This is pure career-goals gold.
Not sure how we discovered this little gem, but tucked away at this Google Docs link is pretty much everything you need to think through your career goals for an essay to business school. (Here it is Berkeley Haas: Career Goals Brainstorming Guide” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>stashed on the essaysnark server in case that other link ever goes dead.)
We stumbled across this in something like 2017 and kept meaning to share it with BSers at an opportune time, and now seems to be that time! Since we know lots of you are slowly starting to think about Round 2 and there are a number of you considering what may have gone sideways for Round 1 and how to fix it. And often, not-great career goals can be a reason for being turned away.
If you do a good job in working through these questions, and you’re able to identify clear, concise, yet comprehensive answers — with details! — to the aspects of your plan for your post-MBA future, and those answers are rational and realistic, then you will guaranteed have a good platform from which to pitch yourself for Berkeley Haas in their application and interview — and the same goes for many other schools, too.
Career goals seem to have been de-emphasized among top business schools over the past five or six years, with many admissions committees removing their traditional “why MBA” type essay question from their list of requirements. But that does not mean that certain schools don’t still want to know why you are interested in getting this degree, and what you plan to do with it.
Berkeley is one of those schools.
Columbia is too.
So is Tuck, and NYU Stern, and also Michigan Ross, and UCLA, and Duke, and well yeah lots of ’em.
Heck, you do a good job on that, you don’t even need our Career Goals App Accelerator.
Kinda silly for us to post you this ain’t it?
Well, that proves how much we just want all of you BSers out there to succeed, don’t it. 😉
(Though obv there’s value to the stuff we sell, too!!! Like getting FEEDBACK!! Personalized and specific to YOU. Which is really the key to the kingdom of admissions success.)
And of course, once you’ve identified these important parameters of what your goals actually are, then you’ll need to put those plans together on the page in a compelling way that makes sense to your reader with enough background info to show that you’ll be successful. And you’ll want to (in most cases) insert a detail or two on how their school specifically will set you up with the goodies you need to catapult yourself into that new destiny (in some cases, the bulk of your essay will be that aspect; it varies by school and by prompt).
So the Essay Decimator may still be a worthwhile investment to make — especially after you have worked through the brainstorming guide from Haas. Taking an open mind to the feedback received from the ‘Snark and adopting our advice into your work can show real results. If you start out with “B quality” essays coming into the decimator process, then we can offer ever more sophisticated feedback on your content strategy, and you can get to “A quality” essays that can truly stand out from the crowd. (Most people start with “C quality” or worse, though, and the quality of the end product reflects the amount of reflection and willingness to learn that goes into the process.)
Of course, studying the resources here on the blahg also can be so helpful! There are more posts in the ‘snarchive under Career Goals than any other topic, and if that list is overwhelming, then check out the subtopics like career changer and specific post-MBA target industries like consulting (the full set of categories can be viewed from the dropdown menu at the top right column of the main page of the site).
The other helpful task is to talk to people. Informally, or more formally, through informational interviews Hit up mentors, friends, your dad’s golfing buddies, the CEO of your company, anyone you can, and ask about why they’ve pursued their current profession, what they like about it, what advice they can offer for someone earlier in their career (that’s you!). Nuggets of wisdom are likely to be uncovered in unexpected places.
Like lurking on some Google Docs drive, courtesy of a great bschool, that obviously wants its applicants to succeed! (Just like we do. 🙂 )
So, go for it, BSer, and find out what your future career may hold! We can’t wait to see the goals you construct and how you are pitching them to your schools.
Tell us what you think.