MBA Application Short Answers

In this episode of the mbaMission podcast, Harold Simansky and Gavriella Semaya discuss the importance of the short answer section in MBA applications. They emphasize that the short answers are not just a repetition of the information in the resume, but an opportunity to showcase the impact and significance of the applicant's experiences. They also discuss how to approach short-term and long-term career goals in the limited space provided. Overall, the conversation highlights the need to make the short answers interesting and compelling to capture the attention of the admissions committee.

Takeaways

• The short answer section of MBA applications is surprisingly important and should not be left to the last minute.
• Short answers should focus on the impact and significance of the applicant's experiences, rather than simply repeating information from the resume.
• When describing job responsibilities, highlight the how and the impact, rather than just the what.
• For early-career professionals, focus on the influence and contributions made within a project or team, even if the direct impact is not clear.
• Avoid exaggerating or overemphasizing the significance of certain experiences, as admissions committees can see through it.
• Short answers should be coherent with the rest of the application and should make the applicant interesting and compelling to the admissions committee.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to the mbaMission podcast
• 0:41 The importance of short answers in MBA applications
• 2:06 Showcasing impact in the short answers
• 4:50 Distinguishing factors in your work experience
• 6:15 Presenting your contributions authentically
• 8:58 Communicating career goals
• 10:10 The Why vs. The What
• 11:13 Final thoughts on MBA application short answers

Transcript

Harold Simansky (00:11)
Hi, this is Harold Simansky Senior MBA Admissions Consultant here at mbaMission. And you're here at the mbaMission podcast with my colleague, Gavriella Semaya. Hi, Gavi Good, how's everything with you?

Gavriella Semaya (00:23)
Hi, Harold, how are you doing? Good, good, enjoying the summer so far.

Harold Simansky (00:28)
Yeah, me as well, me as well. Though maybe when people listen to this, it'll be winter. And we can at least remind them summer used to be. No, no, that's true. That's very, very true. On that note, I actually want to talk to you about something that people don't really pay much attention to and is surprisingly important. And that's the short answer part of the applications. So.

Gavriella Semaya (00:34)
Fair point. Fair point. Not exactly beach listening.

Harold Simansky (00:55)
Honestly for a long time I didn't pay much attention to them and then I at some point I learned just how important they are so God

Gavriella Semaya (01:02)
Yeah, I think I underestimated them when I was applying, certainly. Now I know better.

Harold Simansky (01:05)
Yes, yeah, no question about it. And Gabi, I know you have some thoughts about this and I would love to hear just how you approach the short answers now and at least what's your overall strategy around them.

Gavriella Semaya (01:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the first point that you mentioned is the most critical. I think people tend to leave this to the last minute. They think it's the same as kind of filling out the form, entering your basic biographical information. But it's really not. I think of it as an integral part of the application. And to me, the whole application is a puzzle. And so it's not just what stories are you going to tell, but where are you going to make the most of them? Where are you going to?

maximize this bit of information. And so the short answer is, I think another kind of default assumption is that you can just kind of copy your resume over, right? Because they're asking you to describe your job, they're asking you to describe your extracurriculars, but they already have that information. And so what new can you tell them in the short answers? That's kind of the fundamental approach.

Harold Simansky (02:05)
Yep, that makes sense. And I guess my question is, what new can you tell them in a short time?

Gavriella Semaya (02:10)
Fair, fair question. So, you know, I think if the resume is just kind of the highlight reel of here's the accomplishment, right, the job description is a little bit more around what you do day to day, but you know, you want to make it as interesting as possible. So, you know, you could mention something like, you know, prepare financial models as needed, but focus on, again, like try to focus on the impact more, I think.

particularly when you're describing these different aspects of your job, you have limited space. You've got 200 characters or something like that. There is an element of picking and choosing, right? You don't have to include every responsibility under the sun, everything you've ever done. So what are the biggest impact items and how this is kind of where you talk about the how a little bit, right? So if you're leading meetings regularly with stakeholders, that's not necessarily something you would put on the resume.

but it is something you could include here to showcase a little bit more of the sort of the under the hood aspect of it.

Harold Simansky (03:16)
Yeah, that makes sense. One thing that we always talk about with a resume is this notion of impact. I've always felt this tension in terms of, well, you sort of have to tell them what you're doing and a lot of things impact, particularly for an analyst. Someone who may be early in their career just isn't so clear. Like, how do you approach that? How do you even think about what impact looks like when you're only making it?

Gavriella Semaya (03:22)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, there's not always a linear connection between your work and a result, especially if you're earlier in your career, right? You're more of a contributor. But I try to think about how it influenced the bigger picture. So you can say things like contributing to a follow on contract with the client or support at a work stream. But wherever possible, I try to think about the result, if not on the end kind of deliverable, then on your team.

What kind of contributions were you providing there? Were you ideating different things? Were you, you know, even if you're not necessarily driving that meeting, were you a part of the brainstorming session? So, you know, it's a little bit trickier when you're earlier on, and I think that speaks to one of the reasons why applying when you've got a few more years under your belt is beneficial. You have more to speak to, both in the application and when you're at business school, and you know, you have more to kind of offer in terms of your insights. But...

Yeah, it's definitely tricky. I think you still have to have that same lens. You can also focus on the complexity of what you're doing and the difficulty. If there's a high bar as an analyst to what you're doing, there's still value in that, right? Even if you can't necessarily directly show impact.

Harold Simansky (04:51)
You and I will probably over the course of any season work with one, five, ten, whatever it is, McKinsey, Bain, BCG analysts. I mean, probably the biggest group of people apply to business school. In the past, how have you seen one distinguish themselves from another?

Gavriella Semaya (04:59)
Yes.

I think what I try to do is focus less on the things that any associate consultant, early stage consultant would do. So everybody's leading a work stream at some point, right? But what in that work stream is distinct. And so I usually frame it in terms of projects and think about the context of the project. What was the ultimate goal and what were you contributing in that sense? So it's a little bit, focus less on the...

I prepared the reports and so on and more about the strategy that you might have brought forth or if you were driving client relationships if you're client facing in any way. So it's always about also the breadth of your experience. If you're a consultant and you're working on multiple projects, show that. So think about if you have to pick out of your eight projects and you're showcasing, you're selecting a few on the resume, think about those that either...

really speak to your goal if you're moving in a particular direction or that speak to kind of the diversity of your experience in that sense. So if you've been across industries or across functions, highlight that.

Harold Simansky (06:15)
Yup. How important and I have my own thoughts about this in terms of we will frequently have clients who say I've worked on the biggest &A deal of all time. Yeah or I I've really just managed an analyst I guess from well I'll get to sort of my thoughts which is yes really impressive transactions are meaningful.

Gavriella Semaya (06:24)
Yes.

Yeah.

Harold Simansky (06:43)
particularly if the admissions committee member has heard about them. At the same point, there's this expectation that the bigger the transaction, the smaller your role. So, yeah, yeah.

Gavriella Semaya (06:52)
Exactly. And I think admissions committees see through that, right? They're not, you know, they might not be experts in the field. They might not have, you know, finance experience themselves, but they've seen enough of these to understand that if you're a second year, you know, analyst, odds are you're not the person driving the deal, right? And so I think it reflects more poorly to insinuate that you are than to talk about your contributions or maybe what you learned from it, right?

I think those are kind of that's where the value is, is okay, this was high stakes, but let's not have any illusions about your role there. And there's nothing negative about that, right? No one's expecting a second year analyst to be the one driving this deal.

Harold Simansky (07:35)
Right, no, that makes sense. And I'll tell you, we can play this little game here in terms of things that our clients have said on their resumes or before they worked with us, things that our clients have said on their resumes or in short answers that just make no sense at all. It's the old, again, largest merger of all time that they were client facing and they're the ones who actually put the two merging. Exactly right.

Gavriella Semaya (07:50)
haha

Mm -hmm.

Right, I signed on the dotted line. It's my name on the contract. It's my, yeah, totally.

Harold Simansky (08:04)
Exactly. Right. So as you think about sort of more mundane things or an analyst does, how do you phrase something like that? How do you even consider what's important and what isn't?

Gavriella Semaya (08:16)
The first thing is to get at, at least between myself and the client, what's the reality here? I want to know what the reality is because we can build from that rather than trying to start from kind of an impressionist version of what you've done. And so look at the modeling. If it's a small piece of the project, for example, zero in on that. I'd rather have more information about what you did and how you impacted the piece that you were responsible for.

Harold Simansky (08:20)
Yep.

Gavriella Semaya (08:45)
than just know that you participated broadly speaking in this transaction.

Harold Simansky (08:50)
I know that makes sense. Let's talk about what short answers are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so. I think so. Short answers are frequently career goals as well. Short term, long term goal. When you're first talking to a client about what that goal is, how should they even consider it? What should they think about when they have only 50 characters to share or 100 characters to share what those goals might be?

Gavriella Semaya (08:51)
I don't think I answered your question about rephrasing specifically.

Mm -hmm.

So again, for me at least, I start with more. I always want to start with more information so that you can distill it to the most impactful statement, the essence of what it is. You don't need every detail to communicate what you want to do. And so if you're thinking about Columbia's 50 characters, they're not expecting an elaborate statement. They want to understand the function in the industry. When you have a little bit more room, I try to layer on sort of the so what.

piece of it, like to what end do you want to be in financial services or consulting or et cetera. So that's kind of how I break it down initially. And then I think if I remove any of this information, does it still make sense? Right. If you've only got limited characters, everything in there has to add value to the statement.

Harold Simansky (10:08)
That makes sense. That makes sense. And I guess this notion here of, okay, short answers in the application is different from what's in the resume. And if I understand correctly, it's almost like the resume is the facts or the black and white. Short answers is the color. Is that what we're getting at here?

Gavriella Semaya (10:24)
Mm -hmm.

I think so. Yeah, I mean, especially with schools like HBS where they ask you to describe a key accomplishment and key challenge, right? Now, it's not so much that you led this work stream that's the accomplishment, right? It's that you did so when a senior manager was out on leave and you had to step up into this role that was more senior than expected for you, or you did so, you solved a problem with limited information. You highlight the what makes this

noteworthy. It's not so much the what as the, you know, why is this, you know, interesting? So I think of it, you know, you have to go a little bit more surface, below the surface rather.

Harold Simansky (10:59)
Yeah.

No, that makes sense. Great. Any final thoughts or piece of advice that you would say to somebody who comes to you and say, hey, what should I do with the short answers?

Gavriella Semaya (11:22)
first thing, I mean, I do it last typically because I want to know what else I've said elsewhere in the application and I want to make sure it's coherent. But then I also think about, again, like what might we not have spoken about here? And so, you know, or if there's a particular trait that we're trying to emphasize, use it as a tool. Don't think of it as an afterthought that, you know, it's when you think about how the admissions committees are reading it, it comes before the essays in the application. And so you're forming, they're formulating opinions about you as they read it. And I want them to

read through these short answers and think, I want to know more about this person, or this is really interesting, not just, okay, great, this is what they've done. You know, you got to get a little bit under the hood to make someone interesting.

Harold Simansky (12:03)
That makes sense actually. And that's always what we try to do here is make people interested. Right, right. No, I think that's right. And I also tell people everyone's interesting. We just have to get to know you a little bit. Definitely great then. Well, Gavi, thank you very much for joining me today. And I look forward to having you on future mbaMission Podcasts.

Gavriella Semaya (12:08)
Yes, I think that's actually a very good way of summarizing our jobs.

Very true, very true.

Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure.

Thanks, Harold.

Mm -hmm.