How to Write a Leadership Essay for MBA Admissions Abroad
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The business schools (B-Schools) offering Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs look for qualities of initiative, leadership, team spirit, ability to work under pressure, time and people management, problem-solving skills, adaptability, and tolerance for diversity among others in their prospective students. To ensure these abilities, the B-Schools require applicants to write essays on various topics/ prompts that bring out their personalities.
More often than not, admission essays are asked as a part of MBA admission applications by reputed MBA universities or B-schools abroad. The total number of essays may vary from one to five. Also, while the actual questions may differ, they can be clubbed under broad categories or personality traits that the universities are looking for in their applicants. Universities abroad, especially for their MBA program, want to pick the people who are the best fit for their ideologies. As such, it becomes important for them to look at certain personality traits and markers, and one of the most often searched for is – Leadership.
Most of the top-tier universities abroad lay a premium on the ‘leadership’ ability of the candidate. After all, they are being trained to be future leaders of organizations and the business world. Thus, the top-tier universities abroad have a keen eye for recognizing traits of leadership in applicants, so that the foundation is already there for them to build upon. The verbiage of the prompts could vary, however, the intent, which is to find students with leadership qualities, remains the same.
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- Importance of Vocabulary in your Admission Essay
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- Word Limit and Essays: How important are they
Before we learn how to write a leadership essay for MBA admissions abroad, let us look at a few leadership questions that universities abroad ask:
- If we were to admit one more student to the class of 2012, make a compelling argument as to why that student should be you? (300 words max)
- Describe an experience where, working in a team as a member or leader, you successfully managed to deal with a challenge posed by the diversity of the group. (Maximum 500 words)
- Discuss why you are interested in pursuing an MBA at this point in your career (250 words), why this university, and the specific program to which you have applied, is the best fit for your MBA experience (250 words), and discuss how you will leverage both your professional and academic experiences thus far to achieve your post-MBA career goals (250 words).
- Leadership and ethics are inevitably intertwined in the business world. Describe a situation in which you have dealt with these issues and how they have influenced you. (250 words)
Let us discuss how to write a leadership essay for MBA admissions abroad:
- Choose an example: You may discuss a personal, academic, or professional space, where you worked in a team situation and displayed your leadership skills. Use concrete examples and details.
- Focus on your role: The incident could be a challenging situation in terms of handling a diverse team, a project with a stringent deadline, an offshore assignment, or any other. It may be a small incident, but what is important is how you handled it and the leadership qualities that you demonstrated.
- Define your style of leadership: Your style of leading a team/ group is also crucial – leading from the front, empathy, sharing appreciation with the team, motivating and mentoring the team, innovation, good listening skills, ensuring maximum participation of the team in everything, being approachable, and other such aspects. Also, reflect on how your leadership style has evolved and what you have learnt.
- Be authentic: Your content should be authentic and not copied from somewhere else. The admissions committee (Ad Com) will know if the content is fabricated or plagiarized.
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How to Write a Leadership Essay for MBA Admissions Abroad - FAQs
Q. What are some basic leadership traits that one can choose to discuss in MBA essays?
A. Leadership is a broad term, which encompasses many qualities. Some basic traits of a leader are: good communication, people management, goal-orientation, initiative, empathy, motivating the team, sharing knowledge and appreciation with the team, keeping a positive attitude, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of team members, good inter-personal skills and so on.
Q. What kind of leadership experiences can one share if there are not many professional examples to talk about in the leadership essay for MBA admissions abroad?
A. The leadership instances do not necessarily have to come from your professional life. Some applicants are comparatively new in their field and do not have much to talk about. However, one can always go back and see if in college life there have been instances where one has taken an initiative to organize/conduct an event, led a team/group, started a club, impacted the community by taking some important steps and galvanized others, taken care of the family when a parent was seriously ill or out of job, and many others. You basically need to reflect on how you have been a leader in your own right.
Q. How to write a leadership essay for MBA admissions abroad?
A. To write a leadership essay for MBA admissions abroad, you must keep the requirements of the university/program in mind and align your values with those of the university. You must select a strong instance of leadership that you may have demonstrated in your life and then discuss the situation, challenges, your role in it, leadership qualities that you displayed, and the impact of your leadership on the team/ project. Adhere to the word limit specified and answer each part of the prompt adequately.
Q. What kind of leadership questions can I expect? Please share a sample prompt where I can learn how to write a leadership essay for MBA admissions abroad.
A. Given below is a prompt from Stanford University, which basically intends to gauge your leadership abilities:
Prompt: Tell us about a time when you built or developed a team whose performance exceeded expectations.
Outline of the essay:
- Describe an incident/anecdote which shows the outcome of your efforts at creating a team, either in your job or college, or extracurricular life.
- You could begin with a description of the team which you created, in order to create an impact straightaway.
- Next, go back to the time when you were first faced with the requirement, and describe it.
- You need to show not only that your team met the requirements, but that it went beyond and above them. Hence, outline expectations that were lesser than what your team actually achieved.
- Talk about the challenges to your leadership, and how you tackled and overcame them, systematically. You could pick out challenges in people-management, circumstances, and logistics.
- Finally, reiterate your brilliant results, and emphasize how your team went beyond expectations.
- Devote two-three lines to the learning from the experience.
After applying to Hertfordshire University UK, the applicants are going to receive an initial decision about their application within 2-3 working days. After the submission of the application and documents, the applicants are required to pay their tuition deposit. Then, complete the Sponsorship interview and the financial declaration. International students are required to pay a deposit of £5,000 before registration. The balance can be paid in line with the liability dates related to the year and entry of the semester.
International students coming from diverse backgrounds must prove their English language proficiency by submitting the scores of IELTS, PTE, and Duolingo at Hertfordshire University. The university demands an IELTS score of 6 from the students. Along with the IELTS scores, students can refer to the table below for all the required English proficiency score:
English language test | Minimum Score required UG | Minimum Score required PG |
|---|---|---|
6 or above | 6 or above | |
59 or above | 58 or above | |
105 or above | 120 or above |
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The University of the West of Scotland has five modern and diverse campuses in United Kingdom. The University has welcomed more than 3,000 international students which are representing 1/3 of the globe. They also have 130 European partners who are actively in global study and exchange options through the Commonwealth universities programmes. The University also offers study abroad opportunities for UWS who are eligible for the same and also have more than 20 transnational education partners worldwide which helps them deliver UWS Bachelors and Masters Degrees around the world.