Extracurricular activities can be an essential part of your MBA application. Admissions committees are interested in learning about your interests outside of school, but they also want to know if you have the skills and experience to succeed in the program they are offering. B-Schools will look at your extracurricular activities to help them decide whether or not you would be a good fit for their program. The right extracurricular activities will show admission committees that you have leadership and teamwork skills and management skills and communication skills. If you don’t have any of these things on your resume, then there are other ways that you can showcase your extracurricular activities on your application.
Before starting any MBA application, the applicant must plan for gathering all application materials like recommendations, transcripts, resumes, and essays. In this process, the applicant should mainly focus on how to best position himself. If the applicant has taken leadership roles in volunteer organizations or is actively engaged with a nonprofit organization, then they definitely want to highlight these achievements in their application. But some applicants lack such experience or have done nothing on that front. They don’t have any volunteering experience or no extracurricular involvement. In this blog, we will discuss how to fill that gap.
If the applicant has weak extracurriculars then his chances of admission are not doomed completely. Admissions committees realize that it’s really hard for some people to have significant involvement in an organization outside of work. This is usually seen in cases where the applicants are busy with their job and hardly get time to involve in activities outside of work. We have indeed seen compelling candidates be accepted to top programs even though they lack post-college extracurriculars.
However, if the applicants are not engaged in anything outside of class when they were studying undergraduate, this might weaken their chances to a certain extent. The B-School admission committee will evaluate the applicants in a holistic manner, they will consider all aspects of the candidate’s life — not just what they have achieved at work. Applicants can also discuss how they helped their classmates/peer group to overcome certain challenges. So, if the applicant is weak or has no volunteer work or extracurricular activities to talk about, then they should brainstorm what other relevant things they could share with fellow students in class. Applicants can think along with the lines of travel or cultural experiences or even a family situation. Applicants can talk about their passion other than their job and explain to the admission committee the impact created by these activities.
How to Showcase Your Extracurricular Activities on Your MBA Resume
- Use a Separate Section for Extracurricular Activities.
When it comes to extracurricular activities, you should use a separate resume section for them. Doing so will help you highlight the value of your other interests and show that you are always striving to learn new things and make contributions beyond your job.
- Use Different Fonts and Formatting for Your Extracurricular Activities Resume Section.
You want this section to stand out from the rest of your resume, so make sure that it is formatted differently than all other sections (e.g., use a different font or size). You also want this section to reflect the same professionalism as other parts of your application (e.g., if you’re using bullet points in another part of your application, continue using bullet points here). If possible, try highlighting certain words or phrases within each bullet point by capitalizing them or bolding them without changing their color too much — this helps draw attention to what matters most!