Analyzing the 2012 Columbia Business School Essays - What Columbia wants you to do.

1. Analyzing the 2012 Columbia
Business School Essays
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2. Analyzing the 2012 Columbia
Business School Essays
Whenever a school releases new essays
questions, it serves as a sort of referendum on
the strategy of the prior year. When a school
moves far away from certain strategies, you
realize that you don't have the DNA of the
school completely wired. When they move
toward your strategies, you know you've been
right on point.

3. Short Answer - What is your post-MBA
professional goal? (Maximum 200 characters.)
We added the underline to "characters" for emphasis,
because we can only imagine how many people will
write 200-word responses to this question.
What Columbia wants you to do here is twofold:
4)give them a thesis for your candidacy, and
5)focus on your short-term goals.
These are two aspects of applying to Columbia that we have
hammered for the past year.

4. Essay 1 –
Considering your post-MBA and long term
professional goals, why are you* pursuing an
MBA at this point in your career? Additionally,
why is Columbia Business School a good fit
for you? (Maximum of 750 words).

5. For Essay #1, this is basically the same as last year. Just because
you bumped out your thesis to the short answer field doesn't mean
you are off the hook in defining your goals again here. Indeed, you
probably won't have properly defined your path in that short
answer, so you really have to immediately pretend the SA doesn't
exist.
Your Essay #1 will need to feature What, Why, How, When, and
Where - the purists' career goals essay. And, as with last year, we
will be putting an emphasis on Columbia's unique desire to see an
alternate career path presented, as well as really stress testing the
'how' or Proof Paragraph, to make sure that transferable skills are
on display - that you leave know doubt at all that you can land that
post-MBA job. As in years past, Essay #1 will be the make-or-
break Columbia essay.
(*We took the liberty of fixing what appears to be a typo in the question prompt.)

6. Essay 2 –
Describe a life experience that has shaped
you. The goal of this essay is to get a sense
of who you are, rather than what you have
achieved professionally.
(Maximum of 500 words.)

7. Essay #2 has been refined from last year, when a very
vague prompt sent candidates scattering in a million
direction.
Again, we feel validated in our approach, which was to
stress one experience or interest and build a theme
around it, rather than just rattle off your resume.
Columbia has further zeroed us all in by asking for a
"life experience," but the big takeaway here is that they
want a story, not a list. Furthermore, it should be fairly
obvious, but this could from your personal life and not
from work.

8. Essay 3 –
Choose from three options ("outrageous
idea," "campaign speech," and "one-on-one
session") (250 words).

9. Essay #3 is a new wrinkle in that it gives three choices, much like
HBS and GSB have provided options in recent years.
For us and our clients, the choice will usually be simple and will
almost always be 3b.
Why? Because we have been hammering "community building"
already. If you have read any of our thoughts on CBS over the
years, you know that Columbia battles both a reality and a
perception that it is a commuter school and - at times - a bit of a
ghost town.
This means that each and every applicant needs to bring some
community building skill to the table and they need to showcase it.
The inclusion of Essay 3b just makes it much easier to do so,
rather than having to weave it into Essay 2.

10. In all, it is great to see everything about the Columbia application
bringing clarity to the experience. The things we suspected are
now up in lights.
This means that the application is even more straight forward, but
it also means that there is less room for error as mistakes are
likely to be punished even more severely than they were last year,
when Columbia already loomed large as a program that had
expectations for "good" essays and was fairly tough on those
candidates who failed in that regard.
If you are just starting out on your admissions journey, email us at
mba@amerasiaconsulting.com to request a free consultation. We are
currently offering some great promotions for Round 1. Additionally, you
can download our free guides for applying to HBS and Columbia.
http://www.amerasiaconsulting.com/