For most people, career enhancement is the primary motivation for pursuing an MBA. If this is true for you, writing your career goals essay demands laser-like focus. The essay must demonstrate a clear understanding of how you plan to leverage the MBA to achieve your professional aspirations. Presenting a well-thought-out and realistic plan for your goals is a must.
In many cases, a school’s application will require you to select your target industry and function from a drop-down list. Sometimes, you will be given a limited amount of space in which to articulate your career goals. Many MBA programs will ask you to elaborate more fully on your professional objectives in essay form, though the prompts and parameters for those essays vary from school to school.
For example, UVA Darden asks applicants to describe their short-term, post-MBA goal in terms of industry, function, geography, company size, and/or mission and to explain how this goal aligns with their long-term career vision – in 200 words. That isn’t a typo. You are limited to a mere 200 words, and this is not uncommon. Despite the limited word count, MBA programs want to be sure that you have a clear, achievable career path in mind that builds on your previous experience.
Dartmouth Tuck’s career essay prompt begins by asking why you are pursuing an MBA and why now is the right time for you to do so. Further, the school’s admissions committee seeks to understand how the Tuck MBA will help you in achieving your professional aspirations. The word count is slightly higher than Darden’s, at 300 words, but the school’s prompt is a little broader, inquiring also about your motivations for pursuing the degree, your short- and long-term goals, and how you will leverage the Tuck program in pursuing your goals.
Wharton takes a somewhat more traditional approach, requiring a 500-word essay in which you describe how you plan to use its MBA program to achieve your goals. The school’s prompt suggests that you consider your past experience, your short- and long-term objectives, and the resources available at Wharton. Like Tuck’s, Wharton’s prompt is multidimensional.
Each school’s career essay prompt has multiple parts, and the maximum length of the essay varies, so always pay close attention to exactly what your target school wants to ensure that you properly answer all the questions within its “single” question.
Now let’s break down the essential elements of a compelling career goals essay.
Three Elements of an Effective Career Goals Essay
Your career goals essay should achieve the following three things:
- Provide clarity on your chosen career path, including your short-term, post-MBA goal and your long-term aspiration. Explain why your experiences and interests make your career goal a logical and wise choice.
- Demonstrate why you are suited to a particular field as a result of your education, experience, abilities, and enthusiasm. Ensure that you connect the dots between what you have done and what you want to do.
- Highlight specific career achievements. Choose from your most notable or defining experiences. These could be related to your work, community involvement, or extracurricular activities. The experiences you select should showcase your leadership skills, creative thinking, collaborative abilities, and personal reflections about what you learned or gained.
Ideally, the material you include will also allow you to prove your knowledge about industry trends and suggest how your abilities and strengths can help you contribute to that field.
Click here to read a sample MBA Goals Essay and see how these three key elements are achieved. (Note that the school for which this essay was written had a larger word count than the programs mentioned earlier in this post.)
The applicant’s opening is attention-getting for all the right reasons. The candidate introduces herself as the supremely busy executive she visualizes becoming in the future. She trades large amounts of stock, rushes off to a Zoom conference, hurries downstairs, flags down a taxi, and hops on a plane. As she describes this whirlwind of activity, we can practically feel her heart pumping.
After establishing her voice and personality in this opening, she offers context for her MBA goal. Notice that in writing about her work as an accountant for a major firm, she provides relevant details, including how many years she has been in the field, her bilingualism, and her specialty area as an auditor. This information is her springboard to explain why she is pursuing an MBA: she’s bursting out of her limited role as an accountant. Her eyes and ambition are set on a larger playing field as an international investment manager.
Outstanding career goals essays are not merely lists of an applicant’s roles and achievements. Instead, they have a narrative flow and arc that convey the candidate’s palpable excitement about their career choice. This applicant’s enthusiastic, dreamy first paragraph achieves this, and she returns to that image at the end, where she paints her idealized (if frantically busy) future. She also proves her seriousness by noting that she registered for the CFA exam.
Connecting Your Goals to Your Target Program
Many MBA programs will ask why you have chosen to apply to their school in particular. To craft a compelling argument for this portion of the goals essay, you must be prepared to respond knowledgeably and enthusiastically. And the best way to become both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about a school is by visiting campus in person or virtually, attending student recruitment meetings, reading student blogs and school press releases, watching videos on the program’s YouTube channel, communicating directly with students and/or recent alumni, and generally just doing your research on the program and its community. As you do this research, make sure to identify specific courses and specializations at the school that are directly relevant to your goals so you can mention them in your essay.
Summary Tips
- Focus on answering each and every question included in your target program’s career goals essay prompt. Often, there is more than one.
- Highlight specific achievements vividly and in a way that shows that your career choice is logical for you.
- Research the school thoroughly so you can write about why it is a good fit for you and can do so with genuine enthusiasm.
Consider working one-on-one with an expert who will walk you through the process of creating a slam-dunk application. Schedule a free consultation with an Accepted consultant today. We have read thousands of career goals essays and know exactly how to help you craft an outstanding submission.
As the former executive director of admissions at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School and assistant dean of admissions at Georgetown’s McDonough School and the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School, Kelly Wilson has 23 years’ experience overseeing admissions committees and has reviewed more than 38,000 applications for the MBA and master’s programs in management of information systems, computational finance, business analytics, and product management. Want Kelly to help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch!
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