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Winning MBA Admission Tips with Atul Jose

Winning MBA Admission Tips with Atul Jose

著者： Atul Jose
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 Winning MBA Admission Tips with Atul JoseCopyright F1GMAT Consulting
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  • Use Multiple Identities in your M7 MBA Essays

    Use Multiple Identities in your M7 MBA Essays
    2025/09/06
    If you've noticed how late night talk show hosts use Segues to transition away from a light-hearted moment from the guest's life, to promoting the guest’s movie or music or book or a show, see how they transition?Learn from Talk-Show HostsIt could be a smooth transition with something like, “ Speaking of explosions, this movie had 200 explosions”Or Speaking of swear words, this movie has over 100 swear words.Or speaking of dictators, you are playing a dictator in this movie.There are multiple ways in which late night talk show hosts transition their conversation.Essays - It's All about Leaning into Multiple IdentitiesIn a visual medium like a late night talk show, you have the advantage of observing through a video format and listening through an audio format. In an essay, where the first impression and the last impression is dependent on what you write, it is all about leaning into your identities while using segues.Look at how people interact in social media.I would not recommend that you spend a lot of time in X or Facebook or in some Forum, fighting with some strangers. But at least observe how people interact. I do that and immediately, I see the discussion pivot to a judgment of the person’s primary identity.It's not a bug. It's a feature.We are tuned to identities that motivate a person and the incentive structure based on which the person is communicatingSegues and Multiple IdentitiesWhen you write essays and use segues, understand this fundamental human tendency to cling on to an identity.What are the identities by which we most relate to?For women applicants, I have noticed how they strategically share the societal barriers in regions where they can’t freely express their thoughts or lead an initiative.Their sex as an identity is used against them.Such narratives get immediate attention. But again, if you lean too much into one identity, it becomes challenging to stand out in essays.The second identity that you all know is around gender. That's the most controversial identity, right now in political discourse.Again like what women applicants are facing in terms of competition, if you lean too much into your LGBTQ+ identity in essays, your chances of standing out from other LGBTQ+ applicants go down dramatically.You have to find a secondary identity before using segues in your essays.The third identity is your nationality.Most top schools are in the US and the UK, and the overwhelming identity in universities are left or left-leaning.You cannot use a nationality-based essay narrative.Same with the 4th identity that is your political ideology.You can’t highlight the talking points of the extreme left or the right in your essays.Universal Values - Include them as Part of your IdentitiesFocus on universally accepted values of inclusion, integrity, humility and humanity.The fifth and the most important identity by which you will be judged, typecast or shortlisted for interviews is based on your professional identity.The disadvantage of leaning too much into your professional identity is that there are several stereotypes in each profession.A technologist might be stereotyped as someone with low social skills.A finance professional might be stereotyped as someone who is unethical.There are several implicit biases against professional identities.You should be aware of it, and choose examples accordingly, before seguing from one identity to the other.That is why schools really look into your extracurricular and volunteering experiences.They want to learn how you interact with others in the community, with different age groups, different incentives, different education levels, and collaborated with people from different political ideologies.Moving Beyond your Primary IdentityHave you shown evidence of going beyond your primary identity and find uniting motivations.Recently, I was approached by a client.Her winning strategy for other schools was to lean into her professional identity. And it worked for other schools because it was on AI and its transformative value in disbursing loans and in offering value added services for the underserved in American cities.But for Stanford, I had to dig deep into her story and found that she also has a venture with her family where she's was helping women beneficiaries in rural healthcare where traditional health services can’t reach.For Stanford’s open-ended essay, it was important that we show her skill set in multiple contexts and not just be a woman engineer working in banking. This was a great differentiating factor 5 to 10 years back when there were not enough women graduates. But right now, women are graduating at a higher level than men.I advised her to highlight many more identities.And her first response was that – “So I should show that I am woke?”This is not about exaggeration or showing your empathy in an exaggerated manner. It is about highlighting your multiple identities so that you are not stereotyped into any one particular ...
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    7 分
  • A shortcut for writing Authentic MBA Essays - Sense Memory

    A shortcut for writing Authentic MBA Essays - Sense Memory
    2025/08/26
    I have been procrastinating to create this video for the past 15 years.When I work with clients for essay editing, the one thing I always wanted to share is about ‘finding’ an authentic emotion before writing the essay.In my volumes goals video, I have shared how it is all about writing a lot before finding one’s authentic voice.An authentic voice is different from reaching an emotional state before capturing one’s authentic emotion.This is a concept popular among actors.If you notice the greatest actors. In my books – Philip Seymour Hoffman and Daniel Day-Lewis, why do we feel that they are not acting?They pursued a technique called Emotional Memory.Emotional Memory is finding a similar memory as the character is experiencing and then expressing it authentically for the camera.In essay writing, where you have to write about failures, traumas, and setbacks, if you don’t go back to that emotional memory, the writing will turn into a commentary.There is a huge difference between reflective writing and commentary.The first draft of many of my clients is a commentary about their ‘hard’ times. It is not coming from an authentic place.I ask them to go back to that moment, and they come back with overly emotional lines.This is not what I mean by Emotional Memory.It is to find a place in your memory where the details are vivid.I, as a reviewer and editor, should feel that you have lived that moment.And it can only come from a place of genuine reflection.A shortcut to reaching an emotional state that reflects the event is to match the event to your day-to-day mood.In a 5-day workweek, there would be days in which you won’t be happy.A client or a supervisor wasn’t happy with your output.A deadline was missed.A promotion that you anticipated didn’t happen.When you are feeling low, write about failures, a weakness, or a trauma.This emotional state will help you find expressions, phrases, or words that match the emotional state you are writing about.Now, you can’t wait endlessly to have a bad day.There is another shortcut to reach that state, which actors call sense memory.If you are writing about an event 5 years back, play the popular songs from that year.If your memory is associated with a restaurant, cafe, or a place in your city, try to travel to that location.Go back to your phone and browse through the photos from that year.Our mind has something called “Associative Memory” that helps us recall the emotion.If the memory is negative, we remember the ‘central event’ but forget most of the details.This is our way of coping with the negative event.So, to reflect and write about the negative event, you have to stay in that emotional state and ask some fundamental questions like:1) What was the triggering event2) What was the hurtful incident?3) What was the hurtful comment?4) What was the change in perspective you had after the event?5) What life lesson do you still carry now from that event?Once you ask these 5 questions, you will expand on the central event with details.It is the details that improve a narrative.A person obsessed about impressing his overbearing millionaire father went to a great extent to scale his startup.One such funding round led to a collaboration with an investor, who found a loophole and fired him out of his own startup.His reflection was not just about the person who did harm to his dreams. He went deep into his own motivations.In a weird way, the essay was a theme on the competition between the father and son – a theme I haven’t read much in essays.Many of you will not find the emotional state to write about the negative event because the event was too far down the memory lane.That is one reason i recommend that clients limit reflections to the past 3-5 years.If you have to go back more than 5 years, it should be something extremely rare and memorable that left a permanent mark in your life.These are tragic events like losing parents, an identity crisis, or an interaction that revealed a truth about the world.So, to summarize:1) Find a similar emotional state as you had experienced, before writing about the event in an essay2) If you can’t reach the emotional state, use sense memory or artifacts from the year to capture the details.For any help brainstorming, editing, and reviewing your essays, reach out to me through F1GMAT’s contact form
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  • For a 250-500 word essay- Do you have to write 700, 1000 or even 2000 words?

    For a 250-500 word essay- Do you have to write 700, 1000 or even 2000 words?
    2025/08/24
    When you start writing your MBA and Master’s application essay drafts, the first thing that you have to figure out is “how much writing is enough?For a 250-500 word essay, do you have to write 700 or 1000 or even 2000 words?What is the process of writing a Winning application essay?It depends on three scenarios.The first scenario is your writing experience.Scenario 1 - Writing ExperienceI was in the technology industry before starting F1GMAT and pivoting to writing, consulting, and editing services. So i empathise with engineers and bankers who are struggling to capture their authentic voice.Even before starting F1GMAT, I used to have a popular blog. People who i didn’t even expect to read it used to read my posts. And when I entered the office, they would come personally and appreciate my observations.Applicants with Writing ExperienceLike me, if you have any writing experience, writing blogs, journals, or essays for a school magazine, you don’t have to worry about writing 2000 words for a 250 to 500-word essay.But if you have no experience in writing, you have to seriously think about volume goals.When clients reach out to me, the first request many have for me is to write lines for them.I immediately share a perspective that you should be aware of.Schools read essays in hundreds. They are aware of essays that are written by professional writers.Editing and helping clients with essays is different from writing essays.In F1GMAT’s editing process, I do add a few phrases and lines that improve the applicant’s expressions, but most of the writing is done by the applicant.It is the line-by-line comments that help them understand the fundamentals of storytelling.If you need my help, reach out to me through F1GMAT’s contact form For applicants from a marketing background or those who have some experience writing, there are a few volume goals that you have to keep in mind.First, for a 250-word essay, use a 2x target or a 500-word draft as your volume goal.This is because many times, when you first start writing a school application essay, you are just exploring one thought, and it might not cover all the bases.Even Drafts Need Word LimitAs a new writer, when you explore one thought, you will write a lot of backstory around that one event. If you go by some strict word limit while drafting your essay, you might not fully capture the emotions and motivation around that event.For a 500-word essay, the target word count should be somewhere between 1000 to 1200 words. Now, why do you need such kind of a structure?Isn’t it better just to write freely?Even I have recommended writing freely, but over the years, what I have seen is that if you write freely without any word limit, you start bringing contexts and irrelevant events into the narrative.Then, it becomes a big challenge to come back into a frame of mind where you are writing authentically from a core emotion.Risk of One-Event Focus I have also seen scenarios where the client felt that one childhood event was critical for the development of their worldview. So they would suggest we spend a lot of words on that one particular event.The risk when you allocate most of your words to one event in draft essays is that what you consider to be a unique event might not be unique.Your competitors might also quote such events.An experienced consultant and editor like me have seen this happen quite a lot.For example, during the pandemic, the underlying theme for all applicants was how they were useful when the world was shut down.The narrative was fine-tuned to make themselves the hero. And to be honest, from 10-15 essays, i would say 2-3 were genuine contributions. The rest were all just trying to brand themselves as heroes in a catastrophic world event.If you go into the writing process with such a preconceived notion of which event has better branding, you will waste your time on the wrong event.In some applicants, there is a lack of self-awareness.Match Essay Example with your First ImpressionI worked with a client who was doing incredible cross-cultural collaboration in three time zones, and when asked to write about inclusivity, she shortlisted a college collaboration that felt too trivial. I had to be diplomatic in revealing that what she cited didn’t match the first impression the admissions team would have about her.The example didn’t match up to her ‘image’.All the examples in your essays should match that first impression.Scenario 2 - Writing StyleThe second scenario where you have to think about volume goals is your writing style.I have worked with clients who are extremely careful not to express too much. They are measuring how they structure each sentence.This is good if you have experience in writing.This is what I do.Power of One-Paragraph Writing and EditingI use a one-paragraph writing, one-paragraph editing strategy, where I write one paragraph freely, read it back 2-3 times, and then ask myself – is it too revealing? ...
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    10 分
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