Essay 1
What are your short-term and long-term post-MBA goals? How will Columbia Business School help you achieve these goals? (Recommended 750 word limit)
Because Personal Statements are similar from one application to the next, we have produced the “mbaMission Personal Statement Guide,” complete with four free sample essays. We offer this guide to candidates free of charge, via our online store. Please feel free to download your copy today.
For additional information on the Columbia Business School experience, please consult The mbaMission Insider’s Guide to Columbia Business School.
Essay 2
Please tell us about yourself and your personal interests. The goal of this essay is to get a sense of who you are, rather than what you have achieved professionally. (Recommended 500 word limit)
Columbia Business School continues to slim down its essay offerings, implying that between your resume, recommendations and interview, the admissions committee has a comprehensive window into your abilities and prospects for success. So, in this essay, the admissions committee wants to understand “who you are,” through your life experiences. While this essay need not be historical in nature, it should still tell a story about you. In some ways, instead of this being biographical, it might be considered the story of your personality – how you developed or how your personality has manifest.
With such broad parameters, this essay will likely be challenging for many. Where do you begin to brainstorm, let alone to write? You might create a small list of personal characteristics and then work backwards and consider how you might include anecdotes that reveal these characteristics in your narrative. Alternatively, you might jot down a list of crucial “shaping” experiences and try to emphasize those that have had the greatest impact. In five hundred words, you won’t be able to say it all, but you should be able to highlight a few powerful moments that reveal your character. You should not worry whether there is a “right” or “wrong” story, but should instead focus on the broad statement that you are making about yourself.
Remember, the admissions officer reading your file will likely have read hundreds of others – you should carefully consider your introductory sentence and attempt to launch into an anecdote, so that you can maintain seize and maintain the reader’s interest. A long “wind up” of an introduction will make a visceral connection to your story much more challenging.
Optional Essay
Is there any further information that you wish to provide to the Admissions Committee? (Please use this space to provide an explanation of any areas of concern in your academic record or your personal history.)
Optional essays are not the place to paste in a strong essay from another school or offer a few anecdotes that just did not fit in with your other essays. Optional essays are in fact the place to address any lingering questions that an admissions officer may have about your candidacy that have not yet been addressed – a poor grade or overall GPA, a low GMAT score, a gap in your work experience, etc. Via the mbaMission guide to Optional Essays, we offer candidates direction and many examples of brief but effective optional statements which will give you your best opportunity to take on your problem areas.
Reapplication Essay
How have you enhanced your candidacy since your previous application? Please detail your progress since you last applied and reiterate your short-term and long-term goals. Explain how the tools of the Columbia Business School will help you to meet your goals and how you plan to participate in the Columbia community. (Recommended 750 word limit).
Whether you have improved your academic record, received a promotion, begun a new and exciting project, increased your community involvement or taken on a personal challenge of sorts, the key to this essay is conveying a very deliberate path of achievement. CBS wants to know that you have been actively striving to improve and that you have seized opportunities during the previous year to do so, because you feel a CBS MBA is vital to your future success. While CBS asks you to reiterate your goals, you should not feel that you must stick with the goals stated in the past. If you have sincerely reflected and reconsidered your goals, you can discuss that path of exploration and your process of refining your goals to meet your personal needs.
As a reapplicant, you have already been “stung” once, but you should not assume that there was something badly deficient and that this is your opportunity to right that wrong. So, remember, this essay should not all be about you to the exclusion of everything else – CBS still wants a thorough “Why CBS?” and a discussion of your contribution to the community. We would suggest dedicating at least half of your essay to these topics.
Read the full article: Columbia University (Columbia Business School) Essay Analysis , 2010-2011