In our work with ambitious MBA applicants with backgrounds in highly competitive fields like finance, we often encounter worries like this:
My profile is good in some ways, but it’s too vanilla—there’s no big story of overcoming adversity, I’m an overrepresented minority (ORM) applicant, I lack extracurriculars, my post-MBA goals lean more toward the practical than the inspirational. I probably look just like hundreds of other applicants. How do I grab the admissions committee’s attention?
This is a reasonable concern. MBA admissions at the top business schools are extremely competitive. Good grades and a good job are not enough to get you in; you need to draw the admissions committee in with a compelling story about your background and personal development.
You might think you don’t have a story in you—that you’ve followed a pretty unremarkable path to get where you are today. But based on our experience talking through candidates’ histories to help shape their essays, it’s often just a matter of finding the right perspective.
To give an idea of the variety of creative approaches you can take to differentiate your profile, let’s look at some case studies. These are all real candidates (although their real names are not used here) who worked with Menlo Coaching and were successfully admitted to M7 MBA programs.
John wasn’t sure how to stand out. His professional background was strong, but so were those of countless other applicants in his field. He could say a lot about his achievements at work, but he risked coming off as someone with no personality outside of it. He badly needed a compelling personal angle to distinguish his application.
John worked on his MBA applications with Menlo Coaching. During an in-depth personal story call, he mentioned something that he hadn’t considered relevant to his application but that caught his coach’s attention immediately: John liked to write songs.
John’s coach convinced him that, far from being frivolous or irrelevant, his songwriting could be the key to expressing his personality and values to the admissions committee.
For John’s personal essay, he and his coach worked out a structure in which he would present a few lines from one of his songs, followed by an account of where he was coming from when he wrote it—how the values expressed in the lyrics informed his own behavior in his personal and professional life. He repeated this structure with several songs, covering a variety of topics.
The point wasn’t to wow the admissions committee with John’s talent as a lyricist—not a particularly relevant qualification for business school. Rather, John’s coach wanted to do something unexpected that would catch the reader’s attention and convince them John wasn’t just another professionally qualified but personally unremarkable candidate.
Taking a creative risk like this with your essay is a step you might shy away from if you didn’t have an experienced advisor assuring you it was a good idea. For John, the risk paid off: He got offers from Wharton, Kellogg, and HBS.
MBA candidates coming from a private equity background are often worried about the fierce competition they’ll face from other PE applicants, and not without reason—this is a tough field to stand out in.
Yasin was one of those worried PE candidates. He did have a story beyond his work life—his parents came to the US from Pakistan, and his dad’s executive career had meant constantly moving between different cities and even countries while he was growing up.
But, he and his Menlo Coaching consultant wondered, wasn’t this just the typical “third-culture kid” story the admissions committee would have seen a thousand times before? The top business schools get a huge number of applicants with this kind of background. That didn’t make it a no-go for Yasin, but it meant taking extra care to tell the story in an engaging way.
Yasin worked with his coach to bring his story to life, not by making any dramatic changes but by adding colorful details and anecdotes: the different sports and activities he participated in depending on the family’s location; his inability to answer the question of where his “hometown” was; the contrast between the Muslim and Western holidays his family would celebrate.
It also meant connecting this story with Yasin’s professional achievements and his reasons for choosing particular schools. He stressed, for example, how his experience jumping between cultures allowed him to build relationships with the diverse range of key players in the deal process, and how his interest in diversity of thought informed his engagement with a class he attended at a target school.
That attention to detail paid off, and Yasin was admitted to HBS.
Sometimes—especially if you start working on your application early—it’s not so much about framing your story in the right way, but rather considering what opportunities you might have now to build up some extracurriculars that will impress your target schools.
Take the example of Rick, an investment banking analyst who started working with Menlo Coaching almost two years ahead of his application deadlines.
Rick’s coach was intrigued by the voluntary mentoring work Rick was undertaking alongside his job. He was mentoring five international students from his alma mater (Rick himself had moved to Canada as a teenager) on how to break into the finance industry in Canada or the US.
Realizing that there was time and potential here for something bigger than one-on-one mentoring, the coach advised Rick to scale his activities up to a whole (free) online course—recording videos, making handouts, and marketing the service to a much wider audience.
After preparing the course and pitching it to his alma mater, Rick began approaching other universities with a compelling case: “Hundreds of students at this rival school are already using my free online course. Do you want in?”
By the time of his applications, Rick could boast of a course that was in use at five top universities in Canada, serving around 800 students a year. What might have been just a minor extracurricular had become a unique success story, and Rick was admitted to Stanford GSB partly on the strength of this display of entrepreneurship.
You might be thinking, Good for them, but what’s my story? Some candidates have a great idea of the story they want to tell right off the bat; others are completely at a loss. For both groups, expert coaching can be hugely beneficial.
Menlo Coaching’s comprehensive MBA application consulting service guides you through every step of the application process. That means (among other things) digging deep in your personal history to find the perfect story for your application and then steadily refining your storytelling in your admissions essays.
Menlo Coaching hires consultants not based on their history in AdCom or their possession of an MBA but rather on the strength of their storytelling abilities. They’re experts in identifying compelling stories for candidates based on their backgrounds, goals, personality, and many other factors. Request a free consultation to learn more.
