MIT Sloan LGO Essay Questions for Fall 2012 Admission
Oct, 18, 2011
While most of the essay questions for Fall 2012 admission to the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program are the same as those for the regular MBA program at MIT Sloan, there are two additional questions that I wanted to comment on. You can find my analysis of the cover letter, the three other essays, and the supplemental information here. Unlike the cover letter or three other essays, the two LGO specific essays are rather straightforward. Clarity of purpose and analytical rigor rather than an overly creative response would be best here. Save your creativity for the rest of the essay set!
Essay 4: Why do you wish to pursue the LGO Program? What are the goals that you hope to accomplish both as a student and as a graduate of the program? Be sure to include a description of your post-LGO career plans. (250 words or fewer, limited to one page) You may copy and paste text directly from your cover letter.
Unlike the MIT Sloan MBA program, the LGO program actually requires having a clearly elaborated professional post-degree plan. In your cover letter, you need not fully elaborate on those plans because you will have Essay 4 for that purpose. Of course, you do have the option of doing so, but if you want to maximize your presentation of yourself as a whole, you might not find that to be terribly useful. Still, your cover letter should clearly be consistent with what you write in Essay 4 and feel free to have some overlap.
In the event that you actually don’t have clear professional plans, please see my analysis of Stanford Essay 2, which provides a method for formulating your goals based on SWOT and gap analysis. I hope this would be unlikely because anyone who applies to LGO had better have clear ideas about what they intend to get out of the program and what they will do subsequently.
A good answer to this question would do the following:
1. Clearly state your post-LGO career plans. I would suggest that you emphasize both the specific kind of role you want to have after you graduate and your longer-term career goals. The longer-term part can be stated very conceptually.
2. Explain why the LGO program will support your post-LGO professional goals and why, otherwise, you are attracted to the program.
3. Discuss what you intend to learn through LGO. That is to say, explain your learning needs. Don’t just mention a bunch of courses, but actually briefly explain what you hope to learn.
Just as with Essay 4, you might find some overlap between Essay 3 and the cover letter. I seriously doubt you have huge blocks of text to paste, but you might have a sentence of two.
2. Connects your interest in the engineering field and specialty area to your post-LGO career plan.
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