Creating the Killer MBA Application: A Step by Step Guide to Creating the Best MBA Application

Essays are an opportunity to highlight your personal attributes. You can project your skills that have contributed to your success and show your potential to succeed in your career goals. The application essays help to portray you as a person who is well aware of his/her potentials, strengths and skills. This is an essential quality that the admission committee seeks in every applicant. You can gather plenty of words for your essays if you have past successes to talk about. If you do not have enough to boast about your academic and professional areas, essays can do little to enhance your chances of admission. There must exist something to maintain the balance. Either you must be having an average academic profile with a good career graph or a great academic profile with average career graph or a good academic and career profile with little extracurricular involvement.

While preparing yourself for a graduate business program, your goal is to assemble the best possible application package. That means you need to cover all of your aspects. You need to craft perfectly polished essays that are full of details and free of an error, that properly addresses your strengths, weaknesses and career goals and which well exhibits your leadership skills and potentials. When reviewing applications, the MBA admissions officers look at all of your components: your GMAT score, academic record, essays and so on. But unless they think you as a “best fit” for their institution, you chances of admission are still low. 

The MBA institutions constantly look for certain indicators in you. Your essay should be able to click their perspective. You must have exhibited a number of skills and plenty of potentials in you, but how do they trust unless you support your answers with relevant examples and real experiences. Writing killer essays are a key to success. This is where your personality and passion come through, where you can demonstrate your fit and very often it’s the first opportunity for an admissions officer to hear you. The admissions committee would be happy to know that you are energetic, loyal, creative, diligent, honest, strict, humorous and a responsible person, but that is not just enough for them to get convinced. The admissions committee will be more interested to know about the situations where you had displayed these traits effectively. From where you have landed up here is more essential for them, rather than where you are heading to. When the question asks you about your personal qualities, the admission people try to figure out, what important contribution you can make for their school and what traits of yours will prove you as an asset to the institution.

Most business schools evaluate candidates for leadership. They want to see that how and where you’ve made an impact, whether that’s in your career, through extracurricular activities or in your personal life. Demonstrating leadership skills gives the admissions committee a vision of your potential in their program. You academic record is another component on which the admissions committee focuses. If you don’t have much to boast about your academics, spotlight your extracurricular activities. Demonstrate to the admissions panel that you are multidimensional. You can list your awards and recognitions to prove the same.

Essays, letters of recommendation, examples of leadership, extracurricular activities, etc are the ways that you employ to articulate to the admissions committee who you are. The key to creating a killer application is being able to do this well. You are the best person who knows about your strengths, weaknesses, skills and potentials. So go a step ahead and craft all these into a well structured essay that reflects the best of you and focuses the spotlight on you amongst the crowd of applicants. Get some help. Even the most careful writers benefit from a second or third set of eyes. Ask someone, a friend or a colleague, to review your essays, look for editions and tell you if you are hitting all of the points in the right way. 

Essays are admittedly an important part of the application process and you need to do a great deal of introspection for answering even the simplest straightforward questions. Every aspiring applicant has got the potential and strives hard to fabricate the best essay but only a perfectly outlined and well refined essay serves the purpose and can hit the right corner.