How can you write essays that grab the attention of MBA admissions committees? With this thorough Columbia Business School essay analysis, our friends at mbaMission help you conceptualize your essay ideas and understand how to execute, so that your experiences truly stand out.

Columbia Business School (CBS) has just released its essay questions for this year, and the admissions office is offering applicants “a little bit old and a little bit new.” Its micro essay (really just a goal statement, to be fair) and first essay remain unchanged, while its second essay is a repackaging of a prompt from two years ago, and its third is brand new. In the past, for its third essay, Columbia Business School applicants could choose from two prompt options, generally pertaining to their personal lives and passions; now, candidates must respond to a question about a team failure instead. In short, this year, applicants have less choice with their essays (though the word counts have not changed), and the topics involved skew slightly in favor of the professional and academic and away from the personal. Let’s jump into our Columbia Business School essay analysis… Read more

The Executive Assessment (EA) shares a lot of roots with the GMAT, GMAC’s flagship graduate business school exam. In certain ways, the Executive Assessment feels almost like the GMAT on steroids—it’s even more stereotypically GMAT-like than the GMAT itself, if that’s possible. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

My mother-in-law is amazing at baking. She’s the kind of person who can whip up a layer cake with no recipe, while having a conversation, reading the news, and playing a game of Scrabble.

Me, on the other hand—well, I once managed to melt a batch of lemon cookies. So, when I have to bake something, I triple-check the recipe like it’s instructions for doing heart surgery. Read more

Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips from our exclusive admissions consulting partner, mbaMission.

When candidates who have already taken the GMAT exam once ask us whether they should take the test again, we always reply with this key question: “Do you think you can do better?” If the individual does indeed believe that he/she can improve, the next question we inevitably get is “What do business schools think of multiple scores?” Read more

Guess what? You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free—we’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

Are you ready for the third and final installment of our GMAT Time Management series?

In the first part of this series, we established some overall principles for GMAT time management: Read more

Guess what? You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free—we’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

Are you thinking of applying to business school this year? Perhaps you’re just starting to prepare for the GMAT or GRE, or maybe you haven’t yet begun to assess your overall fit at the top business school programs. How will you differentiate yourself from so many other MBA applicants? Where will you start? Read more

Mission Admission is a series of MBA admission tips from our exclusive admissions consulting partner, mbaMission.

This time of year, many business school candidates receive invitations to interview with their target MBA programs. Many of these applicants inevitably fret and ask themselves, “What if I don’t know the answers to my interviewer’s questions?” The good news is that, as the title of this blog post states, a business school interview bears no resemblance to a TV quiz show. The admissions officer, alumnus/alumna, or student interviewing you will not ask you about esoteric topics and will not expect you to answer questions pertaining to business management. The vast majority of the questions you will encounter in your MBA interview will pertain to your life and experiences—in other words, the interviewer will be asking you about you—so you will already have all the answers in hand from the beginning. Read more

From aspiring business leaders to high-powered lawyers to education pioneers, our students come from all walks of life but are united by a common purpose: the desire to realize their best selves. For the next month, we’ll be sharing their Manhattan Prep stories with you. Read more

Guess what? You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GMAT courses absolutely free—we’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

In our first post, we discussed what I would call the behemoth of big GMAT skills: reading with specificity and objectivity. Today, we’re going to focus on the latter of the two to delve into another one of the most important big GMAT skills: stripping yourself of biases. Read more

Each week, we are featuring a series of MBA admissions tips from our exclusive admissions consulting partner, mbaMission.

The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania sends out Round 2 interview invitations on February 8, and once again, the school is using its Wharton team-based discussion format rather than a traditional admissions interview to evaluate its candidates. Understandably, Wharton applicants get anxious about this atypical interview, because the approach creates a very different dynamic from what one usually encounters in a one-on-one meeting—and with other applicants also in the room, one cannot help but feel less in control of the content and direction of the conversation. Yet despite the uncertainty, here are a few things that interviewees can expect: Read more