Blog Archive UC-Berkeley Haas Essay Analysis, 20132014

Blog Archive UC-Berkeley Haas Essay Analysis, 2013â€"2014 The Haas School of Business at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, offers you more opportunity to tell your story than most business schools do these daysâ€"its three short essays favor those whose candidacies include a variety of dimensions and accomplishments. Your job is to ensure that the reader is constantly learning about you as he/she reads on. Ask yourself, “Am I offering a new skill or a new experience in each essay?” If your answer is not “yes!” then you must go back to brainstorming to ensure you are providing a broad and compelling picture of yourself. If you want the admissions committee to stay interested, you must keep providing new information throughout your essays. 1. If you could choose one song that expresses who you are, what is it and why? (250 word maximum) As absurd as this prompt may seem, you of course want to take it seriously. Rather than trying to identify what might be an impressive or interesting song in and of itself, stop, think about the various facets of your character and then back into your choice. Ask yourself what defines who you are and then work to find an appropriate song that reflects and reveals these elementsâ€"preferably one that you are sincerely connected to or that triggers a strong response in you. To add another level of creativity, consider different versions of the same song and the different singers who have performed or recorded it. (For example, the famed song “New York, New York” has been recorded by a number of artists over the years and in different languagesâ€"not that we are suggesting this song!) If the lyrics of a particular song seem to match well with your personality, you may also be able to identify a version of that song with a certain style, tempo or featured instrument, and these elemen ts can further illustrate your personality. There is no “right” song in the eyes of the admissions committee. Your task is to find one that serves as an avenue for discussing your character and to clearly explain how and why it does so, using examples. 2. What is your most significant accomplishment? (250 word maximum) Your most significant accomplishment can be from any sphereâ€"professional, community, academic, personal. As mentioned in our introduction, be sure to represent different dimensions of your candidacy as you respond to these short-essay prompts. In other words, whichever aspect of your profile you choose to highlight here, it should be one that is not represented elsewhere in your application. (Note: you can tell two stories from the same “venue,” but they need to represent your skills/talents in different ways. Mentorship is a different skill than business development, for example, but both can occur in the workplace.) The key to this essay is choosing an experience that is simple but powerfulâ€"one that speaks for itself and draws the reader in, allowing him/her to draw a clear conclusion about your capabilities. Even with just 250 words, you can sufficiently recount a story that accomplishes this goal. 3. Describe a time in the last three years when you overcame a failure. What specific insight from this experience has shaped your development? (250 word maximum) UC-Berkeley Haas has maintained a question about failure this application season, though it differs slightly from last year’s. Clearly, the school believes that managing failure well is an important factor in being prepared to succeed. As we have stated in other essay analyses we have written over the years, the schools do not want you to hide your failures or blame others. They want to know that you can take responsibility and both rise to the challenge and learn from the experience when things go wrong. An effective essay will tell a story that involves clear forward progress and then a sudden derailment just as success is near. If, by contrast, an idea never got off the ground in the first place, it cannot truly be called a failureâ€"just a bad idea. Many applicants feel that failure is the most difficult topic to write about, because few have had “heroic” failures (e.g., you left your job to start a nonprofit that could not raise the necessary funds and had to fold)â€"which are relatively easy to write about and reflect well on the candidateâ€"and instead have had embarrassing failures (which applicants typically should avoid sharing). So, what is the right kind of failure to discuss, if you do not have one of the heroic variety? The first thing to do when trying to identify which failure experience to share is to analyze your successes. Most successes that are worth discussing were hard earned, meaning that they most likely involved some failures along the wayâ€"you may have simply forgotten about some of the failures you experienced as part of the successes you ultimately achieved. For example, the popular new product you launched may have initially been mispriced; you may have encountered production delays that you should have been able to avoid; you may have had trouble convincing a single retailer to sell it or originally targeted the wrong venues. These are just examples, of course, but the nature of business is that projects are revised, deals are delayed, efforts are stymied. To write a strong essay response to this question, you must clearly convey your specific actions and intentions, thereby revealing a sincere effort on your part that yielded unexpected results in the end. The admissions committee wants to know that you are a student of your failure, so even in this short space, you must reflect on your actions and discuss what you learned and how you would apply that knowledge going forward. 4. a. What are your post-MBA short-term and long-term career goals? How have your professional experiences prepared you to achieve these goals? b. How will an MBA from Haas help you achieve these goals? (750 word maximum for 4a. and 4b.) Together, these two questions constitute a typical personal statement essay question. Because personal statements are similar from one application to the next, we have produced the mbaMission Personal Statement Guide, which helps applicants write this style of essay for any school. We offer this guide to candidates free of charge. Please feel free to download your copy today. For a thorough exploration of UC-Berkeley Haas’s academic program, merits, defining characteristics, crucial statistics, social life, academic environment and more, please check out the mbaMission Insider’s Guide to the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. Share ThisTweet 2013-2014 Berkeley-Haas MBA Essay Analysis