Personal statement: Master of Business Administration (MBA) I am currently a marketing manager for [XX], a large cancer charity. I have held this position for three years. I am interested in studying an MBA to learn from industry leaders, and explore and share innovative ways of doing business through team projects. I am also keen MBA personal statement example “I consider enrolling on this course to be a major commitment and investment to my future, one that will not only help to fill my knowledge gap but will also provide me with a platform for the next step in my career Personal statements are usually limited to words no matter what type of statement you are writing. So, it is better to finish your personal statement within - words. Paragraphs should be single-spaced throughout with an extra line of space from the next.
How to Write a Great MBA Personal Statement: Length, Structure, Examples
Note : This guide, the first in our series on application essays, focuses on mba personal statement essays, mba personal statement, similar to those required by the Harvard Business School HBS.
See our second guide for specific tips on writing short-answer essays constrained by tight word limits. For many candidates, writing essays for business school applications can feel intimidating because of the slim margin for error. Admissions officers at highly selective business schools look for justifications to reject candidates, and when they cannot find those justifications in work experience, undergraduate grades, or admissions test scores, they search for them in application essays.
Best practices in application essay writing indeed exist, although some of them are not obvious and a few may seem counterintuitive. Although this research is mostly sourced from essays submitted to the Harvard Business School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the principles outlined below apply to any top MBA program, whether on-campus, executive, mba personal statement, or online.
Northwestern University, mba personal statement, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have all introduced video essay questions. A variant asks for photos; for example, New York University asks for six captioned images that describe candidates. Most application essay prompts can be divided into five categories: introduction, career objectives, school selection motivation, achievements and setbacks, and additional optional essays.
These prompts ask applicants to introduce themselves to the admissions committee members. The Harvard Business School has used the same prompt for the last few years. Here is their actual class of required essay prompt:. As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program?
A variant includes a previous Harvard prompt asking candidates what they would say while introducing themselves to other new students on the first day of classes. These prompts ask applicants to explain their career goals and why they believe an MBA is necessary to accomplish those goals. These prompts ask candidates to discuss why they want to attend that particular business school, along with the benefits that the school and classmates will receive should they win admission.
Experts believe that this topic is highly significant to admissions officers and needs to be incorporated into most essays—and especially into introduction essays—in some fashion. The questions seek to uncover what contributed to their accomplishments, mba personal statement, along with how they recovered from setbacks, and what candidates learned from them.
This last prompt typically asks applicants to discuss any additional topics about which admissions committees need to know mba personal statement rendering decisions. Writing expert and admissions consultant Sanford Kreisberg offers a great deal of insight about successful application essays. Frequently, candidates also include how those experiences helped form their values.
Another admissions consultant argues that emphasizing values is necessaryirrespective of the structure a candidate selects. Admissions consultant Stacy Blackman advises clients to select themes that will enable them to display qualities HBS highly valuesespecially drive, accomplishment, and leadership:. We have found that both personal and career-oriented topics can work, and most candidates tell more mba personal statement one story in the essay. In the past, we have observed that successful HBS essays also demonstrate a core driving passion.
HBS has always been highly focused on leadership and really loves candidates with a track record of leadership impact and a success trajectory that indicates upper management potential.
Accomplishments have traditionally been a strong focus of HBS essays, and using at least one accomplishment story in this essay may be a good strategy. According to Kreisberg, frequent themes include overcoming adversity, or helping others overcome adversity, and overcoming victimization, mba personal statement, or helping others overcome victimization. In fact, he argues that this theme accounted for as many as 70 percent of recent Stanford GSB essays.
Kreisberg also says that absent parents, especially absent fathers, mba personal statement, embody themes in many of the successful HBS essays from and The essay must convey that, above all, the candidate seems like a genuinely likable person.
According to Kreisberg, the critical test the HBS admission committee reportedly relies on is this question: Is this someone you would want to sit next to in a case method class?
All experts agree that authenticity is a necessary winning essay hallmark. One of the most difficult challenges of application essay writing involves balancing a string of impressive accomplishments with humility.
Candidates must present themselves as showing careful attention or consideration, including consideration of the needs of other people. Ideally, candidates need to sound like previous applicants from the same industry.
Applicants with work experience in investment banking need to sound like students the school accepted with investment banking experience; applicants with military experience need to sound like students the school admitted from the armed services, and so on. Many experts suggest that effective application essays do not need to be particularly well-written. They contend that admissions committees are willing to overlook mba personal statement writing so long as applicants deliver compelling pitches.
After all, business schools are interested in selecting and training future business leaders, not Pulitzer Prize-winning writers. Moreover, the HBS essays we reviewed for this guide do not appear to be particularly well-written. The errors and defects found in the samples suggested that the authors won admission because of other factors, like their work experience, undergraduate grades, or admissions test scores.
Nevertheless, the most successful essays do appear to demonstrate many characteristics of great writing, such as:. Alice van Harten is a founding partner with Menlo Coaching, one of the most favorably-reviewed MBA admissions consulting firms in the world.
In this video, van Harten explains Classic Stylea writing style she encourages her clients to use which is based on the writing guide Clear and Simple as mba personal statement Truth. She says this approach is effective because it helps differentiate writers from other candidates and exudes confidence.
Consider for a moment why a powerful lead can be critical in this kind of essay. A typical admission committee member might review as many of 30 or 40 of these applicant essays on an average day. A compelling lead not only differentiates an essay in the mind of that reviewer, but also grabs their attention.
Here is a remarkable example:. You will never make it in this place! Mba personal statement leaving the comfort of my childhood home, I found mba personal statement blindsided by a brutal indoctrination into the male-dominated military.
The writer eventually introduces the controversial topic of male domination of organizations, and explains how she adapted to that domination and finally overcame it. During my first year in mba personal statement, my parents declared bankruptcy. Since my parents were co-signers on my student loans, our bank refused to renew them after my mba personal statement year, mba personal statement.
I did a number of things to get by, including working three jobs simultaneously to make ends meet. I also tried to support my dad by helping to manage his rehabilitation process as much as a teenager reasonably could. Displaying vulnerability, this example surprises readers who may not expect an HBS student to have faced damaging family issues like bankruptcy and drug addiction.
The lead also arouses the curiosity of readers who want to know how the applicant eventually overcame these traumas. The best essays avoid passive voice. Notice the active voice and the vivid choice of the verbs in this excerpt:. After college, I joined the Ivy Club in D. The club had declining admissions, so I galvanized support by changing its mission and expanding its demographics.
Now I thrive on helping other people and organizations do the same: identify problems, then clarify and meet their goals. HBS does not specify word limits for their essays. However, the best pieces display judicious word counts. MBA Mission explains in more detail:. We expect that most of our clients will use between and 1, words, with some using as few as and a small minority using as many as 1, We have difficulty imagining a scenario in which an applicant would truly need more than 1, but we certainly know of candidates who were accepted with essays that exceeded that high target.
In short, take the space you need to tell your story properly and showcase your personality and experience, and then work to reduce your essay to its lowest possible word count, without sacrificing any impact or effectiveness. Stacy Blackman concurs, saying that essays should be under 1, words, mba personal statement. It is always easier to eliminate words than add more during editing.
A good rule of thumb is to write until the essay feels complete, and then take a second pass through the essay to cut any unnecessary words. The following outstanding Harvard Business School essay—which was written by a published author—satisfies mba personal statement of the above criteria. This sample appears in The Harbus MBA Essay Guide. InI realized a life ambition—I completed my first novel, all while working full time at [Top U.
Investment Bank]. I could not wait to share it with the world and eagerly went in search of a literary agent. But each agent I contacted declined to represent my novel. In true entrepreneurial fashion, I self-published my novel through the digital platforms Smashwords and Createspace.
I worked with a promotional expert to organize a month-long book tour to promote the book to prominent book bloggers and their readers, mba personal statement.
The result? My novel has received multiple 5-star reader reviews, mba personal statement, from Amazon to Goodreads, and was a semifinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Storytelling is my lifelong passion; it saw me through a difficult childhood, mba personal statement. After my father left, my mother raised me as a single parent in [U. We did mba personal statement have much money and that coupled with my bookishness made me a target for bullies. Books and writing were an escape; they gave me an avenue to articulate the feelings of abandonment and powerlessness I otherwise did not want to express, mba personal statement.
Writing made me happy and the more I wrote, the more my talent blossomed. I began to win awards and my work was published in youth literary journals, mba personal statement. These experiences made me more confident, a key part of my success later in life.
It all started with a pen, a notebook, and my imagination, mba personal statement. Stories are an integral part of the human experience. They uplift and inspire, give us permission to dream and to visualize what could be.
Storytelling has been an integral part of my career, from building financial models at [Top U. My passion has also informed my growth as a leader; I believe my most impactful expressions of leadership have been my efforts to help others write the narratives of their own lives and careers. At [Top U. Being a mentor gave me the privilege of guiding another first generation college student along what I know can be a lonely, difficult path.
This fall, she started college with a full scholarship. Storytelling will be a part of my future career path; as an MBA graduate, my goal is to obtain a position in strategy and business development at an entertainment company that specializes in film or television.
Nailing Your MBA Essays: How to Tackle Your MBA Applications and Showcase Your Leadership
, time: 10:584 Tips on How to Write a Great MBA Personal Statement - EssayEdge
MBA Personal Statement This is a sample personal statement written by our professional writer. Please note that our website is scanned by various anti-plagiarism software, so do not attempt to copy/paste this personal statement. You will get caught and your university career will be over before it has begun! Personal statements are usually limited to words no matter what type of statement you are writing. So, it is better to finish your personal statement within - words. Paragraphs should be single-spaced throughout with an extra line of space from the next. Personal statement: Master of Business Administration (MBA) I am currently a marketing manager for [XX], a large cancer charity. I have held this position for three years. I am interested in studying an MBA to learn from industry leaders, and explore and share innovative ways of doing business through team projects. I am also keen
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