Essay 1. Provide an honest portrayal of yourself, emphasizing your strengths and weaknesses. Highlight the key elements that have shaped your personal journey. Give relevant illustrations as needed. (400 words)This is a great opportunity to present your story to ISB. The essay prompt aims to go beyond simply assessing your academic and professional accomplishments, and seeks to gain deeper insights into your character, self-awareness and personal growth.
ISB is keen to know how you have evolved as an individual, the challenges you have faced, the lessons you learned and how these experiences have shaped your journey. It is important to be true to yourself as your authenticity can help differentiate your response to this essay prompt. Let us go through the steps you can follow to have a compelling essay to this prompt.
Firstly, start by reflecting on your personal journey and creating a master list of your accomplishments. Think of the achievements you are most proud of in your journey. Feel free to add to and edit the list, as the self introspection process takes time, sometimes hours or days. Aim to pick accomplishments that involve their fair share of challenges, as this can help showcase your strengths (point below) better.
For each accomplishment, connect it to a specific strength or strengths that you exhibited. For example, if one of your core strengths is perseverance, there could be multiple accomplishments from the above step where this trait can be linked to. While at this step, also highlight your values, motivations, and the core beliefs that you possess. These would add an additional layer and nuance to your story.
Once you have your master list, highlight the most important accomplishments. These can be picked by considering two parameters: recency and impact. The more recent the accomplishment, the better. Likewise, the more its impact, the better. Prioritize two or three accomplishments that are particularly significant, along with the associated strengths.
When considering weaknesses, it is recommended to follow the same steps as for the strengths. Start with listing the incidents in your life where you think you could have done better, especially ones where you had control over the outcome. For each such incident, connect it to a specific weakness or weaknesses. These can be areas of improvement. Try to avoid pseudo weaknesses as these do not portray authentic self introspection. For example, being a perfectionist is not really a weakness, and highlighting this (or something similar) as a weakness could indicate that you are trying to hide your weaknesses.
Subsequently, prioritize two or three incidents from the above point, along with the associated weaknesses. Consider two parameters to prioritize: recency and impact. The more recent the incident, the better. Likewise, the more its impact, the better. Also explain how these incidents have impacted your life, and discuss your efforts to overcome them. Working on your weaknesses demonstrates self-awareness and a drive for personal growth, both of which are positive attributes that ISB seeks to uncover.
As the next step, aim to strike a balance between highlighting your strengths and addressing your weaknesses. Focus on your growth and how you have overcome challenges, rather than dwelling solely on weaknesses. Likewise, avoid exaggerating your strengths. The key is to be honest, and to align to some of the values ISB looks for in a candidate. As a reminder, here are the values that ISB primarily looks for: clarity of thought, leadership, effective communication, team orientation, learning orientation, industry knowledge, problem-solving skills, and interpersonal skills.
Now that you have identified the important qualities and formative moments from the above steps, it is time to start weaving them together. Focus on maintaining a smooth flow throughout your essay, which should read like a personal story that portrays you as the protagonist. Use clear transitions to ensure a smooth flow between paragraphs.
Finally, conclude your essay by linking your personal journey to your future goals. Articulate how your strengths and the lessons learned will contribute to your success in the ISB MBA program and post your MBA journey.
Please refer to the original version of our complete blog on ISB's new Essay prompts at
https://admitstreet.com/blog/isb-essay/Regards,
admitStreet
ISB & HEC alumni, Admissions Interviewers
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https://admitstreet.com | E:
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