During a recent episode of my GMATClub / Gurufi MBA Podcast, I spoke with Russ Morgan, at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. When the conversation turned to personal statements, he offered an insight into what they look for in potential leaders that was quite fascinating. In this brief clip, I offer some thoughts on that and how you can use this information to inform your MBA personal statement.
For more help with your personal statement, check us out at Gurufi.com. Our personal statement editors and consultants have decades of experience helping clients get into top Masters and Ph.D. programs in STEM, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Our specialty is helping you craft compelling personal statements that move the needle in your admissions process! For questions, shoot us an email at service@gurufi.com. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
You’ve picked your dream school, taken your GRE, and gotten your letters of recommendation. You sit down to write, and the blinking cursor on the blank page taunts you. You’re frozen. What to write? Who am I? What makes me special? How do I sum up my entire life, my future, and my intellectual and professional mission in 1000 words?!?!? ARGHHHHH!!!! Oh no, you have writer’s block!
In most cases, people get writer’s block because the skip an important phase of the writing process. Instead of beginngin by just letting ideas flow in a non-self-critical way, they obsess over every word, and start to tear down their own ideas before they even get fully formed.
The trick to beating writer’s block is to make the first stage of writing private, low stakes, and focused on just generating content. But it has to be great content, right? Nope. Making it great comes later. What you need to work out first are your ideas in all of their sloppy, half-baked, meandering, wonderful messiness.
You see, one of the unusual things about people is that we have beliefs and ideas that we don’t even know we have. Our motivations are unclear, even to ourselves. That’s where this writing exercise comes in. The exercise I explain in this video will only take 15-20 minutes from start to finish, but it could provide you the tools you need to make a fantastic personal statement. I’ve taught this technique in seminars and in my classrooms for over a decade, and every time, two things are true. (1) Many (sometimes most) students think, “why are we doing this? This is touchy-feely hippy garbage!” And then they do it. Then, (2) they say, “woah, that was SO helpful!”
Watch the video and do the exercise. The most you will lose is 25 minutes that doesn’t help you. But the upside is that, like so many of my former clients and students, this simple technique gives you the bricks to build something awesome.
We often work with clients who spend a lot of energy making sure that their introductions are unique and compelling, but then don’t invest enough attention in their conclusions. This is a mistake and a missed opportunity. After all, your conclusion is the last impression the reader has of you, so you should view it more like a closing argument than just a way to recap the main beats from your essay.
For more help, check us out at Gurufi.com. Our personal statement editors and consultants have decades of experience helping clients get into top Masters and Ph.D. programs in STEM, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Our specialty is helping you craft compelling personal statements that move the needle in your admissions process! For questions, shoot us an email at service@gurufi.com. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Authenticity is a vital part of any personal statement. Brian, Gurufi’s CEO, recently wrote a post for PrepAdvisor in which he detailed how and why it’s important to be yourself. More importantly, he details what that means on a practical level. Check it out!
For more help with your personal statements, check us out at Gurufi.com. Our editors have decades of experience helping clients get into top Masters and Ph.D. programs in STEM, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Our specialty is helping you craft compelling personal statements that move the needle in your admissions process! For questions, shoot us an email at service@gurufi.com. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
As part of our ongoing collaboration between GMATClub and Gurufi, Brian interviewed Brandon Kirby, the Director MBA Marketing & Admissions at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. We covered a broad array of topics, including how to start a business career in Europe, the different advantages or disadvantages of MBA programs in Europe and the United States, and how to think about the kind of education and training you’ll need if you intend to pursue an entrepreneurial path. We also spoke at length about the strengths of RSM and learning, working, and learning in the Netherlands. Check it out!
For more help, check us out at Gurufi.com. Our editors have decades of experience helping clients get into top Masters and Ph.D. programs in STEM, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Our specialty is helping you craft compelling personal statements that move the needle in your admissions process! For questions, shoot us an email at service@gurufi.com. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Letters of recommendation are a key part of your application, and yet most people do not approach the process with enough planning and strategy. They wrongly assume that, since somebody else is doing it, their job begins and ends with just emailing a boss or former professor and they take it from there. In this quick video from Gurufi’sYouTube channel, we provide three quick tips for how to approach getting a great letter of rec.Check it out!
If you’d like to learn more about getting a great letter of rec, we’ve covered the topic twice before in much greater detail. You can check out these videos here and here!
For more help, check us out at Gurufi.com. Our editors have decades of experience helping clients get into top Masters and Ph.D. programs in STEM, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Our specialty is helping you craft compelling personal statements that move the needle in your admissions process! For questions, shoot us an email at service@gurufi.com. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Graduate school admissions are fundamentally different than college, law school, MBA, or medical school admissions. Their structure, what they look for, and (probably most importantly) who staffs these admissions boards shape them in important ways. In this video, we go through the admissions process, talk about how this should help guide your approach, and provide some specific approaches.
For more help, check us out at Gurufi.com. Our editors have decades of experience helping clients get into top Masters and Ph.D. programs in STEM, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Our specialty is helping you craft compelling personal statements that move the needle in your admissions process! For questions, shoot us an email at service@gurufi.com. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
When you’re applying for an MBA, it can feel like you don’t have any control over the process. After reading twoarticleson Giri Kesavan’s LinkedIn page, I knew that I wanted to speak with him about his approach the MBA process. He was detailed, structured, and outcome-focused in a way that far too few applicants are.
For more help, check us out at Gurufi.com. Our editors have decades of experience helping clients get into top Masters and Ph.D. programs in STEM, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Our specialty is helping you craft compelling personal statements that move the needle in your admissions process! For questions, shoot us an email at service@gurufi.com. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
The question of whether and when to attend business school can be a hard question for many people. In this preview snippet of our GMATClub / Gurufi MBA Podcast, we spoke with Russ Morgan at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business about how to think about this important -and often vexing- question.
For more help, check us out at Gurufi.com. Our editors have decades of experience helping clients get into top Masters and Ph.D. programs in STEM, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Our specialty is helping you craft compelling personal statements that move the needle in your admissions process! For questions, shoot us an email at service@gurufi.com. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Emory University’s Goizueta Business School has become an increasingly popular destination for aspiring MBAs looking to earn a degree that puts their career on a steeper ascent. As part of Gurufi’s ongoing collaboration with GMATClub, we are producing a weekly podcast. In this week’s episode, Gurufi CEO Brian Fobi talks to Evan Bailey about his journey to business school, how he transitioned from a non-quantitative background to a more quant-focused consulting track, and the unique ways that Emory prepares students for a 21st-century career.
For more help, check us out at Gurufi.com. Our editors have decades of experience helping clients get into top Masters and Ph.D. programs in STEM, humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Our specialty is helping you craft compelling personal statements that move the needle in your admissions process! For questions, shoot us an email at service@gurufi.com. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
