The MBA personal statement essay can easily be misunderstood by many applicants. Too many applicants think that the MBA personal statement essay is just like their application essay for college. They could not be more wrong. If you approach your MBA essay like you would your undergraduate application essay you may be making a fatal mistake. How fatal? It depends on your grades and your GMAT score. Still if you mishandle your personal statement essay at best it shows the admissions committee that you don’t know how to follow instructions. At worst it shows that a wanton disregard for their directions. Regardless it doesn’t look good.
The MBA personal statement essay is all about business, that’s the bottom line. What’s more it also involves answering the classic question of why should they admit you instead of another applicant. That really is the bottom line question in the whole admission essay process. So to get to the core of an MBA essay you have to focus on business related virtues. These are character traits and skill sets that go a long way in showing how good you will be as a leader. MBA programs are looking for leader s and managers. They are not looking for followers and “me too” type of people. Your leadership qualities must shine out or else you might lose out.
What are these virtues that they are looking for?
They’re looking for patience, the ability to look at things in terms of a larger picture, the ability to work with people and in terms of skills, they are looking for analytical skills, clear communication skills and the ability to set a goal and follow through.
These might seems straight forward even commonsensical but you would be very surprise how uncommon common sense is nowadays. MBA’s programs have got in a bad wrap lately because lot of high profile people that get MBAs end up making a lot of money and the popular perception is that an MBA program is where you go to if you want to make a lot of dough. Well to some extent that is true, it’s much more than that.
MBA is design to produce leaders. That’s why your personal statement essay must read in such a way that it shows the reader that you fully understand the traditional role and function of an MBA program which is to produce leaders. That’s why it is important for you to not just state that you have these virtues and skills but you also have to draw examples from your actual working experience or your academic experience on that demonstrate your possession of these skills.
Think of it this way, anybody can make any claim they want. In other words anybody can lie. What differentiates a lie and just straight out statement of things they wish they had are facts based on experience and background. So you have to list this out and plug it in to the virtues that you want to communicate. Of course a lot of creative writing needs to kick in for you to smoothly make transitions.
It’s ok to highlight, it’s never ok to lie.
This guest post was written by Chris Walker. He writes model MBA personal statement examples for Ivy Research.