What is a personal brand and how can cultivating one help you get accepted to business school?
What Is A Personal Brand?
Personal branding is key to successful leadership, according to Talent Peak Advisors LLC, whose founder, Soojin Kwon, served for 18 years as head of MBA admissions and program at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.
Kwon explained in correspondence on LinkedIn: “Your personal brand is what you convey about yourself and how you’re perceived, shaped by your skills, qualifications, values, personality, and how you present yourself.”
Mary Van de Wiel, dubbed a “brand psychologist” by Time magazine, has an aspirational view of personal branding. Rather than thinking of our brand as our past accomplishments and characteristics, we might think of our brand as our ideal future self. In correspondence on LinkedIn, Van de Wiel said, “Your personal brand is a creative expression of who you are and who you want to become.”
How A Personal Brand Can Strengthen Your MBA Applications
Van de Wiel’s way of looking at personal branding could be useful to MBA candidates who are facing a classic application prompt that asks about their short-, medium- and long-range goals. Van de Wiel’s advice is to think big: “Try daring yourself to be as bold and exuberant as you like.”
Van de Wiel encourages people to emphasize the “personal” in their personal brand. “We’re operating in the 21st Century Business Unusual world. People expect transparency.”
“Let people hear your voice and your back story,” says Van de Wiel. “Where do you come from? Be proud of that. Make that part of your unique story. Think about your values and tap into what you stand for. What has meaning and purpose for you?”
This will sound familiar to MBA candidates who may have been puzzling over questions that seem to have little to do with traditional business skills. Such questions are trying to get at, in Van de Wiel’s words, “what makes you tick.”
For example, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business tries to shake things up with their signature essay, “25 Random Things About Me.” The University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business asks, “What makes you feel alive when you are doing it, and why?”
Personal Branding And The MBA Admissions Process
Now that you know what a personal brand is, you may be wondering how it figures in an MBA admissions committee’s deliberations.
Kwon explains MBA admissions in terms of personal brand: “The admissions process is essentially about evaluating whether an applicant’s personal brand is a good fit – through what they share in their essays, what their recommenders say about them, how they show up and interact with an interviewer, and sometimes, what they share online.”
A Note Of Caution
Nevertheless, some expert admissions consultants caution applicants against getting carried away with marketing themselves. In correspondence on WhatsApp, Betsy Massar, award-winning founder of Master Admissions, told me, “I think the concept of a brand gets in the way of reality. That just really leads people astray and makes them want to look like some kind of a packaged good or an Instagram personality.”
Authenticity
However, there is one thing on which experts agree. As Massar puts it, “The idea is really to show who you are in the application and be genuine about it. You are who you are and if that is clear in the application it should show through.”
Kwon too stresses authenticity: “The best differentiation strategy is for applicants to be authentic – i.e., true to themselves, because no other applicant will have the same combination of values, beliefs, skills and life experiences.”
Whether or not you call it a brand, a clear presentation of what makes you “you” is an important part of your MBA applications.
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