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. AD
Profile (Background): Miss AD’s strength is in communicating across cross-functional leadership teams in the telecom and IT infrastructure sectors in Canada. With a background in management and a career in engaging with technology leadership, she has gained the buy-side perspective of customers and how they value technology products.
Essay Approach: “Why Wharton MBA?”
Although she has gained a network in the government and the private sector, the influence on the product team is still driven by the leadership in the technology team and product managers.
The frustrating part of her career is that she has both the perspective of the customer and the perspective of the product team, but her lack of an engineering degree limits offering hands-on advice to the technology team.
With a Wharton MBA and the integration of AI in several management courses catered to the technology industry, she would compensate for a lack of a technology background with a cross-functional expertise that a Wharton MBA would offer.
She also plans to pivot into purpose-driven roles in the technology sector, focusing on product innovation and sustainability-led initiatives to reduce carbon footprint in cloud computing and integrate AI in a humane and sustainable manner.
Essay Planning
Problem: Miss AD, with experience in pre-sales in the technology sector, wants to pivot to Product management and strategy.
Problem (Explained): Although Miss AD has gained perspective both from the customer and the product side, her influence on the product milestones has been limited. To cross the functional boundary, Miss AD must acquire the technical, strategic, and cross-functional expertise to be a product manager.
Feasible Goals: Pre-Sales to Product Manager
Short-term Goal: Gain exposure to the lifecycle of a product
Long-Term Goal: To build functional and strategic perspective to find an alternative to cloud technology
Wharton’s Strength: Wharton’s broader technology perspective that offers a mix of technical and strategic perspectives to take the product through multiple iterations.
Opener: I wanted to capture the applicant’s direct involvement with AI integration.
Strategy: The strategy is to share a slice of the life narrative of a pre-sales profile, demonstrating the challenges of incorporating customer demands and also share a vision on a new technology.
Sample Wharton MBA Goals Essay: Short-Term and Long-Term Career Aspiration (Pre-Sales to Product Management) (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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