DECIDING YOUR PURPOSE
To understand whether an MBA truly makes sense for you, one thing that your entire application will revolve around is your purpose- career wise, of course.
Finding your purpose is not gonna be easy - if it was, everyone would be a winner. Now, by purpose, I do not mean your calling but understanding what kind of a life do you envision post-MBA and how is that something you are passionate about.
DEFINING YOUR PASSION
Biggest mistake people make is thinking that the passion (your "why") is supposed to start with your childhood. that is why, when I look at some essays, most of them begin with, "When I was younger...." or "I grew up....". But let's face it, life is not as straightforward as we think it is. So a couple of things to understand how to define your passion-
1. Originates after your exposure to a particular industry or role
2. A strong desire to actually become a leader in a space you see an opportunity
3. A desire to explore outside of your industry (Exploration can still be a passion)
4. Willingness to leave an impact on people's lives around you
5. Major life event that changed the course of what you wanna be
and many more.... Depends on how you have led your life.
A lot of things depend on your values and things you enjoy doing. Because people can be passionate about different things but have the same goal. For example, management consulting can be both a way someone wants to explore different industries and a way someone can specialize in a particular field of interest.
FITTING THE PASSION INTO YOUR GOALS
ALL business schools want to know what the goal has to do with you. "Your why" is more important than just suggesting that you want to achieve a certain position. Deciding your own why requires some introspection that comes from brainstorming of your major life events (not just professional ones). Finding the reasons why you do the things you do will form a pattern. If that reason is career progression, great! but dig deeper, why just this goal? Why not something else.
This is merely a blog but most good consultants employ frameworks to understand your why. That is not something that can be discussed over a general advice and requires personalization. The ideas discussed above can help you define your why yourself. but still, here are a few examples-
Consulting
Joining a big 3 (MBB) consulting company at an associate role / consultant role because of their focus on private equity space, which you developed as your passion to invest into emerging technologies, real estate or e-commerce, which you got exposure to during your previous work experience and you get a major thrill out of the anticipation that goes into stepping into the unknown by placing a bet on something that can change the world as we know it.
Entrepreneurship
Growing up in poverty with lack of resources, you developed an understanding of how life can be without lack of financial education and decided to develop an edtech startup that raised $$$ from some VC fund with a fund size $$ who saw value in the purpose. Your passion to help alleviate the financial illiteracy has now gotten you to the point you want to get an MBA and further expand your network to scale it.
Goals can be anything, but your passion can vary. So, this article sets the stage for your whole application. In the coming weeks, you will see how to make your goals specific and using the passion for your goals in the right way.
Next week- We will be discussing the ways to craft a resume more aligned with your post-MBA goals and how to conduct the research into finding a program that you see fit. For the purpose of this whole blog series, we will take one goal and profile and move forward to see what fits well with the profile.
Stay tuned for future blogs.
If you want to contribute to the future blogs and want to pay it forward to people who can benefit from your help, please feel free to mail a word document of your donation at - info@mbaconquerors.com
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