive experience in Technology, the curriculum mentioned in the goals essay was customized to include foundational skills in Finance and Investments.
Fast-moving consumer goods manufacturers like Unilever and P&G struggled to find a market in developing economies with traditional American and European-themed promotional strategies. Poking the aspirational class with the hope of a better future or the sparkling smile of the celebrity didn’t help the market share. On the verge of giving up the drive to enter rural markets that represent the lion’s share in developing economies, the executives called on ‘MBA’ consultants, many from reputed universities, for solutions.
Haas MBA students selected for the IBD (International Business Development) consulting engagement, apart from sharing the tourist getaways, share a poignant observation - while discussing the client and their customers from thousands of miles away, they lacked the perspective on the ground realities. The statistics were too impersonal. When they reached on-site, the real challenges for enterprises to overcome infrastructural limitations and price sensitivity became apparent.
Sometimes life’s mission might be something that has a ripple effect on an entire generation and the future of humanity. It could be working on a vision to bring equity into a society that is growingly becoming unequal. It could be working on systems, policies, and technology that would determine how humans will consume and expend resources for the next 1000 years.
Theme: Climate Change
Theme: Design
Theme (Explained): When engines and integrated chips can be concealed beneath the flow of human interaction with no one even wondering that there are hundreds of machines and technology, a few inches and a few yards away from our daily existence, the eye soaring wind turbines and clunky solar panels are a big resistance to the adoption of renewable energy.
Theme: Selling
Background Information: A Product Manager in Healthcare shares her experience in transforming the culture in a healthcare company to support working mothers.
Theme: Gender Equity, Working Mothers
Background Information: The applicant noticed a strange bias emerging in a machine learning algorithm despite data verification. The solution to the bias and the creation of an algorithm review process is the core of the narrative.
Theme: AI, Bias, DEI
Background Information: The applicant credits early education through storytelling as pivotal in her career orientation into marketing and escaping the bad influences in the neighborhood.
Background Information: An applicant caught in the battle of his analytical and creative brain finds a match at Teach for America, where he is entrusted to apply his editing skills to keep Grade 1 to Grade 3 students engaged in online study sessions.
Theme: Creativity
Background Information: An entrepreneur musician shares the power of music in improving the mood of distressed children, her mentorship, and the agency she started to help upcoming artists.
Theme: Music, Education, Job Security
Background Information: The applicant notices one person in his team consistently underperforming. His humane intervention to address the personal challenges helped the teammate rise to a star performer.
Theme: Inclusion, Mentorship
Theme (Explained): Often, mentorship when a peer or a sub-ordinate underperforms need context-setting about the problem.
For the essay, the theme of the intervention is holistic mentorship where the person’s personal challenges are handled sensitively.
Background Information: The applicant – a white male applicant working with a diverse team from China, South Africa, and India for a technology giant, confronts a peer who makes unflattering comments about his international peers on a visit to the US.
Theme: Inclusion, Courage, Xenophobia
Background Information: The applicant proactively offered guidance and mentorship to a junior analyst who was struggling to interpret contracts in an M&A deal
Theme: Inclusion, Mentorship
Theme (Explained): Mentorship to make a peer or a subordinate feel included is the best way to demonstrate your sensitivity to the person’s struggles.
Background Information: In the applicant in charge of leading a team of 20+ associates for an insurance giant witnessed an error in judgment from one of the 5 team leads. Reversing a decision to let go of the person is the ‘risky’ sense of inclusion narrative.
Theme: Inclusion, Ethics, Courage
Background Information: A primary care physician who was shaken by a personal tragedy in rural Iowa starts a non-profit, leveraging connections from her alma mater to fund her venture.
Background Information: A leading YouTube creator in the ‘editing for educational video’ niche narrates a peer’s bout with depression after he faced a stagnation in viewership. The applicant’s encouraging mindset with video collaboration helped the peer feel a sense of inclusion among the creator community.
Theme: Inclusion