Last updated on September 8, 2020
Owen Graduate School of Management offers a 2-year Full-Time MBA program in Nashville. For the Fall Intake 2021, Vanderbilt Owen has added 1 short essay prompt and has tweaked the language of others. Following are the deadlines, essay prompts and its debrief:
| Round # | Deadline |
| Round 1 | October 12, 2020 |
| Round 2 | January 11, 2021 |
| Round 3 | March 29, 2021 |
| Round 4 | May 15, 2021 |
Essay Debrief
1. What are your short-term career goals after obtaining your MBA and what functional area do you plan to study while in the MBA program? (75 words)
A very straight forward question asked by almost all business schools. What do you want to do after you graduate from Owen? We all have some idea about what we want to do, after all, that is why you decided to embark on this journey. The important thing here is to be specific with your Industry and Function.
In the second part, Owen is specifically asking you in which functional area do you wish to study. If you’ve studied Vanderbilt Owen’s website you must have noticed they offer numerous concentrations and you can double down on a subject to make it your specialisation. Please note here that your chosen short-term career goal and your area of study should be congruent.
2. What are some specific skills that you want to develop during your time in business school to help you achieve your career goals? (75 words)
You are not being given a lot of words to explain your answers. You need to be succinct with your essay here too. MBA helps a candidate develop a comprehensive set of skills including hard and soft skills.
The operative words added this year to this essay prompt are – to help you achieve your career goals. Here you need to write about the skills that will help you in your above mentioned short-term career goal. It will also be a good idea to include one soft skill and one hard skill.
3. The role of the Vanderbilt MBA Career Management Center is to partner with students to discover and define their career goals; to educate and coach students in developing and refining skills and experiences to achieve their career goals; to facilitate partnerships among students, the business community and the Vanderbilt community. How do you plan to direct your career search and collaborate with the Career Management Center to work toward your career goals? (75 words)
It is very important for you as well as Vanderbilt Owen that you get employed after you graduate. For you it is obvious, but for a business school also it matters as its employment report gets diminished if you’re not employed.
Your research will dictate this essay. How much do you know about Vanderbilt’s Career Management Center? How does CMC generally help a candidate in pursuit of a job? Quoting specific activities done by Vanderbilt CMC will help.
4. Our mission is to provide world-class business education on a personal scale. What does personal scale mean to you? (75 words)
Above 3 essay prompts are classified as career focus by Vanderbilt Owen but this one is classified as a creative one. So you have some room to be creative but not enough word limit. While every MBA program has a core curriculum, Owen prides itself on offering a highly customisable MBA curriculum. It offers specialisations, concentrations, emphases and dual degrees.
To paraphrase the essay prompt, which aspects of the Vanderbilt curriculum do you like or how will you use Vanderbilt’s flexible curriculum to achieve your goals. In fact, you have the opportunity to loop in your 1st essay with this essay as you’ll notice Owen is asking you to about which functional area you plan to study in the 1st essay. You should be careful and make sure that all your essays in congruence with one another.
Apart from the essay above Vanderbilt Owen application requires:
- Video Essays
- Resume
- One Reference
Video essays are being adopted by more and more business schools as an additional tool to evaluate a candidate. It does not just test your oral communication skills but also your spontaneous thinking and overall presentation skills. You will get a few sample questions to practise on before the actual questions but its not a bad idea to practice more especially if you’re camera conscious.
If you’d like to discuss your profile and know whether Vanderbilt Owen is the right school for you or not then fill out this form and we can have a FREE call. Check out our tool MBA Matrix, where you can search and compare more than 300 MBA programs. You can say nice things to me on What’s App!