Confused about your MBA Recommendation, the failure essay, or if NGO work matters? Get clear, expert answers from GyanOne’s MBA admissions consultants.

MBA Recommendation, Failure Essays, and Other Admissions FAQs

Choosing the right person to write your MBA recommendation, answering the dreaded failure essay, and figuring out whether your extracurriculars are “good “enough”—these are some of the most common questions we hear from MBA applicants. In this guide, we break down exactly how to approach each one, based on years of experience helping candidates get into top MBA programs.

How to Choose the Right MBA Recommender

Not every strong professional relationship makes for a strong MBA recommendation—and not every impressive title does either. B-school admissions committees are unlikely to be impressed by a recommender’s credentials if that person cannot write about you in real, specific detail.

At the same time, if you can get an MBA Recommendation from someone who is genuinely well-known and respected and knows your work well, that combination is hard to beat. Two examples make this clearer:

Example 1: Choosing between the senior manager you work with every day and the company’s COO, who once asked you to help pull together data for a board presentation → Go for the senior manager. Familiarity with your actual work wins.

Example 2: Choosing between that same senior manager and a highly respected industry figure (assuming they agree to write it and know your work well) → Go for the well-known figure, since here you get both credibility and substance.

The best way to secure a strong MBA Recommendation is straightforward: do good work, build a reputation as a strong performer, and maintain a genuine relationship with whoever you choose as your recommender.

One more thing to keep in mind—asking your direct boss for an MBA Recommendation signals that you intend to leave the organization if admitted. Some applicants deliberately choose a different manager or a former supervisor for this reason.

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Best Practices for Requesting an MBA Recommendation

Questions about failure are another common set of questions seen in many B-school applications. Apart from the obvious takeaway of “learning from the mistake/failure,” what are some of the other aspects that the MBA Admissions team is trying to learn about the candidate? There are two other important aspects that the Admissions team is trying to judge through this particular question.

The first is whether the candidate is aware of his or her weaknesses and has the humility to acknowledge when he/she has been successful. We are all human and at some point in time can make a mistake.

The important part is being able to acknowledge it. The second aspect is how the person reacted to the failure. This is different from what the person learned from the failure, and what the school is trying to judge here is how the applicant reacts to challenges and addresses them.

Some applicants tend to shy away from mentioning real failures, as they feel that doing so will project them as poor candidates. This is not true at all. In fact, doing the opposite may cause more harm.

Teamwork questions/essays on MBA applications

Teamwork has been given great emphasis in MBA applications. Most MBA candidates have team experiences throughout their career.

What specific experiences and characteristics are being analyzed with teamwork-related questions? The basic attributes being analyzed through teamwork-related questions are fairly clear—your ability to be an effective part of a team, to be comfortable working in a group setting, and to be able to manage and get along with others.

While these are the basic factors, there may be more depending on the school one applies to, as different schools view this characteristic differently. Some schools are very particular about asking for evidence of group achievement, while others are not too concerned about it.

This is why knowing the school you are applying to inside out can be very important. A good admissions consultant will usually be able to give you a perspective on this that goes way beyond what just the website will offer.

Does NGO or Social Impact Experience Matter for MBA Admissions

Some MBA applicants feel that leadership via community involvement is an important part of the assessment. As a result, they feel that they are underprepared to apply if they do not have some NGO work or social contribution to show for their MBA applications.

Is community involvement or social contribution a critical part of an MBA application? Will not having such involvement to show make your application ‘weak’ on extracurriculars? The short answer is no.

For the long answer, one needs to understand two important aspects of this issue. First, it is important to understand that community involvement is not a prerequisite for admission to all top programs.

Some programs do emphasize it, but not having had community involvement certainly does not make one’s application weaker. Similarly, some people believe that a passing involvement with the local NGO will provide a boost to their application. Both beliefs are wrong.

It is also important to understand that extracurricular activities are not all about community involvement. Running a marathon, collecting rare coins, or writing poems is an extracurricular activity too.

Having no community involvement might not hurt your application, but having nothing to show as an activity outside work will. Your work achievements will not compensate on this front—professional achievements are viewed as distinct from activities outside work. It is important, in the view of MBA Admissions Committees, to be an interesting person outside work as well.

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