The following is an excerpt from Your MBA Game Plan, Third Edition: Proven Strategies for Getting Into the Top Business Schools
Becoming the perfect business school candidate is as much an exercise in understanding and cultivating your relative strengths as it is in identifying and addressing your relative weaknesses. We all have strengths. The main challenge is to reveal your strengths in your applications and convince admissions officers that those strengths aren’t outweighed by your weaknesses.
For every Superman there is a kryptonite. For every applicant there is a weakness. That’s okay! This is the first reality that must be understood as you develop your position and become the “perfect applicant.” Remember: A 780 on the GMAT does not blind admissions officers to generic career goals any more than a great stereo system makes up for a car that’s missing an engine. To avoid this type of imbalance, you must express all four dimensions that every business school looks for:
1. Leadership
2. Innovation
3. Teamwork
4. Maturity
Leadership
Probably more than anything else, business schools want to be known as institutions that produce leaders in their fields. Admissions committees are therefore in search of applicants who display leadership ability in all facets of their lives. This doesn’t mean that you need to have served as a captain in the Army or have started three new nonprofit organizations. Candidates who successfully demonstrate leadership in their applications exhibit how they have provided others with direction, shown initiative, and managed difficult situations in their professional, personal, and academic careers. And, above all, they need to show how they have made a positive impact on the organization and community around them.
It is not enough to merely state that you are a leader; you must provide examples of demonstrated leadership. Ultimately, the admissions committee should identify you as a high potential leader because of supporting details rather than overt statements. A good rule of thumb is “Show, don’t tell.”
Innovation
Innovation is a combination of traditional intellectual ability and creativity. Naturally, the former is reflected in the “hard” statistics such as your GMAT score and grade point average, but admissions committee members also look for the latter. Applicants who are visionaries are generally successful in establishing the trait of innovation. Innovation, in this case, can be as simple as finding a new solution to an everyday business problem. Past behavior is a terrific predictor of one’s future behavior in similar settings, and admissions officers look for applicants they can envision doing bold, new things down the road. Stories that demonstrate this sort of professional creativity will help your cause here.
Teamwork
The success that Kellogg has had with integrating teamwork throughout its curriculum has spread through time to the other top business schools. Kellogg’s success with a team-oriented curriculum has been supported by the way in which most companies now operate. Because companies utilize teams for virtually all of their functions, business schools are in search of applicants with strong team skills. A team-oriented attitude is now a baseline expectation of every applicant. This includes basic social skills and a willingness to share successes and take accountability for failures. Though top business schools are certainly known for being competitive environments, operating in teams has become an integral part of conducting business, and as such is a key aspect of the business school experience.
Maturity
Work experience has become a vital part of candidates’ applications. On average, admitted applicants to the top business schools have almost five years of full-time work experience. Although some top programs have made a deliberate effort to admit more people right out of college over the past several years (most notably Harvard Business School, with its HBS 2+2 Program), this remains the exception and not the rule. More important than the length of one’s work experience, however, is the quality and depth of that experience.
Top business schools are in search of candidates with multilayered experiences inside and outside of the workplace. An important aspect of the business school experience is that students teach one another based on their backgrounds. It is often said that everyone at business school, including faculty, is both a teacher and a student. Admissions committees therefore try to identify “mature” candidates who display professional maturity and integrity throughout their applications.
As an applicant, your goal should be to weave each of these dimensions throughout all of the application components. In general, application components consist of:
- Data sheets.
- Essays.
- Recommendations.
- Resume.
- Transcript.
- Interview.
In Chapter 4, we will step through each of these components in detail and show ways in which successful applicants have expressed the four dimensions.
To help you gauge how well your profile supports these dimensions, you should take an inventory of your activities and achievements. This will allow you to identify your strengths and weaknesses and address them accordingly.
Activities and achievements that typically support the four dimensions include the following:
Community Service
Through time, community service has evolved from a nice-to-have to a must-have on the application. During feedback sessions with rejected applicants, admissions committee members frequently mention that they wish they had seen more in the way of community involvement. It should be stressed, however, that this is a quality (not quantity) activity. You shouldn’t merely write down every humanitarian act that you’ve ever performed. Nor should you try to join half a dozen community service organizations six months before applying to desperately demonstrate that you have a heart. Rather, it is important to show that you have aspirations of helping society as a whole and not just your personal bank account. Your goal should be to demonstrate deep impact through a few activities, not broad impact across many. Community service is a great way to express all four of the dimensions that you will need to demonstrate in your application, but it can especially be powerful in communicating maturity and leadership abilities.
GMAT Score
Although your GMAT score alone will never get you into a business school, it certainly can keep you out. As a general rule, if your score falls below a school’s middle-80-percent range of scores, you will have to overcome long odds in order to be considered a contender. On the flip side, a GMAT score close to a school’s mean indicates that you have the intellectual horsepower to excel in the business school classroom. Naturally, achieving a strong score on the GMAT gives you points in the innovation department. To avoid having to overcome a low score, you should review our section on the GMAT in Chapter 4. In that chapter we also answer the question of whether you should take the GMAT or the GRE, which many top MBA progams also now accept.
Hobbies and Extracurricular Activities
Any hobby that can support one of the dimensions or give the admissions committee insight into your personality is worth mentioning. At the end of the day, business schools are looking to admit people, not numbers, and discussing hobbies is a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition. These activities can also display your strengths in areas such as teamwork and innovation. As such, it isn’t really important what the hobby is, but rather what the hobby says about you as an applicant. Do you like fly fishing? Great. Now tell the admissions committee why. Your target business schools are more interested in the reason than you might realize.
International and Cultural Exposure
As the trend of globalization continues and the world gets smaller, business schools want applicants who will have global impact. Use every part of the application as a platform to highlight your foreign language skills, multi-national experiences, and cultural awareness. Examples of this can be as grandiose as leading a business unit through a global merger across three continents, or as simple as working with a group of individuals with diverse professional and educational backgrounds. In general, including international or cultural experiences displays a willingness to operate outside of your comfort zone. In this way, it will help you to support the maturity and teamwork dimensions.
Professional Experience
For most applicants, professional experience will be the primary driver of the application. It is what admissions officers care about most of all (what better way to judge how successful you will be 20 years from now?), and it will permeate your essays, recommendations, interviews, and resumes. Because it has such wide-ranging usage, it should be utilized to support all four dimensions.
Undergraduate and Graduate Transcripts
Although your undergraduate and graduate transcripts can’t be altered, you can emphasize different aspects of them to support your position. Perhaps you took myriad courses outside of your major during undergrad. You could use that multi-discipline approach to support your desire to attend a business school that focuses on general management. Naturally, a high grade point average (GPA) helps to support the innovation dimension and indicates your ability to succeed in a rigorous academic environment. A low GPA can be overcome, to a point, with a terrific GMAT score and successful post-college coursework.
Analyzing Your Strengths and Weaknesses
Odds are, you have some notable strengths that will make you a solid student and worthy contributor in business school, but you also have some weaknesses that might keep you out of your ideal school if they go unaddressed. That puts you in a pool that includes probably 99 percent of all business school applicants. This section will show you how to systematically identify and capitalize on your strengths while rooting out and neutralizing your weaknesses.
The Grid
Surprisingly, many applicants don’t spend any time analyzing or even just writing down their strengths and weaknesses. This might seem like a trivial task—especially because you know yourself better than anyone—but remember that your goal is to sell yourself to someone whose only contact with you is through your application and possibly a 30-minute interview. Therefore, you need to organize your thoughts and make sure that you know exactly what traits you will emphasize for the admissions committee.
It helps to start by drawing out the four dimensions and activity/achievement categories in a grid, like the one below:
[FMF note: The chart was not provided in the excerpt, but imagine it with the four characteristics (leadership, innovation, teamwork, and maturity) heading four columns along the top and the six activities/achievements (community service, GMAT score, etc.) down the side.]
Next, list your activities and achievements, according to the categories, that bring out one or more of the dimensions. This process shouldn’t happen in one 10-minute session. Rather, it will likely take a few minutes here and there as other activities and achievements come to mind. Ideally you can give yourself days or even weeks to make this happen. Some things to think about when you are looking into your past are:
- In what extracurricular activities did you participate while in college? For what did you volunteer? To what positions were you elected?
- How have you gotten involved in your community since graduating from college? What have you enjoyed about these experiences? What have you learned that you didn’t learn in school or on the job?
- What do you like to do in your spare time? What do you enjoy about each of these things? How have they helped you gain a new perspective or exercise your creative side?
- Where have you traveled? What languages do you know? What have you learned from your friends of different backgrounds?
- What have you done on the job that might exhibit one or more of the four desired dimensions? Did you lead a team, identify a problem and find a creative solution, deal with a problematic coworker, and achieve a goal that no one thought was possible?
- What about your undergraduate academic experience might stand out? Did you study abroad or develop your own independent study? Did you dedicate yourself to one academic field, or did you pursue multiple interests? What awards did you receive?
Start by being fairly generous with yourself. Put everything that comes to mind in the grid. You can pare down the overlaps and the weaker examples later. Also, you may have participated in some activities that don’t fit neatly into any of the previously mentioned categories. As long as they help bring out one of the four main dimensions that you want to demonstrate, include them. You can create a catch-all “other” category if needed.
Note that you will likely have more Xs in some categories than in others. That’s perfectly fine. The idea is not to have a completely full grid, but rather to use the grid as a tool for visualizing what your strengths and weaknesses are. Hopefully, your activities and achievements will complement each other and help fill in each column of the table to some degree, but don’t worry if this doesn’t happen when you first fill it out.
Also note that some activities may only demonstrate one dimension while others may demonstrate three or four of them. That doesn’t mean that the former is less valuable than the latter. Keep in mind that the most important thing is to adequately demonstrate all four desired dimensions. An activity that provides your only strong example of leadership may end up being the most important piece of your application story, rather than an example that shows that you demonstrated all four dimensions moderately well.
After you are confident that you have covered everything in your background that is relevant to your application, start to trim the list if needed. If you have 10 examples that demonstrate teamwork, try to evaluate them through an admissions officer’s eyes and rank them from most important to least important. The question you should ask yourself in order to rank them should be: “How effectively does this achievement or activity demonstrate what I am trying to show?” It’s tempting to include glamorous examples over more common ones, but being one small part of a CEO’s task force on cost-cutting may do less to show off your traits than having led the solution of a tough problem within your own department.
Also look for activities and achievements that overlap. If you have done four things that all demonstrate leadership and maturity, you won’t need to mention all four of them in your application. Just one or two will do.
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