Understanding Your Audience
Hello there! Welcome to our complete course covering the business school admission process. Throughout this course, we will seek to equip you with a structured game plan for attacking the intrinsically subject parts of the MBA application – the essays.
By way of introduction, my name is Rob and I am a Harvard MBA and working MBA Admissions Consultant that has successfully placed clients in all of the top business schools around the world. My professional career began on Wall Street, where I worked in bulge bracket M&A and later transitioned to megafund private equity before enrolling at HBS.
As an admit to most of the elite MBA programs, I took a real interest in the MBA admissions process. I spent months working with the largest, most reputable admissions consultants, scoured countless hours of online material, and visited all Top 10 MBA programs to speak firsthand with admissions officers, faculty, and students. While at HBS, I worked part-time in the Career Office helping students and professionals as a Career Coach and was fortunate enough to help out in Admissions. This experience helped reveal the other side of the MBA admissions process, the one I navigated as an applicant. So now, for almost 10 years, I have been helping talented young professionals earn admission to the top MBA programs, with a track record I’m very proud of!
This course will focus exclusively on the written essay portion of the MBA application. Each MBA program has its own ethos and set of guiding principles; over the course of several articles, I will attempt to shed light on the many complex, often misunderstood, elements of what a successful (and poorly written!) essay looks like. My goal is to provide more transparency to the MBA admission process and help talented young professionals take their next professional step.
Before we begin, a word of caution. While this course is comprehensive, it will require thought and introspection on the part of the reader before getting into the nuts of bolts of good essay writing. We recommend you stop to take the time to think through and write down answers to suggested exercises and idea prompts. It will go a long way towards your end goal.
Without further ado, let’s begin with understanding who your audience is.
Who is the Audience?
The essays provide the link between the professionally and academically accomplished individual you are on paper, and who the real “you” is. They allow your story and your personality to come out in a way that informs what type of student you will be on campus and how you will add to and enrich the current culture and learning community of the school you are applying to.
It might be elegant to think of your audience as the “Admissions Committee” – a vague, amorphous entity that systematically and thoroughly scrubs every aspect of your application and will stop at nothing to ensure they fully understand your motives, passions, and interests beyond school. This rendering of the process and who is reading your file misunderstands the nature of applicants’ candidacies are assessed.
What happens: application files are batched and verified for completeness by a records department, placed into a queue for a reader, and then reviewed out of that queue by a single admissions officer or student reader. It is not overly simplistic to say this individual is your audience, despite the multiple other steps in the process that occurs following the initial review, including a second reviewer for those that make it past a first screen. But at the end of the day, your candidacy lives and dies on two initial readers, not an abstract collective – i.e. not the “AdCom”.
A problem we often see students run into while building a narrative is that they try to write what the Admissions Committee wants to hear. This sort of guessing what profile the admissions committee is looking for or what stories they like to hear not only obfuscates the purpose of the individual reading your file trying to get to know the real you, but also is counterproductive in your pursuit of making the case for your candidacy. You will rob yourself of the critical introspective process of understanding why you are applying to business school.
With that said, there are a few assumptions we can safely make about who our audience is, and this will go a long way towards your preparation for composing the essay that best describes the real you. First, we can assume that the individual reading your file has a great affinity for the school in which they work. This might seem obvious but it’s informative so that they buy into the perspective that the school is differentiated from other top programs. Second, we know these individuals are professionals and that they want to get to know the real you. They can set aside their viewpoints to uncover the essence that defines your writing. Third, we know that these individuals read A TON of essays. They are reading one application file after another – a process of reading hundreds of different stories that the applicants have delivered in neat little packages. If you’re looking for a way to frustrate the reader while reading your application, then: obscure the meaning of why you are applying to the school. Bury the lead on your career goals and how the school will help you achieve them. Contradict early parts of your application with new information that doesn’t tie to the narrative that you’ve cultivated.
The correct way to think about who the audience is would be to think about how you would describe your candidacy to someone not intimately involved with the business school application process. Imagine you are speaking to your Starbucks barista about why you are applying and why School X is right for you. Approaching the essay in this light provides the right level of granularity and insight you need to achieve in your essay to the admissions team.
We have found through many years of counseling and assisting business school applicants in the process that the best results come from organized and structured applications that clearly outline who the applicant is, why they are applying to the school in question, and what they hope to get out of the experience. Now that we understand who the audience is, we recommend a three-step process:
1. Inspiration
2. Exploration
3. Clarification
We will discuss each step in turn.
Phase 1: Inspiration
If you are starting this process early, we recommend you hit the books. We want to break down intrinsic motivations for questions beyond what type of job you want after graduation. We’re talking about the level of introspection that defines what type of person do you want to become. What type of leader you want to be. How do you want to use your skills and experiences, built over decades, to help others?
The answers to these questions may not come fully formed after a night of sleeping on it. These are questions that people have asked themselves for millennia – and it’s an exercise that is well worth your time. To help you get started, it’s a good idea to acclimate yourself to how others have approached these questions. We recommend the following book before starting the app process:
Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett. A book that uses real-life stories and proven techniques to help readers work out what they want and how to get it. It offers innovative design approaches to introspective thinking such as reframing, prototyping, and mind-mapping – all of which lead the reader to a life that’s better by a design of your own making.
Phase 2: Exploration
This is the part where you canvas different schools and programs to understand what is on offer. Different programs have different objectives and offerings that may be better suited for certain types of individuals. While most top programs excel because they make room for a very large variety of individuals with different passions and backgrounds and learning abilities to thrive in a single campus, it is important to do your homework on what makes each school tick.
Therefore, to get ahead of this process, we highly recommend you create a list of 5-10 reasons why you want to attend School X for each school on your list. In doing this very manual (and often tedious) process, you will start to see nuance between the different offerings that will go a long way towards connecting the future dots that are critical to a business application – what your long term career goals are and how School X will help you achieve them.
Phase 3: Clarification
This final step, which marks the completion of the first course in our business school series, is a very important one that connects intrinsic motivations to actionable goals. This is the part of the process where we step away from focusing and identifying who the audience is and turning inward towards structured, clear writing. After you’ve inventoried and short-listed the schools you are most interested in, we need to hone down on what makes each school tick. This includes going beyond the typical “I want to take this Class from this Professor”, and targeting the core DNA of the school you are applying to. Why is this program truly unique and how would you be an asset to the learning community there? This is the time to begin thinking about your case for why you would be perfect for this school. Clarity and conciseness are key in this step.
In the courses to follow, we will explore common pitfalls of the essays, and then dive into specific schools to help you better understand the core DNA of the schools and drive home this third step in the process.
