Peer Learning is a major building block of PGP at ISB. Help us in understanding how will you be able to add value to the PGP peer group through your personal and professional qualities/capabilities?
College application essays makes us want to write extraordinary stories that may or may not have the element of truth in them. But one must always remember that the colleges do not want to hear your make-believe stories, they are rather interested in knowing the real you. So, it becomes very important to tell them who you are, rather than who they would like to see you as.
When you look at the question, there are few phrases that underline the crux of the essay.
The Most Important, Personal Quality, Examples, Significantly, Successful leader It is important to focus on these 5 words/phrases while writing this essay for the ISB application. Let us take a deep dive to understand what ISB wants to assess in a candidate through their essay by looking at the question asked in detail:
The Most Important: It clearly indicates that candidate must choose 1 (max 2) quality to showcase in this essay. Admissions committee receive thousands of applications, ISB is giving a chance to the prospective candidates to select their very best quality as the basic theme for their profile.
Personal Quality: This would not essentially mean qualities like friendly, hard-working but to bring out those other elements of your personality that make you stand out and provide you a USP as compared to others. Everybody who is applying to B-Schools is hard working and dedicated, so that is given. A personal deep dive is required to understand what kind of a person you are. Choose to showcase a quality that has a universal need and something that can help you no matter what industry/country/role you are in.
Examples: Not only do candidates have to identify and describe their best quality/qualities, they would also need to connect them with genuine examples both at work and personal life. For example – being a people person is one quality that not only helps in cultivating professional relationships easily, but also makes you approachable. But it needs to be corroborated with good examples of how it gave you an edge to achieve better results for your client/company at work. Examples are very important because they help the reader to connect/click/relate with the candidate and make reading the essay worthwhile.
Significantly: It emphasizes the importance of diversity and unique selling points for admission in ISB. A candidate must be selective in deciding the qualities and examples that he/she wants the admission’s team to remember. Your stories may seem unimportant to you but if there is something about you that significantly helped you to navigate situations, then write about them.
Successful leader: This is an opportunity to define leadership in your way, talking about the elements that you want to learn/imbibe from a leader who inspires you. How do you think that your unique or best personal quality will help you become a successful leader?
Lastly, structure of the essay is almost like the backbone in your body. If you talk about all things mentioned above but do not have a proper structure while doing it, readers might not understand the way you want them to understand. Always try to write as if you are one of the best storytellers.
Diversity is something that ISB has always focused on, and through this question they are directly asking what candidates are bringing to the table. Focus on the key phrases above and tell them your story.
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