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Charlotte is a twenty-nine-year-old risk
analyst at a prominent mid-western retail bank. A green
card holder, she completed a PhD in statistics from a Korean
university and began working for a well-known U.S. insurance
company. After a year with the insurance company she received
an attractive offer from the bank that she has now been with
for eighteen months. Originally from Korea, Charlotte has been
regularly involved with the Asian business communities both in
the city where she currently resides and previously while in
graduate school. Her academic record was quite strong – at the
top of both her class both at her college in Korea and at the large,
U.S. university where she earned her PhD. Her
GMAT score was average
(690 with an 80+% quant section).
With her background, Charlotte would need to convince school
admissions committees that
her professional experience was substantial, relevant and interesting.
The most effective way for her to do this, I felt, was by presenting
a focused career plan in her essays. She needed to "draw a line"
from her PhD studies to her recent professional experience to her post-MBA
career goals. Doing so would allow her to leverage the uniqueness of her
academic background while demonstrating to the Admissions Committees that
her plans where well-conceived.
As we started working together, we had long conversations about her career
plans and how an MBA fit in. At the time she only had a vague idea how this
all fit together – and I was clear in telling her that "putting the pieces together"
was essential for the success of her candidacy. To help her think about her aspirations
I was able to connect her with some alumni from schools in which she was interested and
she took this lesson to reach out to alumni from other schools as well.
These conversations proved formative in writing about her career plans. Charlotte was
able to draw a clear line from her past experiences through the MBA to her short- and
long-term plans. In the end, she was admitted to two of the four top-ten MBA programs
to which she applied.
– Mark is a former Associate Director of Admissions for the Tuck School of Business.
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