Aiming for a top MBA program? You’re not alone. If you want to attend an elite business school like Harvard or Stanford, you’re going to need to beat out thousands of other qualified applicants.
But how do you do this?
The secret is creating a strong, cohesive profile that incorporates a variety of key elements that help you stand out. This guide will break down each of these components and provide tips on how to showcase them in your profile to ensure you impress the admissions committee and land a spot at your top choice school.
What are you passionate about?
One of the most important things you can define as you start thinking about your MBA application is what motivates you. Whether or not, on the surface, this relates directly to your career, we always suggest that you spend some time reflecting on how your passions in life have led you to where you are, your personal and professional approaches, and other key aspects of your life.
Not only will this help you add some color and life to the questions about your career experience and goals, but it will also help you make connections to questions about your extracurricular or personal life. Some of the best applications we’ve seen have shown links between the things they choose to volunteer for and the things they want to accomplish in their careers. For example, one of our clients realized that helping other people overcome their self-doubt was something they were passionate about and used this to connect their goals of creating accessible edtech products, their achievements mentoring others at the workplace, and their volunteering experience teaching children.
Having a clear idea of what passions motivate you and the values that have guided your life and career so far is a really great way of making your entire story more cohesive and boosting authenticity and meaning.
TOP TIP: If you’re not sure where to start, you may want to start by thinking about your personal brand. This can be an excellent exercise to give you clarity on your life, best examples, and reasons for wanting to complete an MBA.
What is your career vision?
Before getting to the specifics of your application, it’s a good idea to think about what bigger ideals and changes you want to be a part of as you move forward in your career. Your vision can also be a great link between your passions/motivations and your goals.
Later, when you approach the end of your career, what impact do you hope to have made or what do you hope to have transformed in your industry? How can you leverage your unique skills, passions, strengths, and resources to effect change, and why does this matter? These may seem like daunting questions, but answering them is essential to adding strong content to your essays (particularly the conclusions!) and demonstrating to the admissions committee(s) your genuine dedication to your goals.
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
As you build your profile, understanding your main strengths and weaknesses will help you define yourself and may also give you ideas of what stories you can use as examples.
Detailing your strengths can be a difficult task – for some, it’s hard to define them at all, and for others, it’s hard to limit them! While you are full of wonderful attributes, you will have to choose wisely since you only have a few pages to show them off.
When contemplating the attributes to highlight in your application, it can be beneficial to reflect on the feedback you’ve received from those around you. Specifically, those who interact with you regularly – be it colleagues, superiors, friends, or family members – can provide valuable insight into your strengths. Identify the characteristics they often praise and then pair them with concrete examples. Demonstrating how these attributes contribute positively to your accomplishments will significantly enhance the impact your application makes on the admissions committee.
Try to choose strengths that align with or contribute to your passions and vision.
If defining your strengths is hard, writing effectively about your weaknesses may seem like an impossible task! But if you approach this the right way, we know you can find a way of turning some of your biggest insecurities into a sign of humility, growth, and desire to improve.
We strongly advise against using vague, cliche responses to questions that ask about your weaknesses and failures, such as “I am too much of a perfectionist” or “I am too hard of a worker.” Admissions committees will see this as an inability to recognize your own humanity and an incapacity to improve (which is the whole point of getting an MBA!).
We encourage you to be authentic and select weaknesses that are accompanied by real-world examples where you’ve gained significant insights or developed important skills. What the adcom is truly looking for is evidence of your capability to acknowledge your errors, accept feedback and new information, and utilize it as an opportunity for growth and improvement.
While deciding what weaknesses you will reveal might require a soul-search, it’s definitely worth taking the time to do so that you can impress the adcom from another perspective.
What achievements are you proudest of?
Once you’ve got your passions, vision, and strengths/weaknesses defined, you can start thinking about specific examples of achievements that you want to highlight. When have you made an impact, achieved outstanding results, influenced others, or gotten great feedback?
While formulating your answers to these questions, we encourage you to concentrate on your professional journey. However, it’s important to remember that your experiences are not confined to the workplace. Have you had the opportunity to employ your skills in a voluntary or personal setting? This is certainly worth mentioning!
For example, one of our clients wanted to emphasize his strengths in strategy, and one of his examples was helping his uncle build up his small business; as a result of his excellent business acumen, his uncle was able to save his struggling shop, and the client could demonstrate his success through the sustained growth of the company over the last few years.
Try to choose examples that have specific, demonstrable results — this is the best way to prove that your impact was real! Whether it was increasing internet access to 1,000 people, driving a company’s revenue growth, or supporting a mentee through a promotion, proving real results can vary widely, but remember that you must show and not just tell.
What are your goals?
Another part of your profile that you must include in your application, even if the questions don’t directly ask for it, are your short- and long-term goals. This is the part that links your past experience to your needs for an MBA, so it’s also important that your goals have some connection to the ideas you’ve already established about yourself.
Even if you don’t have a concrete understanding of your goals yet, it is beneficial to formulate a provisional plan. This conveys to the admissions committee that you have contemplated how your experiences, interests, acquired knowledge, strengths, and MBA education can be utilized for future career success.
For both your short-term (immediately post-MBA) and long-term (anywhere from 3-10 years in the future) goals, you will want to write about the roles, responsibilities, and achievements you want to make.
And if you plan on making a career transition, you will want to state your reasons for doing so. The best goals statements we’ve seen make a connection between the writer’s passions and, importantly, vision — doing this really connects all the dots of your profile to your plans!
TOP TIP: Not sure what your goals are? Check out this post, designed to help you develop and clearly articulate your MBA goals. If you still need help, our team of MBA experts is ready to help you review every aspect of your background and determine which goals best fit your career vision.
Need help getting into a top MBA program?
Defining your profile is one of the most difficult but most essential steps in preparing for your MBA application. Not only will it provide the foundation to connect all of your stories, but it will be the key factor in showing how you stand out.
At ELC, we know how overwhelming this may be. Luckily, our team of application experts has just the expertise you need to help you choose the right stories and characteristics that will help differentiate you from the thousands of other applicants. That’s why our success rate is 98.9%!
Apply to partner with us on your application journey and see how we can be the perfect boost to get you into your dream MBA program(s).
Real MBA Essays That Got People In
School-specific sample essays that got our clients accepted
