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29 May 2018, 06:49
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Whoohoo! Our newest essay analysis for CBS is out. Ready for it?! Check it out below or head over to our site to check it out here: https://admissionado.com/resources/essays/columbia-cbs/
Enjoy and hit us up if you have any questions or are having trouble getting started!
CBS MBA Essay 1
Through your résumé and recommendations, we have a clear sense of your professional path to date. What are your career goals over the next 3 – 5 years and what, in your imagination, would be your long-term dream job? (500 words)
This is mostly a standard goals essay. But interestingly, they tweaked the question from last year. Last year, they wanted you to split time between explaining your goals and how you envisioned CBS helping you achieve those goals. This year they’ve zapped that second piece out and replaced it with… doubling down on the goals themselves. Neat. Let’s drill into that a bit, shall we?
First of all, they’ve made a point to steer you away from rehashing your résumé here. “Because we can read, and have your résumé and recommendations in front of us… We have a clear sense of your professional path to date. In other words, we get what you’ve done up to this point (so please don’t waste our time by repeating that stuff here, because you’ll be revealing just how much you don’t get that simple concept)”… is kinda what the folks at Columbia Business School are really saying there. Now, there IS a reason to slip in some of your achievements, but only to the extent that doing so further CLARIFIES your goals and/or CONVINCES the reader that you have a shot at succeeding AT achieving those goals (we’ll come back to that).
[They’ve also gone back to the tried-and-true 500-word limit, rather than leave it open to 100-750, which we’re guessing ended up being 750+ every single time.]
Okay, so how to crush Essay #1 for CBS? Well, this may require some re-wiring of your brain, so strap in.
You want to the reader to be utterly impressed, okay, we’ll grant you that. But HOW you go about impressing him/her is where it gets tricky. Your instinct might be to impress through pitching the coolest-SOUNDING job/plan. In other words, you may want to tantalize these guys/gals with a killer tech idea; or something revolutionary; or something so creative and unique, it stops them in their tracks. Nope. Don’t try to impress through the plan. Instead, impress through the INEVITABILITY OF that plan. If your background (and therefore your skill set, prior achievements, general career arc, etc.) maps perfectly to the plan you’ve laid out for the next 3-5 years, you’re going to be thought of as “bankable.”
Think about it… business schools don’t just allow for your career goals to shift, they fully expect them to. That’s often the whole point of business school: to prime “future successes” to be as mighty as possible. What they want are SURE THINGS.
This should be a game-changer as you approach your essays. You’re no longer selling “the buyer” on the quality of the plan itself, but rather, on your ability to pull that plan off, because your background and your skill set, and your interests, and your future aspirations, and your dedication to success are all in perfect alignment.
To put a fine point on it, the reader of the perfect CBS Essay #1 won’t say, “Wow, what an impressive 3-5 year plan. I hope this kid succeeds!” The perfect essay elicits THIS response: “Wow, this kid is gonna pull that plan off. Or any other plan s/he commits to. Let’s go get them before someone else does.” See the difference?
Now as far as the long-term dream job is concerned, don’t just talk about what that job is. Attack it from the angle of what changes (in the world, in others, etc.) as a result of your succeeding IN that dream job. Let’s say your dream job is to be the future CEO of a brand new game-changing telecom company. Don’t just tell us what that company does, and what you imagine your role to be as CEO of that disrupting change agent. Pitch us the DISRUPTION. Sell us on “the thing you dream will happen WHEN YOU’RE SUCCEEDING.” If we buy into THAT, then we’re gonna want to help you get to that long-term dream job…
As far as balance/structure goes, this will get you out of trouble for a decent first draft (as always, remember that no two applicant essays need look alike–this is just a general suggestion if you’re stumbling out of the cages):
Sell us quickly on either a TEASER version of your long-term vision, or the OPPORTUNITY you’re hoping to pop, or a PROBLEM that needs fixing. (50-75 words)
Now, quickly catch us up to speed on what you’re up to now, and how you’re hoping to push things forward in the next 3-5 years. (Important to forget business school, for a second – pretend an MBA didn’t exist for the purposes of this particular paragraph; just give us the 3-5 year plan.) But, don’t just give us the step-by-step plan. Convince us that your skill set will allow you to transition from wherever you are right now to step 1 of that plan, and then to step 2, and then step 3, etc. This is the crux of it. Remember, it’s not the plan. It’s the inevitability of your SUCCEEDING at it, that counts. (2 paragraphs, 150 words apiece)
Finally, expand the canvas to include your long term dream job, selling us on “the result of your succeeding AT your dream job.” Sell us on your passion for this thing. Sell on your confidence for why you’ll succeed. (100 words or so)
Somewhere along the way, wherever it makes sense, it won’t hurt to layer in the area or areas where you need some fortification (from, say, a top-notch business school), in order to really achieve your goals, fully. (2 sentences, max)
More important than nailing the structure on a first draft, is getting the foundation correct. So focus on making a convincing argument that:
You have assessed your strengths and weaknesses with considerable thought and insight, and
You have thought through your goals very carefully and have a clear sense of risk, what’s realistic/not realistic, have a back-up plan if things don’t work out exactly as you’d like, etc.
As long as you nail those two things, the rest (the rewriting process where it all starts to tighten up and get sexy) will fall into place easily.
CBS MBA Essay 2
How will you take advantage of being “at the very center of business”? Click photo. (250 words)
A return to a previous year’s question. Love it when that happens.
This question is really asking “Do you fully understand the opportunity at hand?” Kinda like: “Here’s a magic lamp, you have three wishes, they can be anything… go.” The guy who TRULY “understands the opportunity” would say “My first wish is to be granted UNLIMITED WISHES.” The response DEMONSTRATES that he gets it.
When you’re answering this question, you need to show us that you “get” why having a business school in the heart of New York City is meaningful. But here’s the twist… not just meaningful for Joe Applicant. Meaningful for YOU. How will YOU take advantage of it?
Actionable, practical, real-life, believable, tangible arguments folks. Not… “stuff everyone knows about New York already but doesn’t demonstrate a connection to you personally.” Don’t tell us that New York is the financial capital of the world. Show us—instead—how that might affect your plans. Walk us through a hypothetical. Has NYC already impacted you and can you show that while you’re in business school, you’ll build on it further? Don’t just tell us what the opportunities are—don’t LIST stuff. We know the list. Columbia knows the list. No one cares about the list.
In 250 words, there isn’t much room to faff. Walk us through one or two very tangible examples of what may happen while YOU are at business school… in the epicenter of business, and what’s gonna happen as a result of that. Play it out, make us picture it. A leads to B leads to C.
Skin it another way: challenge yourself and imagine that several top cities (London, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, etc.) have comparably-ranked business schools. And suppose you end up getting accepted to ALL of them. Why does the combination of (1) YOU + (2) New York City lead to a more exciting OUTCOME? Whatever it is, prove it to us, here, in 250 words.
Play out this hypothetical: Congratulations, you’ve been accepted to Stanford, Wharton and Harvard. But you’re gonna turn all three down because they all lack one thing: New York City. Convince us that you’re the kind of guy who might actually turn down H/S/W for this reason—it has to be specific as hell in order to pass the smell test.
Think back to chemistry. Reactivity. Explosions. Good stuff.
When you mix (1) YOU with (2) Some other business school that ISN’T in New York City… there’s a reaction. A great one. You may achieve an excellent version of your goals.
But it isn’t EXPLOSIVE…
Instead, when you mix (1) YOU with (2) NEW YORK CITY……. S&$T EXPLODES. And that “outcome” is better, cooler, more impressive, more meaningful, weighs more. Why? How? Explain that delta HERE.
What can we learn about you based on this chemical equation New York City + You XXXX?
The absolute worst thing you can do is list attributed about the business opportunities that abound in New York City. Similarly, we don’t want a retread of you and your goals either (in isolation). We wanna know about the COLLISION of you and your goals … and NYC. Our safety goggles are on. Let’s the dangerous mixing commence.
CBS MBA Essay 3
Please provide an example of a team failure of which you have been a part. If given a second chance, what would you do differently? (250 words)
Not much room, so we need to get to the good stuff efficiently. Let’s identify that FIRST, and then work backwards.
“What would you do differently.” This is where you need to focus. Did you catch the KEY implication there? Whatever the “team failure” had been, the suggestion here is that YOU, no matter how well you think you did with YOUR part, still had tons of agency to affect the overall outcome. You’re not an individual who got an A+ on your piece, while the team failed as a whole. CBS would argue that each person, therefore, failed in some way.
Love this mentality. Don’t blame circumstance, or others, for a group failure. Even if you THINK you did “your piece” 100% correctly, actually, you missed something that could have “saved the team.” Go back in time, as they suggest, and figure out what you missed. The key to this exercise is to demonstrate your ability to step outside of yourself (and your ego) and to optimize for a successful outcome. Are you able to ask “what if I’d done this, what if I hadn’t done that, what if instead of doing this, I’d done this instead”? Are you able to risk exposing a prior decision as potentially… ill-informed? Unwise? Amateur? If so, pat yourself on the back. You’re proving to be a RESULTS guy. If you’re trying to impress CBS, that’s how to do it. Show your analytical skills HERE by dissecting the problem, exposing all possible flaws, missed signals, bad decisions, wrong instincts, etc. and replay it all here with suggestions for ALTERNATE approaches, and speculate on different outcomes, explaining WHY.
In order to do that, you’ll need a good 150-200 words, which means that your SETUP needs to be matter of fact. Consider this layout to skewer this question:
Section 1 – Explain the failure quickly, without much drama, just get us to a place where we understand what was supposed to happen, and what didn’t. We just need to “get it.” (50 words)
Section 2 – Here’s what I think “I did … wrong/sub-optimally” or “I could have done, but didn’t.” Hash it out. The important part isn’t the subject matter, it’s the “how are you dissecting it”? Think “case study” puzzles in consulting firm interviews. They don’t give a rat’s ass about your answer, they just wanna see you “think out loud.” They wanna hear the way your GEARS work. This is what THIS section is about. Churn those gears, on paper. Show us how you’re breaking the problem down, explaining where your actions (or inactions) were the causes that led to undesirable effects. Explain why THESE alternate approaches would have changed things. (150-200 words)
Now, Section 2 (Paragraphs 2 and 3) can go a few different ways depending on your particular story. Here’s one example:
Paragraph 2: Here’s all the stuff I missed that I realize looking back with an analytical eye. (100 words)
Paragraph 3: And here’s what MIGHT have happened (and why) had I replayed it, knowing what I know now. (100 words)
Enjoy and hit us up if you have any questions or are having trouble getting started!
CBS MBA Essay 1
Through your résumé and recommendations, we have a clear sense of your professional path to date. What are your career goals over the next 3 – 5 years and what, in your imagination, would be your long-term dream job? (500 words)
This is mostly a standard goals essay. But interestingly, they tweaked the question from last year. Last year, they wanted you to split time between explaining your goals and how you envisioned CBS helping you achieve those goals. This year they’ve zapped that second piece out and replaced it with… doubling down on the goals themselves. Neat. Let’s drill into that a bit, shall we?
First of all, they’ve made a point to steer you away from rehashing your résumé here. “Because we can read, and have your résumé and recommendations in front of us… We have a clear sense of your professional path to date. In other words, we get what you’ve done up to this point (so please don’t waste our time by repeating that stuff here, because you’ll be revealing just how much you don’t get that simple concept)”… is kinda what the folks at Columbia Business School are really saying there. Now, there IS a reason to slip in some of your achievements, but only to the extent that doing so further CLARIFIES your goals and/or CONVINCES the reader that you have a shot at succeeding AT achieving those goals (we’ll come back to that).
[They’ve also gone back to the tried-and-true 500-word limit, rather than leave it open to 100-750, which we’re guessing ended up being 750+ every single time.]
Okay, so how to crush Essay #1 for CBS? Well, this may require some re-wiring of your brain, so strap in.
You want to the reader to be utterly impressed, okay, we’ll grant you that. But HOW you go about impressing him/her is where it gets tricky. Your instinct might be to impress through pitching the coolest-SOUNDING job/plan. In other words, you may want to tantalize these guys/gals with a killer tech idea; or something revolutionary; or something so creative and unique, it stops them in their tracks. Nope. Don’t try to impress through the plan. Instead, impress through the INEVITABILITY OF that plan. If your background (and therefore your skill set, prior achievements, general career arc, etc.) maps perfectly to the plan you’ve laid out for the next 3-5 years, you’re going to be thought of as “bankable.”
Think about it… business schools don’t just allow for your career goals to shift, they fully expect them to. That’s often the whole point of business school: to prime “future successes” to be as mighty as possible. What they want are SURE THINGS.
This should be a game-changer as you approach your essays. You’re no longer selling “the buyer” on the quality of the plan itself, but rather, on your ability to pull that plan off, because your background and your skill set, and your interests, and your future aspirations, and your dedication to success are all in perfect alignment.
To put a fine point on it, the reader of the perfect CBS Essay #1 won’t say, “Wow, what an impressive 3-5 year plan. I hope this kid succeeds!” The perfect essay elicits THIS response: “Wow, this kid is gonna pull that plan off. Or any other plan s/he commits to. Let’s go get them before someone else does.” See the difference?
Now as far as the long-term dream job is concerned, don’t just talk about what that job is. Attack it from the angle of what changes (in the world, in others, etc.) as a result of your succeeding IN that dream job. Let’s say your dream job is to be the future CEO of a brand new game-changing telecom company. Don’t just tell us what that company does, and what you imagine your role to be as CEO of that disrupting change agent. Pitch us the DISRUPTION. Sell us on “the thing you dream will happen WHEN YOU’RE SUCCEEDING.” If we buy into THAT, then we’re gonna want to help you get to that long-term dream job…
As far as balance/structure goes, this will get you out of trouble for a decent first draft (as always, remember that no two applicant essays need look alike–this is just a general suggestion if you’re stumbling out of the cages):
Sell us quickly on either a TEASER version of your long-term vision, or the OPPORTUNITY you’re hoping to pop, or a PROBLEM that needs fixing. (50-75 words)
Now, quickly catch us up to speed on what you’re up to now, and how you’re hoping to push things forward in the next 3-5 years. (Important to forget business school, for a second – pretend an MBA didn’t exist for the purposes of this particular paragraph; just give us the 3-5 year plan.) But, don’t just give us the step-by-step plan. Convince us that your skill set will allow you to transition from wherever you are right now to step 1 of that plan, and then to step 2, and then step 3, etc. This is the crux of it. Remember, it’s not the plan. It’s the inevitability of your SUCCEEDING at it, that counts. (2 paragraphs, 150 words apiece)
Finally, expand the canvas to include your long term dream job, selling us on “the result of your succeeding AT your dream job.” Sell us on your passion for this thing. Sell on your confidence for why you’ll succeed. (100 words or so)
Somewhere along the way, wherever it makes sense, it won’t hurt to layer in the area or areas where you need some fortification (from, say, a top-notch business school), in order to really achieve your goals, fully. (2 sentences, max)
More important than nailing the structure on a first draft, is getting the foundation correct. So focus on making a convincing argument that:
You have assessed your strengths and weaknesses with considerable thought and insight, and
You have thought through your goals very carefully and have a clear sense of risk, what’s realistic/not realistic, have a back-up plan if things don’t work out exactly as you’d like, etc.
As long as you nail those two things, the rest (the rewriting process where it all starts to tighten up and get sexy) will fall into place easily.
CBS MBA Essay 2
How will you take advantage of being “at the very center of business”? Click photo. (250 words)
A return to a previous year’s question. Love it when that happens.
This question is really asking “Do you fully understand the opportunity at hand?” Kinda like: “Here’s a magic lamp, you have three wishes, they can be anything… go.” The guy who TRULY “understands the opportunity” would say “My first wish is to be granted UNLIMITED WISHES.” The response DEMONSTRATES that he gets it.
When you’re answering this question, you need to show us that you “get” why having a business school in the heart of New York City is meaningful. But here’s the twist… not just meaningful for Joe Applicant. Meaningful for YOU. How will YOU take advantage of it?
Actionable, practical, real-life, believable, tangible arguments folks. Not… “stuff everyone knows about New York already but doesn’t demonstrate a connection to you personally.” Don’t tell us that New York is the financial capital of the world. Show us—instead—how that might affect your plans. Walk us through a hypothetical. Has NYC already impacted you and can you show that while you’re in business school, you’ll build on it further? Don’t just tell us what the opportunities are—don’t LIST stuff. We know the list. Columbia knows the list. No one cares about the list.
In 250 words, there isn’t much room to faff. Walk us through one or two very tangible examples of what may happen while YOU are at business school… in the epicenter of business, and what’s gonna happen as a result of that. Play it out, make us picture it. A leads to B leads to C.
Skin it another way: challenge yourself and imagine that several top cities (London, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, etc.) have comparably-ranked business schools. And suppose you end up getting accepted to ALL of them. Why does the combination of (1) YOU + (2) New York City lead to a more exciting OUTCOME? Whatever it is, prove it to us, here, in 250 words.
Play out this hypothetical: Congratulations, you’ve been accepted to Stanford, Wharton and Harvard. But you’re gonna turn all three down because they all lack one thing: New York City. Convince us that you’re the kind of guy who might actually turn down H/S/W for this reason—it has to be specific as hell in order to pass the smell test.
Think back to chemistry. Reactivity. Explosions. Good stuff.
When you mix (1) YOU with (2) Some other business school that ISN’T in New York City… there’s a reaction. A great one. You may achieve an excellent version of your goals.
But it isn’t EXPLOSIVE…
Instead, when you mix (1) YOU with (2) NEW YORK CITY……. S&$T EXPLODES. And that “outcome” is better, cooler, more impressive, more meaningful, weighs more. Why? How? Explain that delta HERE.
What can we learn about you based on this chemical equation New York City + You XXXX?
The absolute worst thing you can do is list attributed about the business opportunities that abound in New York City. Similarly, we don’t want a retread of you and your goals either (in isolation). We wanna know about the COLLISION of you and your goals … and NYC. Our safety goggles are on. Let’s the dangerous mixing commence.
CBS MBA Essay 3
Please provide an example of a team failure of which you have been a part. If given a second chance, what would you do differently? (250 words)
Not much room, so we need to get to the good stuff efficiently. Let’s identify that FIRST, and then work backwards.
“What would you do differently.” This is where you need to focus. Did you catch the KEY implication there? Whatever the “team failure” had been, the suggestion here is that YOU, no matter how well you think you did with YOUR part, still had tons of agency to affect the overall outcome. You’re not an individual who got an A+ on your piece, while the team failed as a whole. CBS would argue that each person, therefore, failed in some way.
Love this mentality. Don’t blame circumstance, or others, for a group failure. Even if you THINK you did “your piece” 100% correctly, actually, you missed something that could have “saved the team.” Go back in time, as they suggest, and figure out what you missed. The key to this exercise is to demonstrate your ability to step outside of yourself (and your ego) and to optimize for a successful outcome. Are you able to ask “what if I’d done this, what if I hadn’t done that, what if instead of doing this, I’d done this instead”? Are you able to risk exposing a prior decision as potentially… ill-informed? Unwise? Amateur? If so, pat yourself on the back. You’re proving to be a RESULTS guy. If you’re trying to impress CBS, that’s how to do it. Show your analytical skills HERE by dissecting the problem, exposing all possible flaws, missed signals, bad decisions, wrong instincts, etc. and replay it all here with suggestions for ALTERNATE approaches, and speculate on different outcomes, explaining WHY.
In order to do that, you’ll need a good 150-200 words, which means that your SETUP needs to be matter of fact. Consider this layout to skewer this question:
Section 1 – Explain the failure quickly, without much drama, just get us to a place where we understand what was supposed to happen, and what didn’t. We just need to “get it.” (50 words)
Section 2 – Here’s what I think “I did … wrong/sub-optimally” or “I could have done, but didn’t.” Hash it out. The important part isn’t the subject matter, it’s the “how are you dissecting it”? Think “case study” puzzles in consulting firm interviews. They don’t give a rat’s ass about your answer, they just wanna see you “think out loud.” They wanna hear the way your GEARS work. This is what THIS section is about. Churn those gears, on paper. Show us how you’re breaking the problem down, explaining where your actions (or inactions) were the causes that led to undesirable effects. Explain why THESE alternate approaches would have changed things. (150-200 words)
Now, Section 2 (Paragraphs 2 and 3) can go a few different ways depending on your particular story. Here’s one example:
Paragraph 2: Here’s all the stuff I missed that I realize looking back with an analytical eye. (100 words)
Paragraph 3: And here’s what MIGHT have happened (and why) had I replayed it, knowing what I know now. (100 words)
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