External Areas of Focus
As you look at the essay questions, you will notice that they focus on a few basic types of questions. The answers to these questions will hopefully, paint a picture of your potential for success in business school and afterwards. I have chosen a few of the most important questions below to examine:
- Why do you want an MBA? Why this school? Why now?
- Where have you exhibited leadership? What is your leadership style?
- How do you function in a team environment? How have you influenced people in a team environment?
- Where have you shown integrity and ethics in your actions and decision making processes?
- What were the impacts from your contributions? Are they relevant?
I have already gone over the first question in the beginning of this guide. After you read through the rest of this guide, you will need to apply a theme and integrate your answers into why you want an MBA. I will explain this in more detail later.
For now, let’s examine questions 2-5. These questions ask about the 4 external areas of focus which I describe below:
Leadership
Questions about leadership are widely used in business school applications as most schools are looking for someone who has proven leadership experience in the past. The key point to remember here is that you don’t have to be technically appointed or be chosen a leader to display leadership. Many times, your ability to become a leader informally has much more impact than a mere appointment of a leadership position. Just keep in mind that when you have an opportunity to take the lead on something, take it!
Teamwork
When thinking about team work, think about your influence within a team. Do you keep the team together? Do you facilitate communication within the team? Do you influence other members of the team in a positive way? Good teamwork is not just the individual efforts of each team member added together. Good teamwork is when the synergies of the team enable the ultimate outcome to be greater than that of each individual’s work added together. Put yourself in situations where you have the opportunity to influence
a team and make the outcome greater than the individual contributions.
Integrity
Having integrity means applying moral and ethical guidelines to your decision making process. Ever since the Enron and Arthur Andersen scandals, business ethics have become a key focus of many business schools. Good business is not about making as much money as possible but doing things that are “right” for the company, shareholders, employees and customers. You may also get asked, either in essays or interviews, about how you handled an ethical dilemma. Everyone has faced situations where you have to make
choices between what you think is ethically correct vs. perhaps something that positively affects the bottom line of a business. Always consider the moral and ethical impacts of your decisions and remember the situations that you had to make those decisions.
Impact
In anything you do, keep in mind the impact of your actions. You should prioritize based on the impact and do things that require the least amount of effort for maximum impact. In other words, you don’t want to spend months running a project that has very little impact to the business or organization you are trying to help.
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