The Fittest candidate to MIT EMBA program:
Typically, MIT Sloan would need you to have a minimum of 10 years of work experience when you matriculate. As the competition in the 10~15 years of work experience pool is very intense, the admissions team wants to know what managerial experience you have that is unique. Successful candidates usually have a steeper trajectory in the early part of their career compared to most of their peers. You also need to have some general management experience by way of having managed your business, division or department. Ideally, you should have handled some budget, developed strategy and managed a team. You should have made some executive level contribution to your organization. You should be a thought leader and possess the ability to mentor others.
You also should be quant comfortable. That is not to say that MIT Sloan requires you to be an engineer or mathematician, but you should have taken statistics and calculus in your under graduate or graduate degree. If you have not, then you should enroll for any local university and take the necessary classes.
Moreover, you should be innovative and a change maker who challenge status quo.
Please provide a statement on your personal and professional qualifications. What is motivating you to apply to the MIT Executive MBA at this point in your career? (500 words).
The SOP is the heart and soul of the application. It gives you the opportunity to introduce yourself to MIT Sloan and state the reasons for pursuing the MIT Executive MBA now. Writing your career goals isn’t difficult. Most of the EMBA applicants have some idea about what they aspire to do in future. I have rarely worked with an EMBA applicant who didn’t have a clue about his future plans. However, the most difficult part here is to demonstrate your fit with the program.
If you are a star applicant (a manager is a global Fortune 500 MNC managing millions of dollars of P&L responsibility with 15 years of work experience + more than 3.5 GPA from an Ivy League college), you just have to convince MIT Sloan that you will join the program if you are given admission. Since they put a lot of emphasis on brands, if you are working in a gold-plated branded company such as GE, Apple, Boeing, etc, you have a huge chance to win your seat. However, the vast majority of applicants don’t have such stellar profiles. Hence, you need to read and reread my definition of the fittest applicant and try to get as close to the ideal profile as you can. If you are an international or non Ivy League applicant, you need to work hard on stellar GMAT or EA (these exams aren’t mandatory but more than 60% of the current batch have taken GMAT) and work on your essays.
The SOP gives you a lot of space to showcase your maturity. Generally speaking, an EMBA program is not about career change. It is all about career acceleration. Admission officers get a little anxious when an executive in GE aerospace manufacturing with 15 years’ experience says that he or she aspires to become a venture capital / private equity professional. Therefore, you need to think twice before your write stuff that sounds cool to the millennials but may trigger warning bells in the minds of the admissions staff. Look before you leap.
As an experienced leader, we expect you to provide solid reasons behind your decisions and also write in detail about what you can contribute to your peers. Narrate your story inside out and think carefully about how you can contribute to the program. If your SOP is written well, it can differentiate you from numerous applicants in your demographic pool and earn you a seat in the MIT EMBA program.
Lasting impact can happen on large and small scales. Tell us about how you inspired your team, and what you learned about yourself as a leader, through a recent difficult time.(300 words or less)
MIT Sloan finds strength through diversity. We believe that a commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and well-being is a key component of both principled leadership and sound management practice. We seek to create a community that encompasses all dimensions of diversity and fosters excellence within MIT Sloan. This includes diversity of identity, thought, role, and perspective. Please describe a time when you contributed toward making a work environment or organization more welcoming, inclusive, and diverse.(250 words or less)
Please tell us about a time when you introduced an idea that changed the way in which your organization approached a business challenge or opportunity. What factors did you consider, what barriers or obstacles did you face, and how did you measure success (500 words or less)
Before answering these three essays, please read my definition of “fit” with regard to the MIT Sloan EMBA program. You need to cherry-pick professional stories from your life that will showcase you as an ideal candidate for the institution. You need to demonstrate your ability to be an agenda setter in your organization. You should be a person who can inspire your team members, obtain buy-in from higher ups, and create significant impact. More than the actual end results, what the MIT admissions officers want is to understand how you get things done and what your leadership style is. What challenges did you face and how did you solve them? What people issues emerged in your team, and how did you overcome such interpersonal conflicts, organizational politics or inter-departmental rivalries? Show the admissions committee “what you thought, felt, said, and did,” so that they can “visualize you in action”. If you go about these essays in the proper way, they can differentiate you from numerous other applicants in your demographic pool. Talk to us if you need any assistance.
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