EssaySnark has designed our MBA admissions consulting services to allow you to buy only those that you feel are specifically useful to your application development process.
Yet sitting here at the middle of December with about one month left before Round 2, you’re likely looking not only at the price tag, but also the efficiency factor. Can you leverage admissions consulting now, when there’s so little time to go before deadline?
The answer is absolutely yes, especially the way things work around here.
The next question then is, which service gives you the most bang for your buck?
We have some recommendations based on the most popular schools we see BSers trying for, and which of our services is best suited to get you further. This is the targeted approach to your apps!
Your first significant question of course is, where are you at in your process?
If it’s your very first school, then you’re laying out the infrastructure for your content strategy. That means attending to the essentials that your target school cares about.
As we discussed in our recent post on which schools focus on MBA career goals in their app reviews, then nailing down your short-term goal, your long-term goal, and how you’re prepared for pursuing them, is absolutely critical.
Recommended service for defining your goals: The Career Goals App Accelerator
It includes a lengthy tutorial on what schools care about and what they look for, and how to work through your ideas for the goals, and then two rounds of personalized feedback on the goals you come up with. You hear about what doesn’t work as goals and why, potential showstopper mistakes that we see all the time, how to handle goals as a career changer, the timeframe the schools expect you to talk about, and more.
You might have thought we were going to say “S/T goal, L/T goal, and why MBA” in that sentence above — but no. That “why MBA” part is one of the most straightforward to handle, once you have your short-term goal well established. If you’ve done a good job defining that near-term post-MBA target, then it’s self-evident why you need an MBA to pursue it. You’ll still want to connect those dots when you write your essay, but it’s going to be an obvious thing that you’re proposing, that the adcom will be able to buy into.
(Warning for many of you, based on what we’re seeing in droves this season: Your task is not to impress the admissions reviewer with how ambitious your post-MBA goals are!)
Or, if you’re planning on using business school to launch a company, or want to be an entrepreneur later on, then you’ll want to leverage the advice in our Career Goals Starting Point Guide: Pitching Entrepreneurial Goals to the MBA Adcom. Given the popularity of pitching entrepreneurship in apps, it’s really easy to end up sounding like everybody else when you toss out your idea to start a business someday — and that means you’re presenting in a less-effective way. Study that guide and see how the stronger entrepreneurially-focused MBA apps are aligned!
If you’re pitching a career-goals focused school, then the aforementioned Career Goals App Accelerator will help you develop the core content you need for something like half of your application. A school like NYU? Or Booth? Or many others? Yeah totally, for those, this App Accelerator will basically get you your main essay done.
Not all schools are super focused on goals as part of the essays, though, so that might not be your wisest choice if you’re looking to maximize the assist for app development for a target like maybe MIT Sloan or HBS or possibly Stanford. It’s not that goals don’t matter in your pursuit of an MBA at those places; it’s just that those schools are looking way more at YOU and what you bring to the table, rather than some fancy schmancy goals statements you may dream up to write in an essay.
Recommended service for identifying your core leadership and impact examples for like, you know, Harvard or wherever: The Accomplishments & Achievements App Accelerator
The beauty of the Accomplishments App Accelerator is how long its legs are: Not only are you going to need those nuggets, examples, and soundbites in your essays, but guess what? You’ll need them on your resume, and you’ll totally totally totally need them when you go into the interview.
We want to say that the Accomplishments App Accelerator can serve you for every single school — and, because of the universal need to showcase your leadership and impact in pretty much any application, it can. However, if you’re looking at bang-for-your-buck on essay content alone, then given this year’s essay questions, we’d suggest the Accomplishments App Accelerator to probably be most useful for Kellogg, Tuck, MIT, Harvard, Stanford for sure with their “impact” questions,
Or another direction to go in: If you feel like you have a handle on what stories you want to use in your essays but aren’t really sure how to structure them or if the ideas you identified are going to be truly workable in response to the questions, the Essay Ideas App Accelerator can totally set you up for success! Not only do you get those ideas reviewed in detail, against the actual school you’re targeting and what we’re seeing in the competition for that school this season, and what that school is looking for in applicants, and within the context of your profile (core stats, resume)… You also get guidelines on how to actually structure these essays before you try putting the ideas down on the page!
It’s one of our most overlooked services, yet it can truly be a game-changer.
Go through the Essay Ideas App Accelerator before writing your first drafts on a school like Kellogg, Tuck, Stanford, or Wharton especially, and you’re potentially shaving hours and hours or even entire days off your essay development process. It lets you be way more efficient, because you’re figuring out if your ideas are viable before sweating over full drafts of writing. It’s much easier psychologically to drop an idea at that stage than it is when you have a full 500-word essay built out. It lets you avoid major mistakes, and gives you much-needed feedback at a more upstream part of your process.
Recommended service for structuring your ideas and vetting the proposed answers to essay questions — before you write essays (especially for your first school project!!): The Essay Ideas & Outlines App Accelerator
For schools with hard essays? Like UC-Berkeley, or Kellogg, or Tuck? You can make your life easier by front-loading the vetting of where you are headed and giving yourself a chance to course-correct at the stage when that’s easiest done.
However, we can predict with almost 100% certainty that your resume is not currently optimized for your MBA apps. If you want one service that will pay off for EVERY SINGLE APP you develop, the Reworking Your Resume App Accelerator is the top pick.
Obviously our Essay Decimator essay review services are the true workhouse, the very best service of all to understand if the work you’re producing is of a high-enough quality, that the message you’re trying to convey is being carried as it will need to be, in order for the ideas you’re pitching your school and the evidence you’re presenting for why you belong there will be sufficient for them to accept you. We recommend using the Essay Decimator on either the school you’re most in love with, to maximize your opportunities with the favoritist place; OR your first school project regardless of which school it is — which shouldn’t necessarily be dictated only by which has the soonest deadlines! What school you write for first is a significantly strategic choice based on complexity of their questions and what stage you’re in on the learning curve for writing essays. We make suggestions for this personalized to you in the Comprehensive Profile Review if you’re looking for input like that.
We also combine most of the above services into a very cost-effective Complete Essay Package — and yes there’s still time, sitting here right here today, for you to start that process and finish it before the Round 2 deadlines are here! Besides that it breaks down your work into more manageable and focused bite-sized chunks, you also get preferential turnaround times when you submit stuff in SnarkCenter — and the value of that is going to be increasing massively as things get busier here in Snarkville. (Speedy Review can always be added to any submission waiting for feedback in the EssaySnark Review Queue if timing gets tight and you want stuff back quicker! Including for feedback on a weekend or holiday. See the Subscriber’s FAQ in SnarkCenter for details if interested.)
Honestly though, if you buy just one thing from EssaySnark, we’d suggest picking up the essay guide written for your target school. Study it! There is so much in those guides that we cannot reproduce in these posts here on the blahg. You are getting our past experiences in working with literally hundreds of others who’ve tried for the exact school you are targeting. Useful and practical, with lots of insights you won’t find anywhere else, all packaged up in a single place for you to reference throughout this heavy-lifting phase of your essay development.
Bottom line: You still have time to leverage resources!! Heck, there could even (maybe) be time to get a freebie essay review of one of your drafts posted here on the blahg! Check out the contact page for information on that if you’re curious.
The other bottom line: Let’s do this thing! We’re here to help and now it’s just about where and how you want to get started! And if you choose not to use our services, that’s totally fine too, but please get started now!!!
Tell us what you think.