You should begin the essay by clearly stating straightaway what position you aim to get into immediately on completing your business school graduation. ‘Exact position’ means the relevant functional role in a specific domain, and it is quite all right if you choose to name a few specific organizations that you are especially interested in. Just ensure that these organizations do visit Emory for campus recruitment. Browse Emory Career Placement Data here.
Remember this is a short essay, and there is no scope here for a dramatic or poetic introduction, or for any kind of beating around the bush. You may or may not want to talk about your long-term goal. The prompt does not mandatorily require you to do so, but it may not at all be a bad idea if you can briefly cover it within the stipulated word limitation, while at the same time ascertaining that you properly address all the issues the prompt refers to.
The bulk of your essay should be devoted to demonstrating how your professional strengths, past experience and personal attributes are in consonance with the functional role you are targeting post MBA. Let us assume you wish to take on the role of a project manager. It calls for a range of qualities that include the ability to formulate a vision and share it with your team, to communicate effectively, and to maintain your cool under pressure. Can you show that you possess these qualities without making mere hollow statements about them? Perhaps in your last job, your team was caught up in a crisis which you helped to resolve. Not that the example necessarily has to be work-oriented. Perhaps you even organized monthly social gatherings in the last corporate house you worked in. Perhaps you introduced a novel element into these social gatherings in order to foster camaraderie. All these can be leveraged to project your vision and teamwork skills.
On the other hand, if you a Tech applicant and you aspire to become a management consultant post MBA, you can showcase how you have walked the extra mile to resolve business challenges of your global clients. You can illustrate your experience of solving multi-dimensional business problems that has several issues such as interpersonal conflicts, departmental rivalries, global competitors, pricing issues, lackadaisical local leadership etc.) and explain how your professional strengths (communication and interpersonal skills) and personal attributes (perseverance and hunger to overcome challenges) helped you to win those situations.
While any good example of leadership taken from your personal or professional life would meet this prompt’s criteria, it would undoubtedly be an added advantage if you could focus on something that displays your experience in reaching out globally or shouldering social responsibility. Have you, for instance, at some point in your life, provided leadership in a global MNC where your work impacted people beyond your national boundaries? Such a case would be a fine fit here.
The crux of writing an excellent essay would be to focus on the 2nd part of the question i.e. what you learned about yourself through the experience. What have you realized about your leadership style and personal strengths? What are your personal limitations? What are some of your areas of improvement (soft skills)? With what type of people, can you seamlessly interact and work? What type of people gives you headache? How good are you to manage your superiors? How good a mentor you are? Can you delegate critical tasks to your team members? When are you at your level best? And when do you feel frustrated and irritated? These are some of the insights you might have gained from that eye-opening experience. Narrate all aspects of your story and explain in detail what you learnt about yourself.
This is the continuation of the goal essay question. You have already narrated your goals in essay # 1. Now you have to evaluate your current leadership competencies and comprehend the gaps that you have in your profile. These gaps are the primary obstacles in your path that are stopping you from achieving your goals. Your primary objective of attending the Emory MBA program is to acquire additional skills so as to cover these gaps and transform your leadership profile.
Next, you need to describe how the various resources in the Emory program will address those gaps.
Finally, you need to narrate what you will bring to the table. What skills and unique industry knowledge will you share with your peers? What life changing experiences are you going to narrate to your classmates? Are you willing to organize any seminar or conference at Emory in which you will invite corporate leaders from your professional network? Such conferances will help your peers to know more about latest industry trends and broaden their horizon. Think carefully and write.
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Should you feel there is an important part of your story missing from your application (e.g. unexplained gaps in work experience, choice of recommenders, academic probation issues), please use this section to provide a brief explanation. We ask that you limit your response to 100 words; responses in bullet point format are preferred.
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