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Winning MBA Admission Tips with Atul Jose

Winning MBA Admission Tips with Atul Jose

著者： Atul Jose
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 Winning MBA Admission Tips with Atul Jose
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  • MBA Goals Essay - Modesty Doesn't Help

    MBA Goals Essay - Modesty Doesn't Help
    2025/11/16

    I don’t know if it is the modesty of the applicant or if culturally it is looked down on to show ambition, but I have seen quite a large number of international applicants hesitating to quote an ambitious post-MBA goal, at least a long-term goal.

    One reason is that they feel the goals are not believable. The fundraising in their country is not spectacular compared to the US.

    Frankly, no other country is even close to the US when it comes to risk capital.

    So that thought should not bother an applicant. Also, you are not comparing yourself to entrepreneurs and their world-changing goals, unless you are applying to Stanford or Harvard as an entrepreneurial applicant. Then it makes sense to research and dig deep into your start-up idea.

    But if you are a typical applicant targeting Columbia, MIT, Chicago Booth, or Kellogg, your long-term goal can be entrepreneurial in nature or as an investor.

    The themes for the post-MBA goals essay need not be all about changing the world.

    I read essays more closely when the applicant introduced a personal motivation into the narrative – from losing a farm to parents not being able to complete education due to forced migration from war/famine to building an organization that values democracy after the horrors of violence in a dictatorial country.

    So, such personal motivations capture the attention of the reader.

    The ambition shifts from scale to a personal incentive.

    We are incredible social animals.

    Our inseparable need to connect with another person, their thinking and mindset, forces us to empathize.

    The more personal the goal, the better the believability of achieving it.

    Another factor you have to consider before defining the scale of your goal is how relevant the goal is for the school’s community.

    If the school is struggling to attract some of the best Generative AI talent, and you have experience in Generative AI and are planning to enter consulting, you could help the school design a curriculum around AI.

    Think about all the ways in which your personal experience would be valuable for the school and the community around it.

    The more personal the motivation, the more likely you are to pursue it.

    The more persistent you are, the more likely you are to achieve a milestone.

    The more frequently you achieve a milestone, the more likely you are to succeed.

    The more successful you are, the more the schools can promote that you are the Alum that they trusted, and only because you attended the MBA program, you could achieve all that you had planned to achieve.

    Schools are desperate to build their alumni pool with entrepreneurial candidates.

    They don’t want just career-oriented candidates.

    So even if you are a career-oriented applicant, cite ambitious goals within your industry or post-MBA function.

    For help defining the scale of your ambition in your MBA goals Essay, contact me, Atul Jose, with F1GMAT’s Contact form
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    3 分
  • Use Multiple Identities in your M7 MBA Essays

    Use Multiple Identities in your M7 MBA Essays
    2025/09/06
    If you've noticed how late night talk show hosts use Segues to transition away from a light-hearted moment from the guest's life, to promoting the guest’s movie or music or book or a show, see how they transition?Learn from Talk-Show HostsIt could be a smooth transition with something like, “ Speaking of explosions, this movie had 200 explosions”Or Speaking of swear words, this movie has over 100 swear words.Or speaking of dictators, you are playing a dictator in this movie.There are multiple ways in which late night talk show hosts transition their conversation.Essays - It's All about Leaning into Multiple IdentitiesIn a visual medium like a late night talk show, you have the advantage of observing through a video format and listening through an audio format. In an essay, where the first impression and the last impression is dependent on what you write, it is all about leaning into your identities while using segues.Look at how people interact in social media.I would not recommend that you spend a lot of time in X or Facebook or in some Forum, fighting with some strangers. But at least observe how people interact. I do that and immediately, I see the discussion pivot to a judgment of the person’s primary identity.It's not a bug. It's a feature.We are tuned to identities that motivate a person and the incentive structure based on which the person is communicatingSegues and Multiple IdentitiesWhen you write essays and use segues, understand this fundamental human tendency to cling on to an identity.What are the identities by which we most relate to?For women applicants, I have noticed how they strategically share the societal barriers in regions where they can’t freely express their thoughts or lead an initiative.Their sex as an identity is used against them.Such narratives get immediate attention. But again, if you lean too much into one identity, it becomes challenging to stand out in essays.The second identity that you all know is around gender. That's the most controversial identity, right now in political discourse.Again like what women applicants are facing in terms of competition, if you lean too much into your LGBTQ+ identity in essays, your chances of standing out from other LGBTQ+ applicants go down dramatically.You have to find a secondary identity before using segues in your essays.The third identity is your nationality.Most top schools are in the US and the UK, and the overwhelming identity in universities are left or left-leaning.You cannot use a nationality-based essay narrative.Same with the 4th identity that is your political ideology.You can’t highlight the talking points of the extreme left or the right in your essays.Universal Values - Include them as Part of your IdentitiesFocus on universally accepted values of inclusion, integrity, humility and humanity.The fifth and the most important identity by which you will be judged, typecast or shortlisted for interviews is based on your professional identity.The disadvantage of leaning too much into your professional identity is that there are several stereotypes in each profession.A technologist might be stereotyped as someone with low social skills.A finance professional might be stereotyped as someone who is unethical.There are several implicit biases against professional identities.You should be aware of it, and choose examples accordingly, before seguing from one identity to the other.That is why schools really look into your extracurricular and volunteering experiences.They want to learn how you interact with others in the community, with different age groups, different incentives, different education levels, and collaborated with people from different political ideologies.Moving Beyond your Primary IdentityHave you shown evidence of going beyond your primary identity and find uniting motivations.Recently, I was approached by a client.Her winning strategy for other schools was to lean into her professional identity. And it worked for other schools because it was on AI and its transformative value in disbursing loans and in offering value added services for the underserved in American cities.But for Stanford, I had to dig deep into her story and found that she also has a venture with her family where she's was helping women beneficiaries in rural healthcare where traditional health services can’t reach.For Stanford’s open-ended essay, it was important that we show her skill set in multiple contexts and not just be a woman engineer working in banking. This was a great differentiating factor 5 to 10 years back when there were not enough women graduates. But right now, women are graduating at a higher level than men.I advised her to highlight many more identities.And her first response was that – “So I should show that I am woke?”This is not about exaggeration or showing your empathy in an exaggerated manner. It is about highlighting your multiple identities so that you are not stereotyped into any one particular ...
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    7 分
  • A shortcut for writing Authentic MBA Essays - Sense Memory

    A shortcut for writing Authentic MBA Essays - Sense Memory
    2025/08/26
    I have been procrastinating to create this video for the past 15 years.When I work with clients for essay editing, the one thing I always wanted to share is about ‘finding’ an authentic emotion before writing the essay.In my volumes goals video, I have shared how it is all about writing a lot before finding one’s authentic voice.An authentic voice is different from reaching an emotional state before capturing one’s authentic emotion.This is a concept popular among actors.If you notice the greatest actors. In my books – Philip Seymour Hoffman and Daniel Day-Lewis, why do we feel that they are not acting?They pursued a technique called Emotional Memory.Emotional Memory is finding a similar memory as the character is experiencing and then expressing it authentically for the camera.In essay writing, where you have to write about failures, traumas, and setbacks, if you don’t go back to that emotional memory, the writing will turn into a commentary.There is a huge difference between reflective writing and commentary.The first draft of many of my clients is a commentary about their ‘hard’ times. It is not coming from an authentic place.I ask them to go back to that moment, and they come back with overly emotional lines.This is not what I mean by Emotional Memory.It is to find a place in your memory where the details are vivid.I, as a reviewer and editor, should feel that you have lived that moment.And it can only come from a place of genuine reflection.A shortcut to reaching an emotional state that reflects the event is to match the event to your day-to-day mood.In a 5-day workweek, there would be days in which you won’t be happy.A client or a supervisor wasn’t happy with your output.A deadline was missed.A promotion that you anticipated didn’t happen.When you are feeling low, write about failures, a weakness, or a trauma.This emotional state will help you find expressions, phrases, or words that match the emotional state you are writing about.Now, you can’t wait endlessly to have a bad day.There is another shortcut to reach that state, which actors call sense memory.If you are writing about an event 5 years back, play the popular songs from that year.If your memory is associated with a restaurant, cafe, or a place in your city, try to travel to that location.Go back to your phone and browse through the photos from that year.Our mind has something called “Associative Memory” that helps us recall the emotion.If the memory is negative, we remember the ‘central event’ but forget most of the details.This is our way of coping with the negative event.So, to reflect and write about the negative event, you have to stay in that emotional state and ask some fundamental questions like:1) What was the triggering event2) What was the hurtful incident?3) What was the hurtful comment?4) What was the change in perspective you had after the event?5) What life lesson do you still carry now from that event?Once you ask these 5 questions, you will expand on the central event with details.It is the details that improve a narrative.A person obsessed about impressing his overbearing millionaire father went to a great extent to scale his startup.One such funding round led to a collaboration with an investor, who found a loophole and fired him out of his own startup.His reflection was not just about the person who did harm to his dreams. He went deep into his own motivations.In a weird way, the essay was a theme on the competition between the father and son – a theme I haven’t read much in essays.Many of you will not find the emotional state to write about the negative event because the event was too far down the memory lane.That is one reason i recommend that clients limit reflections to the past 3-5 years.If you have to go back more than 5 years, it should be something extremely rare and memorable that left a permanent mark in your life.These are tragic events like losing parents, an identity crisis, or an interaction that revealed a truth about the world.So, to summarize:1) Find a similar emotional state as you had experienced, before writing about the event in an essay2) If you can’t reach the emotional state, use sense memory or artifacts from the year to capture the details.For any help brainstorming, editing, and reviewing your essays, reach out to me through F1GMAT’s contact form
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