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We had an excellent Q&A last week with Ankur Kumar and Anthony Penna, admissions directors at Wharton. The excerpt below provides an insider look at how the adcom readers approach your goal essays – how you should bridge your past and present experiences to what you’d like to be doing in the future.
Linda Abraham: Ritin asks, “How strong of a connection or linkage is a candidate required to demonstrate between his current profile and his long-term goals, or at least his post-MBA goals, at the time of writing his application?”
Ankur Kumar: What we are really trying to do is understand a candidate’s thought process and what they’ve been doing to move in the direction that they are headed. And what I mean by that is that coming to any business school, not just Wharton, is not the silver magic bullet to make all your dreams come true in two years and do all the hard work for you. It is a fantastic and incredibly transformative vehicle for you to get exposure to people and employers and industries and ways of thinking, and to test and refine it. I truly believe that the best candidates and the best business school students are those that have started this process of moving towards their goal well before they have come to business school, and for whom actually business school isn’t going to stop or start them from what they want to do.
In terms of linking what you are currently doing to your goals, we certainly want to understand how they link and what the thought process is – why you have an interest in pursuing a certain field…what is it about your field or your experiences that excite you that make you want to stay in it? How do you want to develop in it? Or if you are looking to shift careers, where did that thought process come from? How did that come about? And of course, how have you been moving towards achieving those goals?
….So I would think about it more from that context than any, in terms of helping us understand what you’ve been doing and how that may link to what you want to do in the future.
For the entire conversation, please view the transcript or listen to the complete audio file on our website.
Do you need help demonstrating that “link” between your experiences and your goals? Check out MBA Goals 101 or our admissions consulting services to get the assistance you need to establish your goals and create a winning goals essay.
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