From a work gap to a Top global business school admit: Sush’s MBA journey

Sush was clear about one thing, she wanted to enter the global market to accumulate a diverse experience and was also driven by aesthetic, and art and was thus would prefer luxury brands post her MBA.

The school perfect for her was clearly ESSEC’s Luxury Brand Management MBA.

So, we were beyond proud when she informed us of the final result. ESSEC had accepted Sush for their Luxury MBA program.

But her journey wasn’t that easy. The first roadblock we ran into with Sush was her gap in work experience. Although a 4-month gap might not seem like a big deal to you, it is to us. You never know who, the admissions committee or the interviewers, might get fixated on that one missing link in an applicant’s profile.

The one-page Resume

I feel like I use the phrase ‘like most applicants’ too often when I narrate an applicant’s story to you. But it’s only fair. The mistakes that these applicants, who created amazing results, make are common to the whole MBA applicant community.

So, like most applicants, Sush was writing a job resume. After all, that is all she had needed to do before these applications. She used industry jargon which made her writing very difficult to comprehend for anyone outside of her industry. While a job resume would be read by someone with seniority in your line of work, who understands these jargons very well, an MBA resume can be read by someone who isn’t familiar with your industry at all.

The other thing she needed to change was the format she wrote in, and no I don’t just mean the font or the tables. What I’m referring to is the STAR format of writing a resume. According to this, each situation that you write in your resume should be accompanied by a task you were assigned, an action you took, and the result you delivered.

Once Sush took all the feedback into account, she delivered an almost perfect resume.

Application Essays

the first drafts that Sush sent us for her essays were rough around the edges.

Sometimes she would digress and wouldn’t address a part of the question. Other times her research of her post MBA job profile seemed to be very limited. Then there was an essay where her short-term and long-term goals weren’t seamlessly connected.

These might look like small issues but would accumulate to create a major red flag in her essay. So, we asked her to go through the entire video library on Interviewninjas before we proceeded with this task.

Once she did that and took into account our feedback, the essays were much better quality.

But getting over every hurdle like the champ she was, Sush was able to crack ESSEC, the perfect school for her.