Advice on applying to undergraduate business schools

[skieurope]

Move the conversation forward people. This is not a debate society. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to assist the OP

[blossom]

OP- you’ve seen a range of opinions. I think the path forward for your kid is to be authentic.

Not every person interested in studying business as an undergrad is going to display a passion for creating a mock investment portfolio (as many of the clubs/activities do). And essays about real life work experience can be very powerful.

I waitressed in HS and college. I have had over 30 years of experience working for large global companies, I have an MBA from a top 5 program, I have had incredible mentors and bosses and leaders to learn from.

But my waitress jobs remain the most helpful and powerful experiences I have had in becoming the business professional that I am. I won a case competition in business school because problem we were trying to solve was for a company that made perishable products– the other students were creating elaborate models and algorithms and doing deep financial analysis. I had worked in a restaurant where a certain percentage of our products– finished products (unfrozen but not yet cooked french fries), raw ingredients (milk about to expire), and condiments (relish is NOT shelf stable without refrigeration no matter what you believe) got tossed at the end of the Graveyard shift because it wasn’t safe to serve them. I was totally outclassed in the analytics by the engineers; none of them had seen the impact on the bottom line of spending the hour between 6 and 7 am (when Graveyard ended) throwing out hundreds of dollars of food. And when the manager showed up at 7 am, he’d have his tantrum and then we’d leave and the morning shift would know that the stale corn muffins and rancid cream which was in little stainless jugs on the tables would be gone– like magic.

Your son sounds terrific. I’d stop worrying about this.

[SJ2727]

@Mwfan1921

Here is an example of the type of prompts I’m talking about from UIUC:

So I will say that my kid (admittedly UIUC was the reachiest school they applied to), non business major, would have battled to answer the first part of this question without a direct experience related to it. But I think for business, as indicated in various posts above, you can find a wide variety of things that could be applicable and per the essay you only need one. (Also note that each part of the prompt is only 150 words here. It doesn’t actually have to be super detailed as a result.) However, most of the other “why this major” essays allowed for much more broad responses than the “describe an experience” one.

Not sure if I missed it during the discussion but at least in original post I didn’t see an indication of how selective the schools being considered are. That would probably inform responses as well (example the Cornell essay prompt posted earlier seems to be more difficult to be able to adapt general experiences to ). But there is still a way to do it. Using the example just above of waitressing - I can see that giving insight about how to run a restaurant business, for example, and I’d think a carefully thought out essay could show this. “Business” is just so wide a topic I think it gives a lot of leeway for this.

[Hummingbird30]

Thank you!