Columbia Business School
The next school in this course is the Columbia Business School, or CBS. The following article will examine both strategies and approaches to the CBS essays this year and provide a comprehensive overview of how applicants should handle it.
Columbia Essay Tips
Columbia’s application this year has one short answer and three essays that ask students to write approximately 1000 words, total.
Short Answer Question: What is your immediate post-MBA professional goal? (50 characters maximum)
Essay One: Through your resume and recommendations, we have a clear sense of your professional path to date. What are your career goals over the next 3-5 years and what, in your imagination, would be your long-term dream job? (500 words)
Essay Two: Why do you feel Columbia Business School is a good fit for you? (250 words)
Essay Three: Tell us about your favorite book, movie or song and why it resonates with you. (250 words)
Preparing to Write
Notice the tone and consistency in themes between the first two essays and short answer question. All are related to Career Goals-type essay questions. You come to Columbia to be at the “very center of business”. They want driven students who have a firm grasp on what they want to pursue while at school and beyond.
More so than in other applications, we recommend you have a rock-solid story for what you hope to achieve coming out of business school. In almost every instance, business school does not work that way. You go in with plans and your experiences cause you to reflect further on what you want to do with your professional career. For other applications, this ambivalence is okay – and in some cases, even rewarded. Not at CBS. Without further ado, let’s explore the core themes of Columbia Business School.
Writing for Columbia Business School (CBS)
In recent years, Columbia has been making attempts to cut back on its super competitive reputation. Like Wharton in terms of structure, large class size, and cohort/cluster system, CBS now comprises a wider diversity of backgrounds in its overall graduate class. Grade non-disclosure has further facilitated this feeling of collaboration among its students, along with CBS Matters, which allows students and faculty to get to know each other on a more personal level. These strides have resulted in real, tangible transitions in the campus culture.
Professional experience. It is rare for CBS to admit students straight out of undergrad. The school values candidates whose professional background is robust.
New York Culture. Unlike schools like Tuck, CBS offers students access to virtually unlimited resources and professional work opportunities in New York City. Often, many students already live in New York, and with limited on-campus housing, this dynamic makes it more challenging to form that strong communal bond that is more typical of say, a Tuck Family. However, students and alumni benefit from life in the city, despite its many distractions. Some students choose to take advantage of cross-town internship opportunities while attending school. Others can meet alums of the school through a simple subway ride.
Intellectual Achievers. As the gap between “cutthroat” and “friendly” continues to narrow, more and more students have felt free to explore diverse interests beyond simple finance and business. CBS promotes multiple language learning opportunities in business school. Further, the school wants its students to embody leadership through the lens of emotional intelligence and self-awareness – key attributes that contribute to the school’s vision of “developing the next generation of leaders in the world”.
Writing Advice
CBS has recently changed its essay prompt to reflect the changing nature of the school’s culture. The essay used to be “Explain why you are pursuing an MBA and how it will aid you in both your short-term and long-term goals (600 words)”. It seems the school has simply broken down this prompt into three separate essay questions to force more structured responses from applicants. Let’s dive into each essay prompt:
Short Answer Question: What is your immediate post-MBA professional goal? (50 characters maximum)
50 characters do not give you much room, which therefore requires you to be concise. We recommend starting your response with “My immediate post-MBA professional goal is…”. Better to offer a straight-forward response vs. arriving at the answer at the end after a professional or personal context.
Essay One: Through your resume and recommendations, we have a clear sense of your professional path to date. What are your career goals over the next 3-5 years and what, in your imagination, would be your long-term dream job? (500 words)
Your introductory paragraph is important here. You should aim to answer the following three questions upfront:
What is your 3-5 year career goal?
What is your high-level first step to achieving that goal?
Is an MBA from CBS necessary to arriving at that first step?
For that third question, we need to present to Admissions why an MBA makes sense for you now. In particular, we want to be specific about that first step so that Admissions can connect those dots between an MBA now and why an MBA is right for you. Be crystal clear upfront; do not make Admissions search for your answer to the Career Goals question.
Second, throughout the body of your essay, we need to unpack the 3-5 year career goals and ultimately set up the essay to land the punch at the end – the long-term dream job. To do this, you need to avoid the impulse to talk right away about your previous professional work or accomplishments. Therefore, we recommend a second paragraph to focus on the further context around your goals. Were you influenced by an experience or mentor in this area of work? They want to know how you arrived there because there will be hundreds of applicants who care about environmental sustainability. The “why” is important before diving into your background and why you are well equipped to achieve that 3-5 year goal. It helps to stop and ask yourself: why do you want to devote your life to this vocation/work?
Finally, the reader will most certainly be interested in your long-term dream job response. It tells them a lot about your vision and your character. However, we offer a view of helpful tips about how to avoid “bad long-term goals”.
Do not be overly predictable in terms of something that is often talked about in today’s current events. Avoid “easy” responses based on what is trending. Focus on authenticity.
Be interesting. To say you want to work in corporate America and get promoted to VP sounds nice, but lacks a substantial degree of substance. Even if this is your goal, tie it to something larger than yourself. Increasing mobility for an underrepresented group in corporate America speaks to larger values beyond yourself.
Pick a long-term goal that has relates to your previous work, schooling, or experience. If you pick something that appears random, Admissions will see that you are not focused and lack direction. Even though the question asks for a dream job, there needs to be a thread of connection between your past and that desired future.
Connect with your dreams. Ensure there is a skill or professional development from your 3-5 year career goal that connects to the long-term dream job. It’s okay if that dream job is in a different field as your 3-5 year career goal, but Admissions wants to see forward momentum arising from your 3-5 year career goal to eventually land at that dream job. The connection can be tenuous, but at least make it explicit.
Essay Two: Why do you feel Columbia Business School is a good fit for you? (250 words)
This essay is a “how” question. Even though it is phrased as a “why” question, Admissions is asking you to explain the proof behind how CBS will help you achieve the goals stated in essay one. Approach this question the same way you would for other types of “why School X”. You are a lawyer and you need to bring evidence to your claim that CBS is right for you. Show up to the trial prepared with anecdotes from your school visit and examples of classes, clubs, or alumni conversations that have informed your view and opinion of the school.
We recommend you do not simply state facts, stories, roles, and responsibilities, but that you help your reader understand how the transferable skills you are learning at CBS will be applied in the future and why they are relevant.
Essay Three: Tell us about your favorite book, movie, or song and why it resonates with you. (250 words)
Our only piece of advice for this one: don’t pick a cliché topic. Here, individuality and uniqueness are coveted. They will most likely have heard plenty of Warren Buffett books (of course, one of their most famous alums). It’s okay to choose an alum, but even better if you can connect a theme from their book, movie, or song to one of your career goals or long-term dream job.
What Not to Write
Many applicants to Columbia Business School also apply to Booth and Kellogg. Don’t simply recycle an essay “my personality outside the office” or “what are my core values.” Rather, you have to sell your candidacy to the specific institution of CBS. To that end, it’s okay to mention that you are enamored of the business opportunities in New York, the financial capital of the US. But it helps to go beyond that and show you are a part of the fabric of the city already.
Example Columbia Essay Examples
“My goal in earning a Columbia MBA is two-fold: as a graduate of Columbia’s engineering college, I am an experienced quant looking to acquire qualitative leadership skills, and as a senior engineer, I seek to rise to C-level management. My goal is a CTO position and beyond, growing an established company to an IPO or private sale…”
“I am a good fit for Columbia because I am not just a resident of New York City, but also a property-owning landlord who purchased a second apartment in the city for rent in the notoriously strict housing market. I will reach out to classmates who come from outside the city and indeed country, and I have a rich network of connections in the city to both support my dreams of business management and to supply my connections with resources as they require.”
Commentary
These excerpts are examples of how to sell one’s candidacy to Columbia Business School above and beyond the very competitive applicant pool. There is a saying in business that “New York jobs lead to new New York jobs.” The city is a unique experience, and it is not for everyone. CBS understands its appeal as part of the global city that NYC is and convincing the admissions officers that you will attend if accepted is a sound strategy.