How MBA Applicant cracked Rotman, Canada’s Top Business School?

With just 3.5 years of work experience, Parth got into one of Canada’s top business schools, Rotman.

Here’s his MBA application journey.

Parth’s goals story

In his first draft of the goals story, Parth laid down every single detail of his career so far. His answer mostly consisted of his job description and a few words on what short-term goal.

The goals story is a very detailed document consisting of the following things:

Past: Your career so far in brief.

AHA moments: moments in the past few months that made you realize you wanted to move on to a bigger role in an organization or move into a different function. Basically, it is the reason you’ve chosen your short-term goal.

Current Handicaps: Reasons why you can’t achieve your short-term goal without an MBA.

Short-term and Long-term goals: Finally, the goals story consists of the goals you have post-MBA.

None of the things mentioned above can be vague. Also, everything in your goals story needs to be authentic to you. For example, your short-term goal can’t be “Management consulting”. You need to portray a clear vision of the companies and types of responsibilities you will be associated with.

Parth’s struggle was that he did not understand how to research his target companies and the roles therein. In fact, like most applicants, he did not realize that he needed to carry out the aforementioned research.

Our solution was providing Parth with the Management consulting guide, directions for research on target companies and detailed critique of his existing goals document.

Parth’s essay analysis

Parth majorly struggled when the essay questions were very similar. He tends to not be able to bifurcate the various stories that he wanted to narrate through the various essays and would end up making strong overlaps.

Another very important factor was explanations. MBA applicants all across the globe have made this mistake. They have written various details of their lives like their greatest achievements or surprising facts about themselves, but haven’t focused on the background of the same.

Let me give you an example. There is an urban legend where a 24-year-old girl narrates the events that have happened every morning since she ignored a spam mail that asked her to forward the mail to 10 friends if she wanted to avoid a curse that leads to death. According to her, every morning a random person on the street would flash her the weirdest smile and say “good morning”. But the catch was that she had been deaf since she was 9 years old.

Can you see the effect that context has on a story? By simply giving the background for the girl, the whole story becomes creepy and supernatural.

Similarly, when writing about his accomplishments, or surprising facts about himself, Parth was asked to add the reasons behind why he felt those were significant things.

Parth was a quick learner and was able to make these changes almost immediately after our feedback.

His hard work was rewarded when he finally received his acceptance letter from Rotman.

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