Q) How has the world you come from shaped who you are today? For example, your family, culture, community, all help to shape aspects of your life experiences and perspective. Please use this opportunity if you would like to share more about your background.
Background Information: A homeschooled consultant shares his unique childhood, the expansion of his thinking that an unstructured learning environment produced, and the self-sufficiency his lawyer parents built in him when they moved from the city to a farm.
Theme: Curiosity, Creativity, Self-sufficiency
Theme (Explained): Homeschooling is more common in the US than in the rest of the world.
If you are an American applicant, think about how to structure the experience and compare it with what a person in a traditional school might have experienced.
Profile: Consultant
Industry: Consulting
MBA Essay Strategy: I wanted to offer a balanced narrative on the homeschooling experience. The unstructured environment where learning is limited only by one’s curiosity is a build-up to one particular experience – measuring soil health with drone-run multi-spectral cameras.
The mentorship of the father to meticulously note down experiment results became a habit that led the applicant to look at failures not as a judgment of his character but as the results of a hypothesis.
Instead of a one-sided narrative, I have also shared the disadvantages of homeschooling, which the applicant acknowledges. Parents addressed them with solutions that ensured that the applicant valued friendship.
With the homeschooling experience, I could capture the applicant’s attitude towards failure, the value he assigns to friendships, and a learning style where curiosity is the only limiter.
Opener: The change in the career of the parents from lawyers to farmers quickly establishes the transition of the applicant from a city to a farm life.
Sample MIT Sloan MBA World You Come From Shaped Who You Are Essay – Homeschooling (248 Words)
My parents were lawyers from New York City who switched to farming in upstate New York. To manage the operations of the farm and educate my brother and I, they chose homeschooling. From the strict regulation to a relatively easy schedule in our new home, the change expanded my habit of experimenting. From high school, I developed a keen interest in soil health and integrating drones to measure soil nutrients.
In Grade 7th, the DIY class was led by my father, who fit multispectral cameras to a drone and attached specialized filters to ..
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