Take a step back from this essay and think about what are the great things you are dying to achieve in your life. What do you desperately want to do but couldn’t muster courage to take a plunge and start doing? Booth MBA program will provide you cutting-edge knowledge on leadership, entrepreneurship, marketing, finance, strategy, HR and all other major areas of management. You will interact with some of the best academicians and management thinkers in the world. What do you plan to do post MBA to implement this enormous knowledge that you will gain in the Booth classroom? If you are thinking only in terms of just one promotion in your work place, then that’s poverty of ambition. Think big. Don’t embrace your limitations by saying that it’s an Executive MBA program; hence, your chance of doing something truly great is minuscule. Don’t be limited in your mindset and imagination.
As an EMBA applicant, I assume that you have more than a decade of work experience. You have witnessed the corporate world with all its beauty and complexity. Now is the time for you to imagine what are the big things that you can do in your life. It’s not the time to think small and play safe. Now is the time to embrace risk while others want to hide behind big titles, designations, or bureaucracy. What is your destiny? What will be your legacy? How should people remember you after you are gone? How will your story inspire generations of young people to do great things in their life? These are the high level questions that you should think while writing this essay.
Don’t be guided by 50 other sample goal essays in the internet. Majority of those essays for Executive MBA programs say that the applicants were just trying to move one or two level up the hierarchy. These shows limited mindset and cookie cutter approach in all such essays floating in the internet. How about creating an equity fund that will implement Artificial Intelligence and Big Data that will disrupt the mutual fund industry? How about launching an academic institution in which students will learn by doing things instead of just reading text books? How about launching a political party to remove income equality in US? Impossible? NO. Such great things have been done before. Turn the pages of history to know how many times people imagined impossible dreams and made it happen. It’s all a question about your mindset.
Chicago Booth will give you abundant knowledge on leadership and personality development. Your only limitations would be lack of courage and limited imagination. Show Booth that you have both these qualities. Your essay will sound way different from other applicants and you will possibly be sitting in the Booth classroom in the next session.
Chicago Booth is scouting for applicants with wide-ranging leadership exposure in professional and personal life who will enrich the class with their knowledge and perspectives. Focus on the crucial leadership experiences in your professional and personal life and show them how those experiences will help you to add diversity to the class and contribute to the learning environment. Think about all your leadership skills and managerial competencies that will help you to add inputs during the case discussions and group projects. Articulate those skills in detail so that while reviewing your application side by side with another profile from your pool (IT Consultants or NY Bankers for example), they will select you.
Read some of the sample essays that I have helped my clients create for their successful B-school applications. All of them have been written and rewritten multiple times to project their differentiation. Read both the finalized essays and the basic write-ups given by the clients in order to understand the huge difference between the two. A meticulous review will help you to realize how much discussions and modifications were done to create the final pieces. Please don’t copy the ideas. I don’t mind if you do. But the chances are, they won’t suit your profile and it will jeopardize whatever odds you now have.
Please review my tips for Optional MBA essays in my blog page here.
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