Nanyang has 4 essay prompts for this application cycle, apart from the standard scholarship and re-applicant essays.
Essay Debrief
1. Social Responsibility Essay. Briefly describe your involvement in any socially responsible or sustainable development activities. (maximum 150 words)
It’s a very straight forward question. The good thing here is that you have a choice between community involvement or sustainable development activities. I know some candidates don’t have notable community involvement and hence fear its effect on their candidacy. Thus, the second choice can be your saviour and is definitely a popular one.
Your contribution/impact in such activities helps the reader get some perspective especially if it is quantified. I know 150 words aren’t much space to explain in detail but that’s the challenge. Further, your motivations to pursue the cause can also help the reader get deeper insights.
2. Briefly assess your career progress to date. Elaborate on your near term (3 – 5 years) future career objectives and how pursuing an MBA will help you achieve them. (maximum 400 words)
Let’s paraphrase this question:
What are your major achievements to date?
What are your short-term goals?
Why are you planning to pursue an MBA?
Why Nanyang?
You will be preparing your resume and in there, you will mention your career highlights. In this part of the essay, you need to expand on 1 or 2 of such achievements. Focus on those achievements that are noteworthy and where your impact is visible. Since the question asks of your career progress to date, your instance(s) here can be from any job after you’ve graduated and not necessarily from your current job. Explain the situation/challenge quickly and then segway into how you managed it. Displaying your leadership skills as well as your analytical aptitude.
Mention your short-term goal as crisply as possible. You don’t want to waste too many words on this. Moving on, loop in your goals with how an MBA will help you achieve that goal. What skills you’ll learn that will help you get that job? And finally, don’t forget to mention how is Nanyang MBA the right choice for you and your post-MBA goal. Your research will play a vital role in how you answer Why Nanyang.
3. Tell us about two achievements (one as a leader and one as a team member) that you are most proud of, and why you feel that to be so. (maximum 400 words)
You need to mention 2 instances here – 1 as a leader and 1 as a team member. Start with either and divide the words equally i.e. 200 each. Be it in a business school or real life you’ll have to be adept at being a good team member and a good leader to be successful. And hence, Nanyang would like to understand how you fared in such situations. While the essay question doesn’t ask for a professional instance it is always better to mention a professional achievement.
The hour creates the hero (leader). Mention an instance here in which you played a vital role in accomplishing that task. Again, numbers help the reader understand your impact. Don’t forget to explain the challenge you faced, how you approached it and finally what you did.
Nothing big can be ever accomplished without teamwork. You must have faced challenges or issues within the teams you’ve worked in. Same as above, follow a structured approach of explaining the reader the circumstance, your approach, your action and the end result. Needless to say, mention a positive outcome instance in both cases.
4. Share with us a situation where you faced adversity. Describe how you resolved/managed it and what you learned from the experience. (maximum 400 words)
You have a lot of room to narrate an incident properly. So do it! We all have faced some or the other form of challenge or difficult situation in life. But it is important that you choose a rather unique and extremely difficult situation here. Here too, Nanyang has not expressly asked for professional adversity but it is advisable to stick to professional ones only.
Help the reader understand the situation first. What was the scenario you were in and how was it rather unique and unexpected one? Then dig deeper into your approach, how did you analyse the situation? What is your system to break down and analyse a challenge? How to do think in a crisis management scenario? As the question asks, how did you resolve such a situation? What corrective steps did you take? And then finally and probably most importantly what did you learn from the whole experience? One’s ability to learn from adversity makes him/her an effective leader. It is imperative that you focus on the learning here and have a clear lesson learnt.
Apart from the essays above Nanyang application requires:
- Two References
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