jerryg123 wrote:
Hi
zenogen! As a successful applicant (congrats!!), would you mind sharing what you discussed in your video?
Thanks!
jerryg123 wrote:
Hi
zenogen! As a successful applicant (congrats!!), would you mind sharing what you discussed in your video?
Of course, happy to help! My approach was to treat the cover letter and video as one package that would be reviewed simultaneously. Therefore, I didn't want to repeat myself in either: I wrote about my professional career in the letter, and spoke about my extracurriculars in the video. And - importantly - made sure I had at least some kind of different content in my back pocket for the interview essay (in the end for that I ended up telling a deeper story about something I'd alluded to in my cover letter).
Cover letter structure:
Para 1 - one sentence on why MBA now
P2 - Why I started in job 1 after college and what I achieved
P3 - What prompted my change to pursue differnet impact in job 2, and what I achieved there
P4 - How job 1 and 2 made it my long-term objective clear
P5 - Why Sloan
Word count: 5% over
Video essay structure (1 min is about 150 words).
Sen 1 - qualified time restriction - will only talk about 1 thing: my charity work
S2 - What prompted me to start charity work (personal)
S3 - What the charity that I work with does
S4 - The impact that I personally have had
S5 - How I plan to take that charitable mind-set into Sloan
Length: 60 seconds on the dot
Write your 150-200 words, then memorize them, practice them in your head to and work every day for a week, so that when you're actually speaking on camera you can focus on body language rather than the content of what you're saying. The video essay takes many, many, many takes. I estimate that I spent about 3-4 hours doing hundreds of takes in various locations. I bought one of those flexible iPhone tripod stands that you can stand up, attach to fences/ledges etc. I did some inside the charity building, some outside the community centre, and another in a neutral location. I ended up choosing one for both acoustic and viewer-interest reasons.