Start by listing your achievements

Well-written essays cover past achievements and then go on to demonstrate how these achievements qualify for excelling in the future as well. Set about your essay writing effort by listing your achievements. Why is this important? - It initiates the process of assessing yourself. How often do we spare time to review our past to gain a perspective on the present? Consider this a beautiful opportunity to rethink past events and objectively look at your strengths and shortcomings. - Your confidence builds up when you start working on an essay question. Many people draw a blank when they first sit down to write their essays. Listing your achievements is a good way to start. So, the first and the most important step you need to take before beginning your essays is to jot down your achievements. What would you classify as your achievements? Discovering your own achievements requires time and energy. Write down every life experience ranging from the big, substantial ones to those trivial ones that you may not consider worthy enough to merit consideration. Look back and recall the experiences that made you feel happy and proud. These could include something like the initiative you took to get the job you have always desired, or the way you helped a colleague handle a difficult situation. It could also be something as simple as the impact your article published in the school magazine, the ease with which you handle both work and fun, or your ability to foresee problems that help you circumvent crisis situations. Sit back, think and jot down all your achievements. Work on this list for a few days and keep adding to it. When you think you are done, you need to organize your list. Divide the list into these three categories: 1. Professional - Skills related to your field of specialization: experiences that describe how good you are as an engineer, salesperson or finance professional would fall under this category. 2. Managerial - Soft skills like working in a team, meeting deadlines, and attention to detail 3. Personal - This includes extracurricular activities, self-development initiatives, community work and anything else you do that cannot be included in the above two categories.

After you group together your achievements, assess the three categories qualitatively and decide which categories, if any, seem to have fewer achievements than others. Now consider only the category where you seem to lack. Think specifically about your skills related to this category. If you are not able to identify your strengths and achievements by yourself, it will help immensely to consult friends and colleagues. Sometimes others can see aspects of our life that we are blind to ourselves. If you are still not able to list much under this category, you may need to re-consider some listed achievements in other categories. Look carefully at your achievements in other categories and see if they would reveal additional skills that can be listed under the required category. Lets clarify this further. Suppose your work is mainly technical by nature, then you might find it difficult to look for instances that fall under the 'managerial' category. Then, what you do is to look for experiences in the 'personal' category that would also bring forward your managerial skills. For example, you could write about how you managed a team through a team sport you played, or some community work you performed. Writing your essay will get easier as you go along. Start working by following the steps given above. As you proceed you will realize that it is a lot easier than you thought it would be. The notes that you make at this stage will be your reference when you select content for your essays. This exercise might seem cumbersome in the beginning but consider this a wise investment. It is certainly worth doing since it culls and consolidates all the information that you need to convey to the Admissions Committee through your essays. Many applicants miss this crucial objective in their zeal to give the right answers.

Career progress and future career plans

Your essays should clearly describe career decisions to date and your perception of your career goals. Since business schools like to enroll future leaders, when you speak about your career progress and future plans, you provide them an opportunity to ascertain whether or not you could turn out to be a future leader by making the most of their program. You need to show how you have progressed so far in your career and on that basis try to define the path you are likely to take in future. Well, they do ask you to write about your future plans too. But your past is looked at keenly since it adds credibility to claims you make about future achievements. While considering your past and future, you need to reflect on why you need an MBA now and how it would help you attain your goals. In simpler terms, you need to demonstrate that your past experiences qualify you to desire the future of your choice and an MBA is your ticket to get there. Career progression: Start by thinking about all the career-related decisions youve made till now. You laid the foundations of your career when you chose your undergraduate specialization. Think about what motivated you at that time. You learned new skills and your first degree qualified you either to get a job or continue further studies. What motivated you then? Delve into those months after you completed your undergraduate studies. Do you remember developing any new interests by then? What were your career plans when you took up your first job? How have they changed over the years? While on your job, did you discover any new aspects of your personality or work style? List the areas in which you excelled and all the new skills you developed. Consider all the job changes and reflect on the reasons that made you want to change. What did you gain or lose in the process? Think of all the new assignments you undertook and how you handled them. How did you feel about changing your style of working to suit the demands of the new assignment? Were you comfortable? Did you falter? What did you learn from each experience of success or failure? How good or bad are you at interacting with others at work? How do you manage your personal interests while on a job that requires the combined efforts of a variety of people with different temperaments and interests?

Answering the above questions will give you an idea about how to project your career from the very beginning to the present. Future plans Students who are clear about their career goals make the most of MBA programs because they are able to focus on specific parts of the curriculum and prepare themselves to meet their career goals. But most applicants lack clarity about their career goals. Career goals cannot be learned from books. You need to dream up goals that capture your imagination and burn in your heart. Imagine you have just graduated from your dream school after two years of rigorous study. What kind of work would you like to do now? Think of it in stages. First, what would be the first job you want to take? Think of what you would really like to do immediately after graduation. Second, what would you like to be doing five years from graduation? Third, where do you imagine you would be twenty years after graduation? Prepare a career progress graph in your mind. Keep in mind the fact that your aim here is to fulfill your aspirations and leverage your strengths. What additional skills would you need to achieve the targets envisaged by you? Your response to this question will be the answer to the Why MBA? question. You may think about the responsibilities you want to shoulder in future, the positions you want to hold, the challenges you want to meet, new skills you want to gain, and the contributions you want to make. You must sound enterprising while writing your career plans. This will be possible only if your plans are concrete and you are truly enthusiastic about them. Reflecting on all this will take time. Be patient with yourself. Keep the questions in your head and pen down your thoughts as they pop up.

Leadership and Teamwork

Your ability to lead a team and your aptitude to work with team members are the two most important areas on which you will be assessed through your essays. Some schools may have direct questions asking you to narrate your leadership and teamwork experiences. Other schools that don't ask these questions directly will anyway assess you on these skills through the overall image projected by your essays. We will help you understand what these terms imply so that you can address them properly. Leadership Skills Many applicants are unclear about the correct meaning of the term leadership. You know you are strong on leadership skills if: a. you perform beyond routine tasks and take initiative to achieve interesting results. b. your actions are focused on what is best for the work at hand, and you are not distracted by personal interests or allegiance to authority figures. c. you constantly strive to find ways of improving routine tasks. You work toward convincing others of the effectiveness of your novel ideas and removing all obstacles in its implementation. d. you can lead a team of people to achieve a difficult task. You motivate team members, and take care of their needs while achieving team objectives. When one or more of the above kinds of experiences are presented in a captivating manner, they can be the most decisive part of your application that can turn that admission decision in your favor. Teamwork All of us have worked in teams at some point in life and can recall interacting with others to meet team objectives. Bring to mind both the good and bad experiences that you went through while working with team members and others. How did you perform? Were you able to lead the team to meet its objectives? What did other team members feel about your presence in the team? Were your interactions positive or negative? Did you learn anything from your interactions within and outside the team? Look back into your own life. As you dwell on these points, you are sure to come up with hitherto unnoticed aspects about your personality and work that will qualify you for management school. Good teamwork releases group synergy so that the combined effect of individual contributions far exceeds the sum of their individual effects. There is mutual accountability and togetherness amongst members of a well-knit team. The basic premise here is that individual contributions cannot be as good as all of us working together in a team. Look back at your experiences. Were you able to define the team's objectives and the roles of members clearly? How did you understand your different team members, appreciate them and make the most of their special skills and abilities to substantially improve the result of their joint efforts? Good team players place team objectives ahead of their own personal goals. If you are able to recall an experience on these lines, you have identified the right team experience for your essays.

Many applicants to the top business schools focus so much on their own achievements that it becomes very difficult to judge their ability to effectively work with people. If you think you could be headed that way, be sure to describe an experience where you worked with others in a team, learned from them and effectively utilized their strengths to achieve team objectives.

Projecting your unique profile

All of us have a story to tell; a story of our own; a story of our unique experiences, choices and dreams. Your life too has been fashioned by specific aspirations, special relationships, and particular situations and people: this is your story. Your application carries your story to the Admissions Committee members who read thousands of similar-looking applications. Since you do not want to lose yourself in a sea of applications, you must ensure that your essays rivet the attention of the committee to your application. Ask yourself, What in my application will make the Admissions Committee sit up and take note of me. Are your essays written so as to leave an indelible impression upon the committee members? Do they highlight your uniqueness and project you as an asset to the school. No one will remember a person who worked for xyz company and met all targets, but everyone remembers the person who worked in the oil fields of conflict-torn Algeria. Who can miss that Chinese interpreter who endeavored to implement stateof-the-art technology in office or the boy who missed basketball to help his sister compose herself just when she was falling apart? Impressive one-line descriptions can also strongly impact the admissions committee and eventually influence their decision-making process in your favor.

What makes you unique?

You are the best person to answer this question. Juxtapose yourself with others you know and write down how you differ from them. You could try a small exercise. Imagine that your company had hired some friend of yours in your place. Would he/she have achieved the same goals or progressed in exactly the way that you did in your company? Probably not. What then makes you different from them? While thinking on these lines, you are likely to discover some traits that are unique to you. Some aspects of your past experiences or certain values and beliefs dear to you could also make you stand out in the crowd. Look outside of your work environment at your interactions with friends and family, and your extracurricular activities. Do the moments that bring back fond memories say something about who you are or what you would like to be? They probably will, if you look hard enough and long enough. One aspect that is common to all successful applicants is their ability to portray themselves faithfully. Unless the admissions committee gets to know you fairly well, they are certainly not going to offer you a place. To tell them who you are, you yourself need to know who you are. For your identity to emerge as part of your consciousness, you need to introspect. The way in which you speak and face situations often reveal who you are. Think of occasions when you were faced with personal or corporate challenges. How

did you overcome these situations? What specific personality traits made you tackle these situations successfully? Did you learn anything new? Juggle these (and similar) questions in your mind until you are able to portray your achievements and traits with clarity. You will then need specific stories to project these traits. If your essays are catchy, intense and lucid, the one-line differentiators will (on their own) make their way into the minds of the Admissions Committee members.

Weaknesses, Setbacks and Failures

Our achievements speak for themselves. However, when it comes to our setbacks, failures and weaknesses, we feel uncomfortable talking about them. All of us have failed at some time to equal our dreams of perfection or to perform well. The big issue is not your weaknesses; they are part of life. The issue is how you manage these imperfections so that they do not dictate you. Setbacks and weaknesses can be robust stepping stones that lead to growth and maturity. However, utmost care should be taken while mentioning your weaknesses in your application so that you do not inadvertently present yourself in poor light. Consider the following piece by an applicant: I was shy, I didn't make a very good first impression and wanted to change this. I noticed that when I spent some time with people, I could open up. People appreciated my sense of humor and trusted me. This gave me the confidence to overcome the problem by taking it head on. I took up a 'Public Relations' job, and once I was into it, it didn't take long before I was building new contacts for the company and won the best new employee award in six months. It's very human to have weaknesses and failures but it is your job to tell the Admissions Committee how you transformed your shortcomings into your strengths. When written appropriately, instances of failure can strike a responsive chord with the person reading the essay. Let the committee know that you are the kind of person who refuses to mull over your weaknesses; you would much rather work on your deficiencies and overcome them. If you can manage to do this, you can be sure that youre heading for success. We encourage you to relate instances of failures and setbacks from your personal life, unless the essay question specifically asks for a professional incident. If you are narrating a professional experience, let the incident be kind of trivial: a small mistake that could have had wide-ranging implications (but you rectified it in time, of course). You can get away with confessing some minor errors but only as long as you can demonstrate that you learned a good deal from this fiasco. Explain your position well and put the best of your writing skills into play so that your essay makes interesting reading and projects you as a learner.

Dont miss this: Let the Admissions Committee know that you have the inherent ability, drive and commitment to move on in the face of failure. You will not let mistakes and disappointments of the past direct and control your future. Yes, you had defaulted once, but you learned quite a bit in the process. Your learning cost you time, energy, setbacks and failures, but in these days of rapid change, it is the learners who inherit the future. It is good to be honest in your essays, but there are some kinds of failures and weaknesses you must avoid. These are the ones that could either adversely affect your school performance or interfere with your career plans. Each incident that sets forth a weakness, setback or failure, must also be balanced with some positive comments about yourself. Look at the two examples given below and unearth similar incidents from your life. Example 1: My mum and I never saw eye to eye on any issue because we were so different. We had frequent rows at home, which caused mother a lot of pain. But some time later when I saw her tide over a very difficult phase, I realized just how strong she was. My mum took the first step to start the process of reconciliation between us. As we opened our hearts to each other, we realized how similar we really were. It did not take long for me to start admiring my mother. Now she has become a great source of inspiration for me. I understand her so well that I am able to anticipate her response to a situation and act accordingly. Example 2: I never trusted anyone with anything, so I believed in doing everything myself. I felt others would never measure up to my standards. But a particular situation in office drove me up the wall. I had nearly given up in despair when a person in my team, whom I considered quite incapable, helped me tide over the situation. I was touched. That day I resolved to trust others, especially my team members. My career has followed an upward trend for the last four years mainly because of my ability to motivate and trust others, and develop unique solutions through positive interactions with team members. Notice the positive turn that each of the above examples took. Observe that in the second example, by mentioning the last four years, we have succinctly conveyed that the negative trait is now a thing of the past. You have made it clear that you have been successfully practicing the positive outcome for a fairly long time. Put on your thinking cap and recall some of the new traits you've picked up over the last few years. Did these come naturally to you or did you have to work on developing them? How did you handle things before you developed these new skills? Somewhere in the answer to the last question lies a weakness or failure that is appropriate to be written in your essay.