8

Ten Commandments of a B-School Application

You went to work for Mckinsey, the top-rated consulting company, straight out of an IIT. You are smart, intelligent, have good communication skills, great quantitative and analytical skills and all the other things that make a great package for getting into one of the top-rated business schools. Well, so do 500 other people working with Mckinsey around the world, who have similar backgrounds and will be competing with you for those few coveted seats. Add to this pool analysts working with BCG, Bain, Deloitte and other top firms and the number goes well above 3000 each year. Then there are as many aspirants from lesser-known outfits. Similar numbers run for investment banks like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs. If you are in the IT sector, then it’s more difficult with thousands of applicants from top IT firms like Infosys, TCS, Wipro or Satyam from India alone, not counting those working across the world. People from Unilever, P&G, Nestle, ITC and so on compete in the marketing pool.

Given the above scenario, it is quite clear that you need to be outstanding for your application to be accepted for admission. There needs to be a wow factor which can set you apart from others in your pool and make the admissions staff stand up and take notice. The reverse is the case for a doctor, a scientist, a professional dancer, a photographer and the like—they already have the wow factor—their unusual background for pursuing a business education. In this case, the challenge is to convince the admissions officers that they can belong to the place, fit in well with the culture and succeed with an MBA degree from the particular school. Both of these require significant effort and one needs to keep in mind the following ten commandments, to produce an outstanding application which has a greater chance of success.

One—Develop Substance in Your Application

You have gone through the initial chapters of this book. You have sorted out your reasons for doing an MBA. You have selected your business schools and in the last chapter, you have read about and hopefully understood what the schools are looking for in you, as an applicant. Having done all this and having understood the value of presentation of your application, you now need to put it in order. You may have numerous incidents which demonstrate your leadership potential and teamwork skills from your university as well as workplace, but you can’t put all of them in your application, given the constraints of space. You now need to pick and choose what you think are the best examples for the essays that you need to write for a particular school.

A great idea is to develop a database where you list down all the examples that you feel have the potential to add value and have added to the learning experience in your life. You can also list down, in a separate column, the phase of life that you have picked them up from, as well as the impact that the incident had on your life as an individual, both in a personal and professional context. Table 8.1 is an example to help you out.

Table 8.1 Categorizing Your Life’s Experiences

The ‘Category’ column would help you differentiate between the examples under leadership, teamwork or community service. The last three columns would help you to understand the value of these life experiences, and will also help you develop a strong base for the next commandment. A few qualities would emerge from all of these incidents; such as patience, ability to take quick decisions, self-confidence, aggressiveness, good analytical skills, communication skills and ability to handle pressure. Table 8.1 will also help you evaluate various examples and allow you to pick those which will have the maximum impact on the reader as having been significant in making you the person that you are today. Recall small incidents such as your participation in a tree plantation drive, teaching a kid while you were still young, or making that small donation which helped feed people in old age homes, and you will be all set.

Once you have this table ready, and believe us, it takes considerable time and effort to prepare this, we recommend that you start the process early, so that you are able to catalogue your entire life in this table and then reflect on the same to let the big picture emerge. You need to then work on putting together subsets of these examples, which have all had a similar impact, reaction, lessons learnt or have a common theme running through them. The common theme could be anything from interest in social service, to adventure sports, to family affairs, to your strategic-thinking abilities. This table would serve an important purpose, which you can perhaps already see. It will help you develop substance in your application and help you organize the material that you have collected.

Two—Build on Your Strengths and Address Your Weaknesses

After your table (made along the lines of Table 8.1) is ready and you have highlighted the lessons learnt and the manner in which the incidents have changed you as a person, you must take the statements that you have written in these columns and express them in a single word (or may be two). To give you a general idea, a typical table would contain words like patient, confident, intelligent, farsighted, strategic-thinker, anger, frustration, introvert, shy, fast-learner, analytical, and so on. They aim at capturing both the positive and negative events and experiences which have shaped your character. These words will form the basis of identifying your strengths and weaknesses. You need to look closely at each of these words, evaluate them well and then classify them as either strengths or weaknesses.

Once you have the lists ready, you will need to do further work in arranging your strengths in descending order of importance. Arrange your biggest strengths on the top while you list your biggest weaknesses at the bottom of the respective lists. The idea is to be able to present a picture where the focus remains on your strengths. Weaknesses would be discussed as well but they should always be presented in the context of continuous improvement. Those weaknesses which are at the top of your list would have been a matter of concern a few years ago. When you do talk about them, it’s easier to point out the fact that you have recognized them as such and have worked on them overtime and that you are on your way to overcome some of these, while others would take more time and probably, help from others. If you work in this manner, you would be successful in presenting a picture of yourself shot in the right light, so that it allows for the most agreeable view on close scrutiny or from a distance.

When you start writing your essays, use the list to build your strengths into your essays by weaving them into your examples. If you look at the essays of successful candidates at the end of this book, you will notice that each essay is able to highlight a few of the strong points and qualities in that person, while sticking to a theme and telling a story related to the question asked. Leave aside your weaknesses and discuss them only if a topic specifically asks you to do so. If you have excellent relations with your recommenders, it might be worthwhile to discuss these lists with them, so that they are able to highlight a few of these qualities, while working on your recommendation, and are also able to comment on how you have been improving upon your weaknesses. In more cases than not, expect a question during your interview, which would focus on your weakness and your perceived improvement of the same. This is a sensitive topic, so remember to prepare well and cover maximum ground when preparing for the interview.

Three—Address the ‘Fit’ Quotient to Build Support

We have discussed the importance of ‘fit’ in Chapter 3, where we discussed the various factors that aid you in deciding between various business schools. If there is one thing which cannot be overemphasized, it is the importance of ‘fit’ in making the decision. We believe that since you have come thus far, you were able to single out the factors that are important to you in choosing a place where you would spend two years of your life, along with a significant investment in terms of, both, money and effort. Now the situation is akin to a man ready to propose, but who’s not sure whether his prospective bride will say yes. For that to happen, you will have to convince her that you are as much the right choice for her, as she is for you. Similarly, you now need to tell the school how you fit in perfectly with their programme, their culture and their strengths. You need to turn the picture of ‘fit’ inside out and let the school evaluate the fit for itself, through the picture that you present to them.

The tools available to you are the essays, recommendations and interview. You need to make sure that all your essays are written, so as to take into account the overall personality of the school. If Stanford prides itself on being a laidback achiever, then you need to focus on how you have been one as well, to whom living a good life is as important as achieving well laid out career plans. For Chicago GSB, your attention to detail and your ability to do analysis should definitely stand out somewhere in the essays. For Harvard, it’s your leadership, performance and potential that counts the most. You need to bring these aspects out, as well as you can, in your essays. The correct use of words and examples with a focus on using the most impressive and high-impact examples can achieve the same for you. Next, your recommendations are almost always a tool to reinforce the picture presented through your essays, in the words of others. Ask your recommenders to focus on specific qualities and help them with examples which bring these out well. Give them sufficient time to write detailed recommendations which are able to cover aspects of your performance, potential and personality. Next, use your interview as an important tool and involve the interviewer in a conversation about you as a person and what matters to you. If you do understand the culture of that business school and have identified it as a good fit, the best preparation for such an interview is to be your self and be open to everything. Let the school gauge you and your abilities and evaluate in real terms your fit with their offering and profile. It might sound clichéd, but it’s better to get rejected than to land up at a place where you do not fit in. You need to enjoy those two years in order to get the maximum benefit from the education and the experience.

Four—Position Yourself Well

Positioning is a much-used marketing term, used to define how a consumer perceives a brand or a product. It is called stepping into the consumer’s shoes and appreciating their point of view. A discerning consumer will, in most cases, buy a brand with which he/she closely identifies. Examples of tags that a consumer attaches to a brand are honest, modern, contemporary, young, old, hip, technically-superior, feature-loaded, multifunctional, complex, confused, and so on. You would clearly notice that some of these words have a positive bearing and others have negative undertones. Business schools also evaluate you in a similar manner and based on the way you position yourself, they attach a few tags to the brand called you.

In the admissions process, you need to position yourself such that you get as many positive associations as possible, in terms of these tags. Your application should be developed in a way that every time a member of the admissions committee reads your file, they come up with comments like honest, well-planned, industrious, entrepreneurial, risk-taker, leader, achiever, high morals, thinker, adventurous and so on. They also make comments like confused, lost, creative, inexperienced, unidimensional experience, etc. These comments are usually put down on your file by the person evaluating your case. It is easy to see what will benefit you more. Consider it as a keyword search and the words used to define you should be used regularly by the school people for themselves. In most cases, if two people agree that your case does not merit further consideration, you are out of the race. However, if you are able to leave a faint impression of somebody who matches the school profile on even one of them, you live on with a fighting chance. If you are able to clearly show that you have all the positive qualities that they require, as well as the energy, enthusiasm and the commitment to do well in the programme, then no one can stop you from being admitted to the programme. You are all they wanted, required and dreamt about, when starting this yearly cycle.

Five—Understand the School

While you were researching the schools, we urged you to try and understand the nature of a school and see if you ‘fit’ with the culture. Broadly defined, a school culture would include people like your fellow students, faculty and staff, the facilities for development, the opportunities available and the effort needed to avail of them and finally the teaching methods, the expenses and the quality of life. It includes everything and everybody. For a detailed discussion and explanation of the various factors, please go back to Chapter 3.

An in-depth understanding of the school is critical for you to make the right choice. It is even more important when you are working on your application and need to know the important areas in your essays to concentrate upon. The schools are quite similar in that on a broad base, all of them want a superstar who can hit a century on debut (or at least hold the bat steady). To help you understand what a school looks for in an applicant, a detailed discussion is presented in Chapter 7. For instance, an in-depth understanding of a school like Kellogg helps you bring out your teamwork abilities when you are applying there and play on your strength to make friends and influence people in a group. It helps you to showcase your ability to work in a close-knit group and make relationships last a lifetime when you are applying to Tuck. You are a clear winner when you showcase your leadership potential above everything else in your application to Harvard, through your activities and achievements till date. For a select group of schools, look at Table 8.2 to get a general idea of what strengths can wow which schools.

Table 8.2 Qualities Admired by Different B-Schools

Six—Maintain Your Perspective

The more you know, the less you know. What it means is that during the process of researching the business schools, you would come to know of things which will broaden your horizon. You would learn new things and realize that an MBA abroad is not just an academic degree, but a different way of life altogether. It is a humbling experience for a few who realize that the objectives they started out with seem too small and find themselves capable of achieving much more in life. It is true that this is one degree which opens the maximum number of doors for you. From manufacturing to IT to banking to consulting to you-name-it, an MBA can place you anywhere depending on your efforts and abilities as well as your desires. However, please do remember that some programmes are better placed than others to help you achieve these objectives.

While all of the above and more will happen, you will meet more people, gain new knowledge and need to work hard to maintain your perspective. The basic principles should not be affected and the premise for your decision to do an MBA should not change. Your career goals might change, but it should not affect the reason which prompted you to do an MBA in the first place. This is important because it is this premise which forms the basis of your application and the entire process thereafter. Only when you decide those, do you select your schools and start with the first of the ten commandments in this chapter. Also, it is the only thing which will help you to maintain a very personal and self-centred approach to the whole application. After all, the essays are about you and your views and not about the world. You have to talk about why you need an MBA and what it will do for your career in the short and long term. You may or may not choose to do nonprofit or to save the world. It is all right to be selfish during this process.

Also, a well-developed reasoning and a balanced approach allow for a good foundation on which your application can shine. For example, let’s say you have been long working in the commercial department of a consumer goods company. Although you did a great job, you long to be on the frontline, where all the action takes place. You want to get into marketing and a good way to make the switch is to do an MBA, learn the ropes and then start with the new role. Now this is a good line of reasoning and difficult to falter at any stage. It helps to maintain this perspective because everything else can be easily built around this theme. Your passion for marketing developed through your involvement with various projects. You saw mistakes happen and gave suggestions to your colleagues, which were sometimes accepted and their success proved that you have a natural flair for marketing and so on. It can develop into a great story, well supported with a lot of examples. However, if you suddenly decide that IT looks attractive and is the ‘in thing’ currently, it changes the basic premise that you decided to do an MBA because you wanted to switch to marketing. The story now has to be force-fitted about how you saw IT as the goal and how things happened and convinced you that this is what you should do. You will probably find it difficult to give examples on how this realization dawned upon you. It changes the focus from you and onto the story itself, since you need to force-fit. If you had decided to maintain the perspective, it would have been a natural fit and the essays would have been stronger and more convincing about how you would have made a great marketer.

Seven—Develop a Coherent Picture

This one is easy to understand but requires the maximum amount of effort. Once you have all the information about your life’s examples, your strengths, your understanding of the school, you need to decide your positioning and use your perspective to give it shape, so that it fits in with your goals. What happens many a time is that one tries to fit in too much information in the given word limit thinking that the admissions officer would be impressed by the number of examples. The reality could not be further from truth. The most important thing that an office, or even a recruiter, would look in your examples from your life and work experience is substance. You should have demonstrated certain skills or abilities, you would have learned some things during the incident and finally, you have changed yourself in a definite way after the incident, so that you are a better professional or even a better human being with a softer personality.

Your understanding of a school would help you greatly at this stage (Table 8.2). You need to shortlist a few examples from Table 8.1, which would be appreciated by the people at school and which would help you get the desired positioning. Once you are ready with these examples, which should be greater in quality than quantity, you need to work on putting them together into essays. This will require significant effort and will need inputs from other people as well. The best thing to do is to contact a few current students and take their feedback on your essays. If you get a wow response from them, you are on the right track. Simply stated, your examples should blend with each other in such a manner that it makes a seamless fit and should present a very strong picture of you with the experiences taking backstage.

Also, watch out for contradictions within your essays and recommendations. Since it is a tiring and time-consuming process, we can lose track of our reasoning and end up contradicting ourselves. This can be very damaging and you might not even get a chance to explain yourself. So make sure that you present a realistic picture, which is supported by your recommenders and all the gross negatives are removed by a thorough check. Take help from someone else to resolve this part, for it is very difficult to take a third person’s view and evaluate your own essays. Also look for grammatical errors, for sometimes they may completely change the meaning of a sentence or even the essay. Once you are done with this, you are done with most of the important work. Now you only need to prepare hard for your interview, using this as the base, so that the coherence is maintained. Try to avoid adding information at a later stage, as far as possible, and as said earlier, maintain your perspective.

Eight—Stand Out From the Crowd

We started this chapter with a discussion on why you need to do just that. Being an international applicant, such as one from India, you more often than not belong to a well-defined applicant pool. One such pool could be—IIT engineer, high GMAT (>750), business analyst at Mckinsey or another well-known consulting firm like BCG, etc. Another could be—engineer, high GMAT (>720), IT industry (mostly software). These form applicant pools and allow schools to categorize you into one of them with ease. There are also, usually, pools within larger pools of such applicants. For example, business analysts at consulting firms probably make up for the pool with maximum number of applicants from around the world, and Indians would be a small subset of such applicants. On the contrary, in the IT industry, it is the Indians who dominate the pool of applicants.

When you do belong to a pool, there are still things that you can do to stand out and differentiate yourself, which is probably your only chance to get noticed and hence, get selected. When you stand out, your positioning allows for positive keyword associations, which work hard for you. A discussion related to the nature and quality of work experience has been presented in Chapter 7. Typical areas through which people are able to differentiate themselves are their performance in extracurricular activities and in community-related activities. It is a fact that in developing countries, even landing a great job differentiates you from the larger global pool of, let’s say, analysts working for consulting firms. But, on a more general note, you do need to differentiate yourself in more ways than one. Usual things that make you stand out are your publications, research interests, interest in outdoors and sports, photography, knowledge of art (paintings) and other such things. If you have organized a conference with known names from industry, it gets you a lot of credit. Finally, it matters if you’re the son of a king and have a kingdom waiting to be managed better, for the school would definitely understand the compulsion and appreciate your interest in attending their institute.

You should avoid the most common mistake applicants make while developing their profile. In a bid to stand out, people sometimes present things which make them look eccentric. Quirks are accepted, but tolerance is less and normal behaviour is the norm. So, you may like to climb mountains, but how you manage the high-stress job of a banker and also find enough time to carry out expeditions can raise eyebrows. So sometimes, it’s better to mention things but with a lower emphasis so that it sounds more like an interest and not a compulsion. A business school might not appreciate it much if you are missing classes to spend time in nearby mountains, so it’s better to not leave a strong impression of some of your interests.

Nine—Be Concise

Stanford GSB asks all applicants to write essays on only two topics. These topics are open-ended and while there is no maximum length defined, it is stated that most applicants on an average write, about, ten pages (standard letter or A4) of font size 12, double-spaced paragraphs. It is but one of the few rare institutes which allow open-ended replies. Most other institutes have specified word limits where Harvard stands on the other extreme (400-word essays) to Stanford, and Wharton is not too lenient either (1000-word limit). Whatever the case be and whether clearly stated or left to be understood, the rule is to be to the point and concise with your essays. Brevity is the key to leaving a strong impression on the admissions committee.

Try to picture a typical scenario. At Stanford, each applicant has poured out his/her heart in the essays and has tried to present a compelling picture in about ten pages of each essay. Adding to this other information is your application, your online transcripts and the recommendations (three in number). Given the volume of applications and the time constraints, this makes for a huge file and a lot of information. The admissions committee also has to complete the process quickly and shortlist the candidates for an interview, which is the final stage, after which the results are published. In our opinion, you are able to stand out and differentiate yourself from thousands of others simply by telling your story in a compelling manner but in less number of words using, let’s say, only five pages. The impact is greater and the impression created is that of a person who knows what he/she is saying and doing and is sure of himself/herself. Your confidence speaks for itself if you are able to define the reasons in a few sentences rather than writing long paragraphs about the same.

Even at other schools which have strict word limits, it is beneficial to stay within those limits, although an allowance of ten per cent is assumed (more or less). The key to presenting a hard-hitting argument is to be precise with your information and present it without any ornamentation. Being straightforward in such a situation, to the extent of being blunt at times, pays. At Harvard, the admissions officers expect it, since they understand that it is indeed a challenge to present a compelling story in 400 words. You need to be grammatically correct and, if possible, avoid fancy words. Also, it is an unwritten code to avoid starting an essay with a quotation, but it completely depends on individual style; where some people can carry it off and others can’t. Avoid using bullet points to present instances and weave it in the form of a paragraph if possible. But again, there are no fixed rules. The only winning formula is that the more you say in less number of words, the higher will be the impact. Once again, don’t overdo it and write a line or two saying that since you are the prince and soon to be king, so you should be admitted. Use the allowed or assumed limits and present your arguments in a convincing manner. It will go a long way in creating a favourable impression.

Ten—Always Use a Checklist

The last commandment states the most obvious fact and yet it is the most common mistake that people make. Don’t forget to include things in your application, don’t miss out on important events and don’t lose out on deadlines. An easy way to keep things in control is to use a checklist to manage things. Whatever you are doing and plan to do, keep a list with a set date by which it needs to be completed. Religiously check the list to make sure that everything is as per schedule and that you have not missed on any detail. When you are working, there are a lot of pressures and on top of that, you need to manage the entire application process. Approximate timelines are given in Chapter 6 to serve as a guide for the same. Sometimes, just a small reminder that needed to be sent to your recommender, which you forgot, can delay your application submission and push it into round two. A courier that needed to go for submitting your transcripts and which you forgot can create problems as well. Keeping a to-do list is a great idea to efficiently manage the entire process. It helps to remember, among other things, your parents’ anniversary or even your own, which can slip out of the mind, given the application deadlines looming over your head. Seeing the larger picture, we recommend strongly that you make a habit of maintaining a to-do list and update it every week, with dates or timelines for completion. This will make sure that things happen before its too late.

Summary

1. Prepare your Table 8.1 to help you identify examples from your life which will help you develop substance in your application.
2. Use the table also to identify your strengths and weaknesses. Use strengths which define your personality and use weak points which have shown considerable improvement over the past few years.
3. Present a strong argument to establish your fit with the school. Let it come out naturally from your essays, recommendations and interview that you and the school are made for each other.
4. Position yourself such that positive keyword associations are made with your application by the admissions officers.
5. Understand the school well and use it to highlight those examples which establish with certainty that you are a natural choice for the school and have all the qualities that they are looking for in an applicant.
6. Maintain a well-developed perspective throughout the application process, for it lends strength and credibility to your application.
7. Avoid contradictions in the statements as well as in various parts of your application. Present a well-balanced and coherent picture through your submissions and interview.
8. Make an effort to differentiate yourself in other ways from your common applicant pool. Focus on extracurricular activities, community activities, interests, hobbies, and work experience to achieve the same.
9. Be concise and to the point in your essays. It helps to present a confident personality through sparing use of words with maximum impact on the reader. Pay attention to word limits and, as a rule, do not cross them.
10. Use a checklist at all times to manage your work and your application process.