Don’t Screw Up Your Goals in the MBA Application

Avoid bad MBA advice and choose MBA application career goals that really fit you and help you build a unique and successful MBA application with Angela’s first MBA Monday video!! We’re in the middle of a pandemic! It’s the best time to hit the accelerator pedal on your dreams. If you want to get an MBA, now is your moment!! We’re starting today with our MBA Mondays series to help you do just that – avoid the negativity and bad MBA advice out there and construct your unique and authentic MBA application! Today, Angela Guido’s talking about how to avoid misdirection and bad MBA advice you’re gonna hear from the internet and alumni about your MBA goals. Here’s how to find your one unique path and choose MBA application goals that inspire AND make sense! Don’t miss this MBA application advice! It’s key to your successful MBA application! #MBAgoals #MBAMonday

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript:

I'm Angela Guido, the founder of Career Protocol, and this is MBA Monday. I'm coming to you every Monday with no-nonsense MBA application advice about how to get into business school, and to help you with your MBA goals.

Beware Bad MBA Advice!!

I'm starting with debunking all the bad MBA advice that you'll find out there on the Internet, and in particular perpetrated by alumni. So here is the number one piece of bad MBA advice that my clients get from both the internet and from alumni, regarding the application process. It relates to your MBA application goals. Your MBA goals are a very important part of a successful MBA application. Schools really want to know what you plan to do with this huge investment that you're making in yourself, and they want to know that the MBA is actually going to help you get there. And even more than that, they want to know that their MBA is actually going to help you get there. So, understanding your goals and having an effective career vision is a really big part of the MBA admissions process that schools go through when they're determining who to accept into the class.

Your MBA Goals are Your Goals

The misconception about goals is that you have to have a certain goal or a certain subset of goals in order to be an attractive candidate for a given school. And this is just patently untrue. There is literally an infinite array of MBA application career goals that you could have that both necessitate an MBA and that make you an attractive candidate for business school. And which goals or set of goals is right for you depends on you. It depends on your background, your experiences, your ambitions and your vision for the future. It depends on where you want to have an impact. It depends on the kind of work that you want to be doing post MBA based on the experience that you've had pre-MBA. You’ll submit a unique MBA application that is tailored to you and your personal experiences. I can't tell you how many times I've had my clients go and speak to their friends who are alumni, their alumni friends tell them “You need to destroy this entire essay and you need to talk about wanting to have goals in finance.” or “You can't say that you want to go into consulting, everybody says they want to go into consulting.” or “You have to have an entrepreneurial goal or the school isn't going to accept you.”. The problem with taking advice in general from alumni is that they have a data set of one. They have their own application process and what they believe made them successful in getting into business school. It's only natural to think that whatever worked for you is definitely what's going to work for everyone else. But this is crazy and it's wrong because for the most part, there's a very good chance that those alumni got into school, not because of their essays or their goals, but in spite of them.

This was definitely the case in my case. When I look back on all the horrible mistakes I made in my MBA essays, I can't even believe how lucky I was to be admitted because frankly, I was admitted not because of my essays, but in spite of them. So, taking advice from anyone who has a single data point is always a risky proposition. And where I see this most going wrong – with alumni in particular – is advising you to have a certain set of MBA application goals that they think the school is interested in or that they themselves met success with. But that has nothing to do with you or your specific ambitions or your unique MBA application. And I'm picking on alumni here, but if you go to the internet, you're going to find a lot of misinformation about what goals you should and should not have when you apply to business school.

To Each Their Own Application Process

Ultimately, the answer isn't neat and clean. Neither the Internet nor an alumnus can give you the answer because the answer depends on you and what you really want. There's no shortcut for doing this work yourself and really figuring out your MBA goals what you genuinely want. If you want a little bit of help, click the link below and read our ultimate guide how to get into business school for a much better understanding of how goals and fit factor into your MBA application and how schools are viewing you and your candidacy.

That's all I have for today. I will see you next Monday for #MBAMonday and if you don't want to miss a single MBA Monday tip, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel!