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16 Oct 2014, 15:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Diamonds in the Rough: Ivy League Experience for a Public School Price at Rutgers |
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MBA applicants can get carried away with rankings. In this series, we profile amazing programs at business schools that are typically ranked outside the top 15. Benefiting from the prestige of its parent university, the eighth oldest university in the United States, Rutgers Business School (RBS) hosts a suite of flexible curricular options and formal concentrations that are rooted in its multidisciplinary strength. The program boasts the “same education as an Ivy League School, at a fraction of the price” on its Web site, a claim that seems substantiated by robust industry connections across several disciplines, a network of 33,000 alumni, and a high employment rate (95% after 90 days after graduation for the Class of 2013). For those aspiring to work on Wall Street, the school offers a Master of Quantitative Finance degree that earned it a place among the “Top 10 Quant Schools in 2012,” as ranked by Advanced Trading. |
17 Oct 2014, 12:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Friday Factoid: A Focused Student Experience at the Stanford GSB |
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The Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) is well known for its close-knit atmosphere, and the school’s small class size allows it to provide students with a unique program of individualized coaching. First-year students at the GSB are assigned a dedicated Faculty Advisor who helps them create a customized plan for fulfilling their General Management Foundations (core) requirements based on their strengths, weaknesses, experiences, and interests. Each Faculty Advisor also teaches his/her own small seminar, which meets during the autumn quarter of the first year. These required “Critical Analytical Thinking” (CAT) seminars involve 14 to 16 students who learn to argue their perspectives on various management issues and develop their written and oral communication skills. This small seminar also helps the advisors and students get to know each other better before they collaborate on the students’ customized curriculum plans. The GSB is also unique in that first-year students are assigned writing coaches in the first quarter to help with CAT’s significant writing assignments. Lastly, students are paired with both a Career Advisor and a Student Life Advisor to help them identify and pursue appropriate leadership opportunities. Needless to write, if you get into the Stanford GSB, you certainly should not worry about falling between the cracks! For more information on the Stanford GSB or 15 other leading MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides. |
17 Oct 2014, 17:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: MBA Admissions Myths Destroyed: My Months of Work Experience Will Not Count! |
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“I had an internship from June to August of 2011. Will the admissions committee count that as work experience?” “I ran a lab during my master’s program. Is that part of my total number of months of work experience?” “I ran a small business that ultimately failed. Will I get credit for my time as an entrepreneur?” Business schools have not seriously considered a candidate’s number of months of work experience as a factor in admissions decisions for a long time. In fact, with Harvard Business School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business increasingly open to younger candidates, work experience on a strictly quantitative level is actually being devalued at some schools. A candidate’s quantity of work experience is just not relevant—quality is, of course, what is important. An “average” employee who has merely fulfilled expectations during a five-year stint at a Fortune 500 company could certainly be said to be at a disadvantage compared with an individual who has made the most of a three-year stint elsewhere and been promoted ahead of schedule. Think about it—which of the two would you hire? Which of the two would you admit? So, if you are asked on an application how many months of work experience you will have before you matriculate, simply answer honestly. If you have any gray areas or are unsure about any aspect of your professional experience as it pertains to your application, you can always call the admissions office for guidance. (Far from being punitive, most admissions offices are actually surprisingly helpful with this kind of simple technical question.) Thereafter, stop worrying about the number of months you do or do not have and instead focus on revealing that you have had an impact in your professional life—and how. Your essays, recommendations, interviews, resume, and other application elements will ultimately make a qualitative impact that will outweigh any quantitative data. |
18 Oct 2014, 13:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: GMAT Impact: How to Solve Any Sentence Correction Problem, Part 2 |
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With respect to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this blog series, Manhattan GMAT’sStacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense. In the Part 1 of this article, we talked about the five-step process to answer Sentence Correction (SC) problems: 1. Take a First Glance 2. Read the Sentence 3. Find a Starting Point 4. Eliminate Answers 5. Repeat Steps 3 and 4 If you have not already learned that process, read Part 1 before continuing with this article. Drills to Build Skills How do you learn to do all this stuff? You are going to build some skills that will help at each stage of the way. The drills are summarized in this post; if you want the full description of each, check out the original article on the Manhattan GMAT blog. Drill Number 1: First Glance Open up your Official Guide (OG) and find some lower-numbered SC questions that you have already tried in the past. Give yourself a few seconds (no more than five!) to glance at a problem, then look away and say out loud what you noticed in those few seconds. As you develop your First Glance skills, start to read a couple of words: the one right before the underline and the first word of the underline. Do those give you any clues about what might be tested in the problem? For instance, consider this sentence: Xxx xxxxxx xxxx xx and she xxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx xxx xxx xxxxx. I have a strong suspicion that this problem might test parallelism, because the word and falls immediately before the underline. When I read the sentence, I will be looking for an X and Y parallelism structure. Drill Number 2: Read the Sentence Take a look at some OG problems you have tried before. Read only the original sentence. Then, look away from the book and articulate aloud, in your own words, what you think the sentence is trying to convey. You do not need to limit yourself to one sentence. You can also glance back at the problem to confirm details. I want to stress the “out loud” part; you will be able to hear whether the explanation is sufficient. If so, try another problem. If you are struggling or unsure, then one of two things is happening. Either you just do not understand, or the sentence actually does not have a clear meaning, and this is precisely why the choice is wrong! Decide which you think it is and then check the explanation. Next Steps Spend the next week drilling these skills for steps 1 and 2. Then come back here to join us for the third part in the series, in which you will learn two more drills for the later steps of the SC process. |
19 Oct 2014, 12:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Talk About Taking Advantage of mbaMission Free Resources! |
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At mbaMission, we are very proud of our entire suite of free resources for MBA candidates, which we encourage prospective clients to download and use as they wish. We believe that in addition to providing valuable guidance and information for aspiring MBAs, these free resources help engender trust in applicants considering our services and reveal the strength of our full range of offerings. We therefore hope that you will attend one of our many online or in-person webinars, read our comprehensive blog, download a free copy of our guides, and avail yourself of a free, 30-minute consultation with an mbaMission Senior Consultant. And whether you ultimately choose to hire mbaMission as your application partner or get everything you need from these complimentary offerings, we are happy to have helped in some way. We find it incredibly validating when someone, who never even worked with us, reaches out to tell us that they benefitted immensely from our free advice. Here is an unsolicited testimonial which we received last week, which we have posted with permission from the applicant: “Just wanted to reach out and say thanks again for your help during our 30-minute consultation earlier this Spring. I just heard from [top b-school] and got accepted. Since I didn’t retake the GMAT, I really believe it was the info I got from our consultation, mbaMission’s webinar series (all 5 sessions), and your colleague’s, Jeremy Shinewald’s, book The Complete Start-to-Finish MBA Admissions Guide (always had it open during my application process) that made me stand out. All the advice I got allowed me to present the most compelling, on-point profile to the admission committee, and continued to pay off again and again. Thanks for everything; it’s really rewarding to have all that hard work pay off. Now the real work can start.” |
20 Oct 2014, 08:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Monday Morning Essay Tip: Avoid Fawning |
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Although the MBA programs to which you are applying certainly want to know that you identify with them, this does not need to be a running theme throughout your essays or your entire application. Unless a business school explicitly asks for this kind of information (for example, by asking what you are most passionate about and how that passion will positively affect the school), we generally recommend that candidates only discuss their connection with their target MBA program via their personal statements (“What are your short- and long-term goals and how will [our school] allow you to achieve them?”). For example, in response to a school’s question about leadership or putting knowledge into action, you would not need to discuss how the school will help you further develop your leadership skills or how you will continue to be an active learner when you are a member of the Class of 2017, even though these topics reflect core values that each school embraces. Although we cannot assert this as an absolute, we find that in most cases, such statements come across as insincere or fawning—the very opposite of the effect you want. |
21 Oct 2014, 10:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Mission Admission: Wait Patiently for Interview Invitations |
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Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips; a new one is posted each Tuesday. As interview decisions begin to be released, do your best to remain calm and let the admissions committees do their work. Although becoming a little apprehensive is natural if you have not yet received an interview invitation, you will certainly not increase your chances of receiving one by calling the admissions office and asking if the school does indeed have all your files or if an interview decision has been made. In fact, such calls can actually have a negative effect on your candidacy, inadvertently making you seem pushy or even belligerent. Admissions offices are increasingly transparent and should be taken at their word. If they say they are still releasing decisions, then they are in fact still doing so. If they say that the timing of your interview decision does not signify an order of preference, then it does not. Unless something has changed materially in your candidacy, all you can really do—as painful as it may be—is wait patiently and try not to think about the decision or second-guess your status. |
21 Oct 2014, 14:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: MBA News: The Economist Releases 2014 B-School Rankings |
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On October 11, The Economist published its 2014 MBA program rankings. Yet again, Chicago Booth topped the list, marking the fourth time the program has been ranked first in the past five years. The Economist explained that Chicago Booth’s notable track record with regard to student employment was a significant factor in the school’s high rating. In fact, 94% of Chicago Booth’s Class of 2014 received job offers within three months of graduating. Dartmouth Tuck, UVA Darden, HEC Paris, and IESE rounded out the survey’s top five, with 15 U.S. MBA programs appearing within the top 20. This is the publication’s 12th edition of its B-school rankings, which weigh data according to what surveyed business school students report is most important to them in pursuing an MBA. The ranking encompasses multiple factors—including median starting salary, pre-MBA salary increase, average GMAT score, mean student work experience, tuition costs, and program duration. The Economist’s 2014 Top 20 1 Chicago Booth 2 Dartmouth Tuck 3 UVA Darden 4 HES Paris 5 IESE 6 Harvard Business School 7 UC-Berkeley Haas 8 NYU Stern 9 Stanford GSB 10 Columbia Business School 11 UPenn Wharton 12 MIT Sloan 13 UCLA Anderson 14 Northwestern Kellogg 15 London Business School 16 Queensland 17 Emory Goizueta 18 INSEAD 19 Yale SOM 20 Michigan Ross |
21 Oct 2014, 17:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: MBA Career Advice: Don’t Use Your Elevator Pitch at a Networking Event |
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In this weekly series, our friends at MBA Career Coaches will be dispensing invaluable advice to help you actively manage your career. Topics include building your network, learning from mistakes and setbacks, perfecting your written communication, and mastering even the toughest interviews. For more information or to sign up for a free career consultation, visit www.mbacareercoaches.com. “Practice makes perfect,” they say. And there is certainly some validity to that adage. Practicing the things you might like to tell someone in an interview or at a networking event is useful because it gives you the chance to collect your thoughts, organize them in an orderly fashion, and recall the key vivid details of stories you might want to tell. In that regard, practicing an elevator speech or any other story about your life can be very valuable. The problem though is that you can’t create the “perfect story” that will work every time. Perfection implies something is fixed and frozen. If your goal is to memorize something and use it over and over again, it may work from time to time, but more often than not your networking attempts will fall flat. I am sure we can all remember that time we sidled up to someone we really wanted to meet, launched into our planned talk, and midway through realized it just wasn’t connecting and our value wasn’t getting across. That’s because in a first conversation with someone – the kinds of dialogue you might have at a networking event or with a busy executive in an elevator– the goal is NOT to get your point across. The goal is to make a human connection. The people you follow up with, the people you remember are the ones with whom you make a connection. This is true no matter where someone sits in the organizational hierarchy. If the CEO likes you when she meets you in that elevator, then the door may be open for a follow up conversation. If you fail to make a human connection, at best she won’t remember you; at worst, she might even avoid you. So why does the elevator speech so often fail? Because it is an attempt to transmit a fixed monologue instead of participating in what should be a spontaneous dialogue. You know what I am talking about – a conversation is a living thing, a collaborative interaction among the people having it. If it is your goal to “get your message across,” it will go over like a lead balloon. To succeed in these all-important first interactions, you need to be in the present moment. You can’t rely on a script from conversations past. Here are some tips for being more present in the moment so that you can make deeper and more meaningful connections through your networking efforts:
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22 Oct 2014, 10:01
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Professor Profiles: David Beim, Columbia Business School |
Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when choosing a business school, but the educational experience is what is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Each Wednesday, we profile a standout professor as identified by students. Today, we focus on David Beim from Columbia Business School (CBS). That a core-curriculum finance professor makes our roster of notable professors may be surprising to some of our readers—especially considering that many of CBS’s core-curriculum professors reportedly cycle through and leave the school after just a few years—but we learned that David Beim (“Corporate Finance” and “Emerging Financial Markets”) makes an impact on his classroom and his students by delving beneath the numbers. A recent alumnus we interviewed included Beim as one of CBS’s “amazing” professors with success in top industries, and another, referring to one of Beim’s courses, told mbaMission, “I think that class could have just been about how to run a pretty spreadsheet and be technically proficient, but he made it be about how finance is the lifeblood of a business.” For more information about CBS and 15 other top-ranked business schools, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides. |
22 Oct 2014, 14:01
| FROM mbaMission Blog: MBA News: 2016 Class Profiles Show Slight Rise in International Student Numbers |
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The business world is more globally focused today than ever. And as the markets expand and evolve in this way, so, too, does the MBA scene. One way in which this appears to manifest is in the number of international students entering B-school each year. Of the 15 top U.S. MBA programs for which we collected Class of 2016 statistics this year, 11 reported similar or higher percentages of incoming students from outside the United States compared with last year. Of the four that did not, only one saw a drop of more than 2%. Candidates looking for a more multicultural B-school experience may want to consider Columbia Business School, Stanford GSB, and UC-Berkeley Haas, whose most recent incoming classes boast 41%, 44%, and 43% international representation, respectively. This kind of demographic variety can have a marked impact on a graduate program’s alumni network and worldwide impact. |
23 Oct 2014, 10:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Beyond the MBA Classroom: Bar of the Week at Haas |
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When you select an MBA program, you are not just choosing your learning environment but are also committing to becoming part of a community. Each Thursday, we offer a window into life “beyond the MBA classroom” at a top business school. Thursdays at UC-Berkeley Haas have a set social agenda—this is when students congregate at the current “Bar of the Week,” as selected each week by the vice president of social (an elected student position within the school’s MBA Association) from the variety of options located in San Francisco and Berkeley. A student described the event on the school’s Web site as “an opportunity to kick back, stop thinking about school for an hour or two, and drink a beer or two.” Often, Bar of the Week—which can reportedly attract upward of 200 students—is hosted by a student club and held at a venue of that club’s choosing. For example, Q@Haas (the school’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered professional and social club) has in the past hosted a Bar of the Week in San Francisco’s famous Castro District. For in-depth descriptions of social and community activities at UC-Berkeley Haas and 15 other top MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides. |
23 Oct 2014, 13:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Diamonds in the Rough: Intimate Class Size at Mays Business School |
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MBA applicants can get carried away with rankings. In this series, we profile amazing programs at business schools that are typically ranked outside the top 15. Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School offers a full-time, 49-credit MBA curriculum that can be completed over the course of just 16 months (August to December) or customized for an extended period of time. Although the core curriculum is very rigid, with foundational management courses spanning the entirety of the program, Mays also offers the option of pursuing certificates and career specializations beyond the 16-month core. But what really stands out about the Mays program is its dedication to maintaining a strong sense of community. The school’s two cohorts of approximately 40 students each make for an intimate classroom setting and confer personalized attention from faculty and staff. |
23 Oct 2014, 17:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: B-School Chart of the Week: Why Do You Want an MBA? |
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Although quantifying a school’s profile certainly does not tell you everything, it can sometimes be helpful in simplifying the many differences between the various MBA programs. Each week, we bring you a chart to help you decide which of the schools’ strengths speak to you. We recently surveyed a number of visitors to our site to get a feel for the concerns, plans, and mind-sets of this season’s MBA applicants. Now the results are in, and for those who are curious about their fellow applicants’ views on business school, we will be sharing some of the collected data in our B-School Chart of the Week blog series. A common question business school candidates encounter both in their personal lives and as part of the application process is essentially “Why do you want (or need) an MBA?” So we naturally included this query in our informal survey of site visitors earlier this year. The majority of respondents—43.6%—said they planned to attend business school to change their career path. This seemed generally in line with what we saw last season, when we asked candidates whether they planned to change careers or return to their already established profession. The results for that question were split evenly, with each option accounting for 50% of the responses. To “improve business skills” was the second most common response, with 38.5% stating this intention. A much smaller proportion of respondents, 10.2%, cited the desire to expand their professional networks as their main reason for getting an MBA, and although conversations about business school often turn to the topic of salary, only 5.2% of those in our survey pinpointed “make more money” as their primary motivator. Similarly, just 2.6% indicated that they were pursuing the degree to advance in their current profession. 
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24 Oct 2014, 10:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Friday Factoid: Manage a $2M Investment Fund at UCLA Anderson |
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Many acknowledge UCLA Anderson’s unique connections to the media and entertainment industry. However, far fewer MBA aspirants are aware of the tremendous opportunities Anderson provides to students interested in investment management. Established in 1987, the Student Investment Fund (SIF) at Anderson is a limited-enrollment course that provides students a hands-on opportunity to apply what they have learned thus far about investment theory. Students must apply for the opportunity to manage the portfolio, , as one of the 10–12 SIF Fellows by submitting an essay and participating in two rounds of panel interviews. SIF Fellows engage in investment strategy, asset allocation, and security analysis for more than 18 months and explore both value and growth approaches to investment as well as fixed income investments. Fellows get together weekly during the academic year, meet once a month with the Faculty Oversight Committee and visit more than 30 investment professionals throughout the course of their 18-month tenure to learn about different investment philosophies. Fellows also receive assistance in securing summer internships in the investment management industry. Those interested in a career in investment management should give UCLA Anderson a closer look. For more information on UCLA Anderson or 15 other leading MBA programs, check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guides. |
24 Oct 2014, 14:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: GMAT Impact: How to Solve Any Sentence Correction Problem, Part 3 |
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With regard to the GMAT, raw intellectual horsepower helps, but it is not everything. In this blog series, Manhattan GMAT’sStacey Koprince teaches you how to perform at your best on test day by using some common sense. In Part 1 of this article, we talked about the five-step process to answer sentence correction problems, and in Part 2, we discussed some drills to build the needed skills. Make sure to read both of those before continuing with this third article in the series. Drill Number 3: Find a Starting Point Once again, open up your Official Guide and look at some problems you have done before. This time, do NOT read the original sentence. Instead, cover it up. Compare the answers and try to articulate all the things the problem is testing. Note that you can tell what is being tested even if you cannot tell how to answer. For example, you might see a verb switching back and forth between singular and plural. If the subject is not underlined, then you have no idea which verb form is required, because you literally have not even seen the subject. You do, though, know that subject-verb agreement is at issue. Drill Number 4: Eliminate Answers Once again, this drill involves problems you have already done. (Sensing a pattern? We learn the most when we are reviewing things we have already done!) This time, though, you are going to get to use the whole problem. Right after you finish a problem, add the following analysis to your review: (1) Why is the right answer right? Why is each of the four wrong answers wrong? (2) How would you justify eliminating the right answer? What is the trap that would lead someone to cross this one off? (3) How would you justify picking any of the wrong answers? What is the trap that would lead someone to pick a wrong answer? You are probably already doing the first step, but most people skip the second and third ones. The first is important, but you can learn more! When you learn how you (or someone) would fall into the trap of thinking that some wrong answer looks or sounds or feels better than the right one, you will be a lot less likely to fall into that same trap yourself in future. Next Steps Practice these steps until they start to feel like second nature to you. At the same time, of course, learn the grammar rules that we all need to know. Put both pieces together, and you will master sentence correction! |
24 Oct 2014, 14:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: MBA News: Kaplan Survey Reveals Spike in Schools Accepting GRE Results |
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Recently, our friends at Kaplan Test Prep released the results of their 2014 survey of graduate school admissions officers, for which the firm polled admissions representatives from 204 U.S. MBA programs. One of the results we found most intriguing was an apparent rise in the number of business schools that allow applicants to submit a GRE score rather than requiring a GMAT score. According to Kaplan, an astounding 85% of MBA programs now accept the GRE in lieu of the GMAT. When the same survey was conducted in 2009, just 24% of the participating programs recognized GRE results as adequate application criteria. However, more schools accepting the GRE does not necessarily mean more MBA hopefuls are electing to take this route. Kaplan’s survey reveals that just one in ten applicants (at most) submitted a GRE score in place of a GMAT score this past application season. What do the top graduate programs prefer? While 78% of the admissions officers surveyed indicated that their schools consider the two tests equal, 18% communicated a continued partiality for the GMAT. According to Kaplan Test Prep’s executive director of pre-business and pre-graduate programs, Brian Carlidge, “The trendline for business schools that accept the GRE as an admissions alternative to the GMAT has been unmistakable over the past five years. What was once seen as an almost exotic admissions policy by business schools has become nearly ubiquitous.” |
25 Oct 2014, 12:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: MBA Admissions Myths Destroyed: The Admissions Committee Wants a “Type” |
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Many MBA candidates believe that admissions committees have narrowed their criteria for selecting applicants over the years and that each school has one distinct “type” that it seeks. So, in this world of stereotypes, Harvard Business School (HBS) is interested only in leaders, while Kellogg wants only marketing students; Chicago Booth is seeking only finance students, and MIT Sloan wants only “eggheads.” Of course, these stereotypes—like most stereotypes—are not accurate. Chicago Booth wants far more than one-dimensional finance students in its classes, and it provides far more than just finance to its MBA students (including, to the surprise of many, an excellent marketing program). HBS is not a school just for “generals”; among the more than 900 students in each of its classes, HBS has a wide variety of personalities, including some excellent foot soldiers. So at mbaMission, we constantly strive to educate MBA candidates about these misconceptions in hopes that they will eschew such stereotypes, which can sink applications if applicants pander to them. By way of example, imagine that you have worked in operations at a widget manufacturer. You have profound experience managing and motivating dozens of different types of people, at different levels, throughout your career, in both good economic times and bad. Even though your exposure to finance has been minimal, you erroneously determine that you need to be a “finance guy” to get into NYU Stern. So you tell your best, but nonetheless weak, finance stories, and now you are competing against elite finance candidates who have far more impressive stories in comparison. What if you had told your unique operations/management stories instead and stood out from the other applicants, rather than trying to compete in the school’s most overrepresented pool? We think that truly being yourself is only natural. Of course, if you are still not convinced, consider what the Stanford GSB’s admissions committee declares on the school’s admissions Web site:“Because we want to discover who you are, resist the urge to ‘package’ yourself in order to come across in a way you think Stanford wants. Such attempts simply blur our understanding of who you are and what you can accomplish. We want to hear your genuine voice throughout the essays that you write, and this is the time to think carefully about your values, your passions, your hopes and dreams.” Kind of makes sense, does it not? |
27 Oct 2014, 08:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Monday Morning Essay Tips: Own Your Story |
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Many business school candidates unwittingly start their essays with platitudes—obvious or trite remarks written as though they were original. For example, when responding to the essay question “Tell us about a time when you made a difficult decision,” an applicant might mistakenly write the following: “Managers constantly face difficult decisions. Still, everyone hates indecision.” The applicant does not “own” this idea and cannot lay claim to this statement. A simple alternative would be to insert his/her personal experience and viewpoint into the sentence: “I found myself back in the boardroom with Steve, anticipating that yet again, he would change his mind on the mbaMission file.” By discussing your personal and unique experiences, you take and demonstrate ownership of your story while engaging your reader. Avoiding platitudes and generalities—and ensuring that you are sharing your experience, rather than one that could belong to anyone else—is a simple but often overlooked step in creating a compelling message. |
27 Oct 2014, 10:00
| FROM mbaMission Blog: Monday Morning Essay Tip: Own Your Story |
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Many business school candidates unwittingly start their essays with platitudes—obvious or trite remarks written as though they were original. For example, when responding to the essay question “Tell us about a time when you made a difficult decision,” an applicant might mistakenly write the following: “Managers constantly face difficult decisions. Still, everyone hates indecision.” The applicant does not “own” this idea and cannot lay claim to this statement. A simple alternative would be to insert his/her personal experience and viewpoint into the sentence: “I found myself back in the boardroom with Steve, anticipating that yet again, he would change his mind on the mbaMission file.” By discussing your personal and unique experiences, you take and demonstrate ownership of your story while engaging your reader. Avoiding platitudes and generalities—and ensuring that you are sharing your experience, rather than one that could belong to anyone else—is a simple but often overlooked step in creating a compelling message. |
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Hi Generic [Bot],
Here are updates for you:
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Tuck at Dartmouth
AGSM at UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE
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