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Entrepreneur Disrupting AI in EdTech with SLM: Wharton MBA Goals Essay

Essay 1 (Required): a) What is your immediate post-MBA professional goal? (50 words)

b) What are your career goals for the first three to five years after completing your MBA, and how will those build towards your long-term professional goals? (150 words)

Profile: Miss. A 

Profile (Background): Miss A started her career as a software engineer and later transitioned into product roles at a global technology company. Her work sits at the intersection of innovation, user experience, and social good, particularly in underserved markets. 

She led cross-functional teams working on scalable technology products and founded a mentorship initiative to increase technology access for women in Kenya.  

Miss A’s background combines deep technical fluency with a desire to build inclusive, user-centered solutions.

Essay Approach: “Why Wharton?”

Miss A should mention Wharton for its holistic curriculum and share the potential of combining knowledge from product development to strategy to entrepreneurship and innovation in scaling her Small Language Learning Model (SLM) in low compute regions like Africa.

Essay Planning 

Problem: User adoption of technology products in emerging economies, such as Kenya, is low due to mistrust in centralized authorities and institutions.

Problem (Explained): The mistrust in institutions is valid, as centralized authorities have often taken advantage of citizens. In addition to the mistrust, building a cost-efficient EdTech App that can offer a personalized learning experience for anyone with a smartphone is a vision that is jeopardized by the high cost of energy associated with training LLMs.

Short-term Goal: Scale the EdTech App by raising funds and acquiring the skills of building a product with Small Language Learning Model (SLM) in resource resource-constrained environment

Long-Term Goal: Bring the 400 million youths of Africa into the global employment market

Wharton’s Strength: Strong Product Development  curriculum

Opener: I wanted to dispel the myth that the M-Pesa adoption in Kenya was just about the technology, but arose from the recruitment of agents, who facilitated a new market for remittance.

Strategy: Citing the experience of M-Pesa and the strategy the FinTech App adopted to scale the product, helped me present the lack of trust in centralized institutions observed in African markets. By presenting multiple problems – the importance of humans in the middle of technology adoption and the role of SLM in addressing low compute in Africa, I am expanding the problem from a simple technology adoption problem to a large and ambitious techno-social problem. 
 

Sample Wharton MBA Goals Essay: Short-Term and Long-Term Career Aspiration (AI and EdTech) (192 Words)

a) In the short-term with a Wharton MBA, I want to gain both the strategy and the product management perspectives to transition from my current role in pre-sales to a product managerial role where I could have a direct impact on the product’s roadmap.

b) I pitched our ‘investment assistant’ to banking clients. Clients requested a ChatGPT-style feature that required ..

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Download F1GMAT's Wharton MBA Essay Guide for the Complete Sample Essay (AI and EdTech)

F1GMAT's Wharton MBA Essay Guide

Essay 1: Two short-form questions

What is your immediate post-MBA professional goal? (50 words)
What are your career goals for the first three to five years after completing your MBA, and how will those build towards your long-term professional goals? (150 words)

Essay 2: Long-form essay: Taking into consideration your background – personal, professional, and/or academic – how do you plan to add meaningful value to the Wharton community? (350 words)

Download F1GMAT's Wharton MBA Essay Guide

Atul Jose F1GMAT's FounderAbout the Author 

I am Atul Jose, Founding Consultant of F1GMAT, an MBA admissions consultancy that has worked with applicants since 2009.

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