You have finally decided to go for a graduate degree, and just about every article you could find on the Internet tells you how cutthroat the application process is. Well, that is true, but you should not let that be a setback for you. Graduate school requires students to work harder than they used to in college—that is if they worked hard at all. For this reason, the admission board or committee takes utmost care in assessing the applicants to make sure that they get the kind of students who can comply with the academic requirements and finish their graduate degrees. While your grades indicated in the transcripts and the exam results exhibit your mental aptitude, these are not sufficient for deciding whether or not you have the determination to push through. With graduate studies, attitude and not just aptitude determines your potential for getting that degree. This is where the recommendation from your mentors and the graduate admission essay come in. If you browse through the Internet for reference materials on graduate school applications, chances are that you will come across a sample graduate school essay or two.
As what you should know by now, the admission essay is a statement of purpose or your intent for pursuing a graduate degree. As such, your essay should indicate what your motivations are, your major influences in life, as well as where your personal development goals are geared toward. Sometimes, even students with the best grades and exemplary writing skills get turned down by universities, because their objectives for getting into a program seem inappropriate. While applicants may not write it openly, the committee can read between the lines and realize that they are pursuing a degree for the wrong reasons, such as being pressured by their parents and bosses, being unhappy with their jobs, or killing time before finding a job. So how do you avoid making the same mistakes? Read a sample graduate school essay which got a thumbs-up from a university with a very selective admission process, and use it as your guide. The motives should state that the degree will enable the applicant to make a significant contribution to his or her community. The guiding principles or philosophy need to show resilience and strong willpower to finish what he or she has started. In addition, the essay must include the applicant's involvement in activities which are relevant to the degree that he or she wishes to pursue. To sum it all up, a clear career path must be evident. First of all, there should not be a mismatch between your personal goals and the objectives of the graduate program. Second, your essay should never show manifestations of a nonchalant, devil-may-care attitude about your career and personal goals. Lastly, you should steer clear of wrong motives or reasons for earning a graduate degree, such as for higher pay or keeping up with other people and their expectations.
Leaders who understand themselves and how they interact with others. Leaders who understand the needs of their organizations and their business environments. Leaders who can drive change through innovation. Leaders who can move their businesses forward. The single aim of the IMD MBA program is to develop these leaders. The program starts with a foundation in the core business courses, e.g. accounting, finance, marketing and operations. This helps you to understand all of the functional areas of the organization and how they work together. It continues with real-world projects and additional courses that allow you to apply what you have learned in the classroom to real leadership situations. The questions have been greatly revised for 2014 admission. The overall spirit of the questions is the same and most have actually had an increase in character count from 1230 to 1500 characters. You have 1500 characters including spaces for each answer, which would be approximately 300-375 words. With 7 questions, that totals somewhere between approximately 2100 and 2500 words, making IMD longer than most US school applications, but of approximately the same length as its biggest rivals, INSEAD and LBS.
What do you consider to be your single most important achievement and why? Achievements reveal your potential to succeed at IMD and afterwords. Achievements reveal your potential for contributing to your classmates. Everyone has had achievements, so make your single most important achievement really stand out. What you consider to be an achievement is a real test of your self-awareness and judgment. The first thing you need to do is brainstorm possible achievements to use here. Your achievement may relate to your professional experience, academics, volunteer activities, hobbies, community engagement, personal matters. The possibilities are quite endless. Whatever it is, you should explain why it is so important. Next, think about the following issues in determining which achievement to use and how to present it. Your achievement needs to reveal valuable thing(s) about you. Some will call these selling points, but more specifically they consist of skills, values, or unique experiences.
One might use a specific achievement to emphasize one’s leadership skills, one’s ethical values, and to explain a significant barrier that was overcome. If you breakdown the meaning of an achievement it might easily reveal multiple important things about you. You may or may not be directly stating this in the essay, but you should think about what how your achievement reveals in terms of your potential. IMD will most certainly be considering how your achievement demonstrates your potential to succeed in their program and afterwords, so you should as well. Just as with potential, think about whether your achievement demonstrates your ability to add value to other students at IMD. IMD is very focused on understanding your ability to function as part of a group of 90 people. This is very much at the center of the education they offer and how how they differentiate their program. If your achievement has made it this far, chances are it is substantial. homepage said, I have three simple tests for determining whether achievement really belongs in this essay. 1. Does IMD really need to know about this achievement? Article was created with Essay Writers.