Are you a practicing management consultant applying to business school? If so, you have several advantages over the general applicant. Mainly, your success as a consultant reveals that your work ethic, analytical abilities, and teamwork skills are probably better than most people’s. As a result, MBA programs will likely give you the benefit of the doubt when they initially crack open your file.
However, there’s a catch: you’re in one of the most competitive applicant pools in business school admissions. Management consultants are some of the most sought-after candidates. So, even though your experience will certainly grab attention, it won’t be enough to secure you a spot in your target program’s next class. To truly stand out, you’ll need to strategically highlight your unique professional and personal qualities.
Understanding the Management Consultant’s Challenge
So, how should you approach your application as a member of one of the most competitive MBA applicant pools? You’ll need more than your prodigious 3.75 GPA and 750 GMAT score to get into the top business schools. You will face fierce competition in the admissions sweepstakes, so your application needs to tell a compelling, differentiating story.
If you’re self-employed or run your own consulting practice, you might face an additional challenge. Adcoms might wonder whether you’re a true entrepreneur or simply listing yourself as a “consultant” to conceal the lack of a significant business track record. To overcome this, you’ll need to demonstrate concrete business impact through your client work, thereby showing that your consulting experience is not just a job but a true entrepreneurial endeavor.
Highlighting Your Uniqueness
Given the number of management consultants that apply to business school each year, you’ll need to dedicate extra effort to standing out as a consultant-applicant. Highlight your uniqueness as a candidate in every way you can. Generally speaking, your “uniqueness factors” fall into two categories:
- Professional or career related
- Personal or service related
Professional or Career Related
This might be the most difficult area in which to differentiate yourself, because most of the consultants you’ll be competing against will have experiences similar to yours. But don’t despair. Even here, establishing your professional uniqueness is eminently feasible. Focus on the impact you’ve had, your leadership experiences, your professional goals, and your firm’s focus area(s).
Your Impact
Thus far in your career, you’ve likely worked on a variety of client projects and might have developed a specialty. Perhaps you’re deeply engaged in the tech space, focused on sustainability consulting, or passionate about healthcare strategy. If you’ve carved out a niche for yourself, make sure you call attention to it. Expertise in a defined specialization helps you differentiate yourself from the broader pool of applicants and shows that you have unique experiences and contributions.
Leadership Experience
Early in your consulting career, leadership opportunities might be limited, but if you’ve had the chance to manage a team or drive major initiatives, make these experiences the focal point of your application. Whether you’ve led a group of junior associates or stepped up to manage a high-stakes project, demonstrate your ability to lead under pressure, handle client relationships, and deliver results. Adcoms want to know that you can thrive in an MBA program that will challenge your leadership abilities.
Your Career Goals
Avoid the trap of stating generic career goals like “I want to be a partner at McKinsey” or “I want to work in management consulting after business school.” These goals are too vague and will not set you apart from your peers. Instead, reflect on your long-term vision and be specific. Maybe you want to lead a consulting firm that works with small- to mid-sized tech start-ups or would like to drive innovation in the emerging markets space. Maybe you want to pivot out of consulting into a specific industry. The clearer and more defined your goals are, the more the adcom will see that you have a distinct vision for your career and understand why earning an MBA is crucial for you.
Your Firm’s Specialties
Even if you work at a large consulting firm, it’s important to highlight your firm’s specific expertise or differentiators. Maybe your firm is known for a unique methodology or has a strong reputation in a specific sector. Sharing these insights can provide context and set you apart from others in your field.
Personal or Service Related
This broad group of uniqueness factors can encompass everything from your hobbies and personal obstacles you’ve overcome to your volunteer work with civic, philanthropic, religious, or sports organizations. Many times, applicants who have trouble making their professional experiences stand out find that their community activities or personal backgrounds come to the rescue.
Community Involvement and Volunteering
Your volunteer work can help balance the professional aspects of your application. For example, if you’ve served on the board of a local nonprofit, led a community development project, or volunteered in an underserved area, these experiences can demonstrate your leadership, empathy, and commitment to social impact. If your job hasn’t given you the chance to showcase your skills as a leader, your community involvement can fill that gap and show that you can balance a demanding career with meaningful outside commitments.
Personal Challenges
Many applicants find that sharing a story from their personal life – such as having overcome an obstacle or pursued a unique passion – can help distinguish their application. Whether you have dealt with a challenging upbringing, established a creative side hustle, or navigated adversity in your career, your personal stories will add depth to your application and make you more memorable. These stories also humanize you, which can be a powerful counterbalance to the analytical, business-oriented image consultants can unintentionally project.
Diverse Interests and Hobbies
Not every MBA applicant can offer a long, impressive list of extracurricular activities, but any unique hobbies or personal interests you have can provide a way to stand out. Whether you’re an avid marathon runner, a competitive musician, or a published poet, these passions reveal something more about you than your professional life can. They show that you’re a well-rounded individual with diverse interests and a commitment to personal growth.
For example, if your job hasn’t provided any leadership experiences, your three years on the board of your community’s dance company can certainly demonstrate your comfort with management responsibilities. Even an applicant whose consulting engagements have a “plain vanilla” quality can greatly compensate by focusing on what makes them unique.
You can also use your community activities and personal interests to dispel the stereotypes that adcoms might unwittingly have in mind when evaluating your application. For example, management consultants are sometimes perceived as relying on “biz speak” cliches to communicate ideas and focusing only on the “big picture.” Your community involvement could counter these negative perceptions by showing your ability to care about the real-life problems of everyday people and to speak about them in simple, human terms.
Finally, although any kind of community involvement is great, if the adcoms keep seeing the same organizations in application after application, it can sometimes create a kind of “rubber stamp” impression. So, if you have volunteered a substantial amount of time with an organization that’s less well known or perhaps even founded your own organization, consider giving extra emphasis to these experiences in your essays.
Getting Application Help
Management consultants have many natural advantages when applying to business school. However, the sheer number of high-quality candidates from this traditional MBA pool makes capitalizing on every available uniqueness factor imperative, and knowing which factors to focus on and which stories will best highlight them can be challenging.
Accepted’s consultants can help you reflect on your experiences, select the anecdotes that best portray your singular self, and weave your stories into compelling essays that grab the adcoms’ attention. Schedule a free consultation today.
Kara Keenan Sweeney has more than 15 years of experience in MBA admissions, having worked for some of the world’s top business school programs, including Columbia Business School, INSEAD, and The Lauder Institute’s joint degree MA/MBA program with The Wharton School and the MA/JD program with Penn Law at the University of Pennsylvania. Kara has guided, coached, and counseled thousands of MBA and EMBA applicants, reviewed innumerable applications, sat on admissions committees, and interviewed countless applicants, including while running Wharton’s Team Based Discussions both virtually and in person. Want Kara to help you get Accepted? Click here to get in touch!
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