Roadmap for Admission into an MBA Program (3 of 6)

Welcome back to our Roadmap Series. This is part III of our VI part series. In our first post, we got an Overview of the eight steps involved in an MBA application process. In the second post, we did a deep-dive into two of those eight steps namely, GMAT and School Research. Today, we will look into Resume and Storyline in greater detail.

Resume

A resume is a document that gives the reader a quick bird’s eye overview of your educational and professional qualifications. From the application perspective, a resume would help the readers of your application understand the educational and career path you’ve followed in order to reach your current position. It’s a view for a point in time.

I would like to address the important issue of length of resume. The view on this is varied with different people having different perspectives. My personal belief is that a Resume of 1 page is sufficient for your MBA application. In addition, more often than not, schools mandate a 1 page restriction for including Resumes in their Resume Books. Hence, making a 1 page resume now would hold you in good stead for when you are at school.

A nicely designed resume with high quality content can take considerably longer than one may want and expect. I recommend spending 1 month only on this exercise as this document will also hold you in good stead when you get to school for recruiting and more. Professional help with your Resume is highly recommended.

This will be covered in greater detail in future posts along with “How-to” videos on formatting which can be a major challenge and for some odd reason, is not covered much at all. In addition, I will be providing sample Resumes for some of the top schools to enable you to better structure your Resume.

Storyline

 

I hope the above comic strip drives home the importance of storyline and how it can make the same message sound so different just because of the way it is structured!

This is the step where you data-mine your life for incidents (big or small) that might define you and that might help distinguish you from the other candidates. This is when you are brainstorming and soul searching to come up with themes and story lines that form the essence of your application. A winning application is almost always preceded by exhaustive and clever introspection. This step can make or break your application and cannot be stressed enough. Here, you plan on how to best use the real estate available within the application for each school in a way that helps you put your best foot forward. Allocate 1 month for this and you will find yourself breezing through the essays.

Conclusion

In today’s post, we learnt how to go about the Resume and the importance of Storyline within your application. Effectively, we have covered the first four steps and in the remaining three posts, we will cover the other four steps. In our next post, we will cover two more steps namely, Recommendations and Essays. Keep reading and slowly and steadily, we will keep moving towards our goal i.e. to Crack The MBA.