Essay: Why Stanford?
Profile: Miss NL
Profile (Background): Miss NL, a PE investor, found her calling to enter a general management role while observing an inefficiency in delivery coffee to a customer in a Coffee Chain. Before working in PE, she was also part of the finance team that brought Apple Card to the market.
Essay Approach: “Why Stanford?”
Stanford MBA offers a holistic experience of competitive positioning, team building, communication skills to reiterate brand value, and the cultural intelligence to lead globally.
Core Curriculum
The Strategy core course will offer Miss NL two perspectives – one on leading within an organization, aligning everyone to the ultimate goal of keeping a consistent brand experience for the customer. Second, to study the diverse forces at play in the market that will again determine how the goals are prioritized for the team. Most importantly, the course will be a reflection on the applicant’s leadership.
Managing Groups and Teams
One challenge of managing a diverse global team is the group dynamics that come with it. The core course will offer Miss NK real-world cases on teams that are effective and many that are dysfunctional. Taking lessons from each group, she will learn to intervene and align the team to the brand’s core objectives.
Note: Complete Core, Electives and Experiential Learning Courses are Quoted and narrated in F1GMAT's Why Stanford MBA Sample Essay as part of F1GMAT's Stanford MBA Essay Guide
Essay Planning
Problem: The fall in awareness of Brand Value, even among employees
Problem (Explained): With 'the importance of brand' deprioritized among GenZ customers as price and value become the biggest drivers of sales, the attention to keep the customers happy has also been deprioritized.
Feasible Goals: Manage the end-to-end experience of a coffee brand to ensure that the brand experience is excellent while maintaining sustainability goals throughout the lifecycle of the product.
Short-term Goal: Learn to create a seamless brand experience, communicate brand value, and build cultural intelligence to align a global team
Long-Term Goal: Build a coffee brand that customers love
Stanford's Strength: Stanford's support of empowering candidates with transformative goals
Opener: Before mentioning the goals in the Why Stanford MBA essay, I wanted to clearly establish the scale of the project she was dealing with. Hence, the phrase "During a break from analyzing the $2bn consumer goods businesses"
Strategy: To present the applicant's unique quant-based thinking, I had to bring the facts into a life experience.
A coffee break is a perfect 'universal' experience that we can all relate to.
By showing one analysis, I mention the impact of climate change on coffee yield, and an experience bringing Apple Card to the market, before pivoting to the goals. This is what I call, interleaving credential statements with life experiences.
It is tough to pull this in a 350-word essay, but through 10-15 iterations, and using the pillaring technique mentioned in the essay guide, you can create a structure that translates to an extremely engaging essay.
Why Stanford MBA Essay: Private Equity to General Management (Build a Coffee Brand) (350 Words)
During a break from analyzing the $2bn consumer goods businesses, I sat in the front seat of the coffee chain, <z>. 180 seconds passed before the cup reached the customer. A 60-second delay masks the unique bitterness for which customers pay 400% more than their homemade coffee. 5% of the customers will never return. At that moment, I knew my future lied in helping ‘coffee reach the right customer’.
The $2bn consumer business I was analyzing before the coffee break, prioritized a product according to my recommendations..
Download the Complete Essay with F1GMAT's Stanford MBA Essay Guide (Build a Coffee Brand)
