MBA Admissions Tip: HBS Essay #3

A recent poster on the Businessweek B-School Forum asked me for tips on responding to HBS #3:

"Provide a candid assessment of your strengths and weaknesses. (400-word limit) "

The poster correctly commented that he doesn't want to emphasize weaknesses and also doesn't want to use the transparently phony my-weakness-is-the-flip-side-of-my-strength approach."

Here are a few tips:

1. Spend roughly 2/3 of the essay discussing strengths.
2. Do discuss a real weakness and your attempts to compensate for or mitigate it. It is important that the weakness be a real one, because you want to demonstrate here mature self-awareness and self-evaluation.
3. In discussing a weakness you might want to use an example that is a 1-3 years old so you can also show a more recent and improved ability to handle similar situations.
4. You can use this essay to show a different side of your background than you reveal in the other essays.

Comments

[Phil]

Another thought on the weakness thing: use it to show what parts of B-School you're most looking forward to learning from. ("I find that my current management capacity is hampered by an incomplete understanding of the finance-related opportunities (and constraints) that affect the startup business where I currently work. One of the great things I look forward to at Your B School is the opportunity to develop a stronger understanding and perspective of corporate finance, particularly the debt and equity markets as a source for corporate resources.)

Of course, if you're looking for something much funnier, take a look at an employment-related blog from my pal Dave: "I guess I'm just a perfectionist workaholic who doesn't know the meaning of the word 'can't'") http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/2003/12/i_guess_im_just.html

Best wishes to all. Phil M. (Kenan Flagler EMBA '94)

[Linda Abraham]

THank you for your comment and suggestion, but frankly I discourage this approach. Your reasons for pursuing an MBA are almost always asked for in a goals essay, so providing them here would be redundant. Furthermore, writing that your weakness is a lack of management or financial skill isn't really providing any new insight into you. They already know you don't have an MBA. Finally, this kind of an answer would not reveal the introspection or self-evaluation that the schools are asking for.