Application Tips
Strategic advice on executing your MBA application, including tips on your résumé, data forms, and essays.
Published: November 2, 2014
Admissions Tip: The Long Essay
Essay content you’ve polished for one school often serves as a great starting point for the next application, but as we’ve often said, customizing this text for the school in question is key. One particular challenge we see applicants struggle with each year is effectively expanding a short essay they’ve written for one program in responding to a question on the same topic but with a longer limit. With this in mind, we’d like to offer some pointers on converting condensed comments to more extensive remarks.
1) Expand in proportion
When taking an existing response as a starting point for crafting a longer document, one good rule of thumb is to build upon each subject to more or less the same extent. While elaborating on your work to date might involve less time and work than the more research-intensive “why School X” discussion, it’s generally prudent to maintain balance among subjects and provide all of the major pieces of information a school requests in equal measure.
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Published: November 24, 2013
Admissions Tip: Plan of Attack
With November wrapping up this week, Round Two deadlines for a number of programs are just around the corner. As most applicants are targeting multiple schools and still working to narrow down their school selection, we wanted to take some time today to stress the importance of taking a deep breath and a step back and formulating a timeline for the coming weeks. Establishing a set of incremental goals with regard to essay composition and recommender management at this point in the season will help you to avoid feeling overwhelmed and ensure that your aims are realistic.
One of our most important pointers pertains to the process of writing essays. The urge to make progress on multiple fronts leads many applicants to work on essays for several schools in parallel, an approach that can be problematic. One reason for this is that when one spends time immersed in three sets of essays at once, it’s easy to lose sight of the full picture he or she is presenting to any one school. While it’s important to be oneself in the application process, it’s also crucial that an applicant tailor his or her materials to each school, a process that is made harder when constantly going back and forth among responses for various programs. Another issue is that it’s easy to waste time implementing the same edits across documents for multiple schools, or to lose track of what one has changed in which essay. For these reasons, we generally recommend focusing one’s full essay-writing attention on one program at a time.
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Published: October 13, 2013
Admissions Tip: Essay Basics
We often stress that, to present oneself effectively in one’s application essays, it is critical to think carefully about what a given question is asking and what this might indicate about a specific school’s admissions priorities. Of course, it’s also imperative to communicate clearly and appropriately regardless of the target program or particular inquiry. Today, we’re going back to basics and offering a few broadly applicable tips on tone and style to keep in mind when drafting written materials for your applications.
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Published: March 11, 2013
Clear Admit’s Kevin Chen Gives Advice to Asian MBA Applicants Targeting Top Business Schools
Navigating the MBA admissions process in the United States and Europe is a tricky task, even for applicants familiar with the expectations of the Western academic and corporate cultures. However, the process presents special challenges for East Asian applicants, who often possess cultural assumptions that can work to their disadvantage. Clear Admit admissions counselor Kevin Chen has nearly a decade of MBA admissions consulting expertise, and has worked extensively with Asian applicants to help them overcome these cultural hurdles and gain admission to top MBA programs including Harvard Business School, Stanford GSB, Wharton, Chicago Booth, INSEAD and London Business School.
Chen, who is fluent in English, Chinese and Taiwanese, has been a successful applicant himself: he holds master’s degrees from both Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He also has a wealth of relevant professional experience, as a consultant, marketing professional and writer for firms including McKinsey & Company, the National Basketball Association and Reuters, the largest global news agency. Last week, Clear Admit spoke with Chen about the common missteps and trends he observes in Asian MBA applicants.
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