Choppy Resume, Fuzzy Goals
Home
Massachusetts
Academic Strength
Arts and Humanities
Biggest Weakness
Mediocre Quantitive Metrics
Extracurricular Strength
International Performing Arts
GPA
2.8
SAT Score
1230
Sarina Needs a Tagline
The Challenge
Sarina had a 700 GMAT and 4 years of work experience. She worked at big names like Macy’s, Shiseido and Amazon, but her work experience was scattered bouncing back and forth between beauty and tech. Her goals were disjointed at first as well – she wanted to marry beauty and tech into her post-MBA role, but wasn’t sure how to accomplish that.
Possible Approaches
We could have handled the situation in a few ways.
Sarina kept undermining herself. She didn’t come across as confident in her essays and therefore her goals didn’t sound achievable. In her first draft for CBS, she would state the obvious and avoid writing about herself. She had a lot trouble articulating why her experiences were unique and what she would achieve with the MBA. She was portraying herself as a functionary instead of a revolutionary. During interview practice, she would say “we” all the time instead of “I” which was telling because she was often in the driver’s seat, so we needed to show that she felt comfortable there.
The Admissionado Approach
The biggest problem was her goals, so we showed her how to start with the long-term and work backward. Through researching, we figured out an ideal role and company and then encouraged her to describe why this was the perfect place for her to work her magic. What are some of the challenges that beauty tech companies face? And what had she already done at one or more of these three companies that proves she will improve or transform the way that they do things? In demonstrating that she knew how to use this position to change things, she could then hit on her short term goal and how it will prepare her to do so. For the interviews, we worked on phrasing to avoid underselling herself.
The Result
We did CBS first because of the deadline and the learning curve was steep. It was her top choice, so I would much rather have worked on Stern first, but we didn’t have that luxury. I remember calling her around the V2 to tell her that the goals weren’t working because they still didn’t sound convincing enough. We worked it out during that conversation and the rest went much more smoothly.
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