Avi Gordon - MBA admissions strategy: from profile building to essay writing

MBA Admissions Strategy

Amazon.com reviews for the first edition:

Amazingly good

This book is incredible. Im in the process of applying. If youve got the time to devote to doing apps right, this book will guide you through a surprisingly rigorous, insightful, and valuable process to decide on and write your essays. Particularly if youre of an analytical mindset, it will help you apply very helpful, intuitive frameworks to thinking about your app. Buy this book.

Great book, great value

This book was very informative and a quick read. This was my first attempt at getting into grad school. Ive been out for over 15 years and I had no idea where to begin. The book outlines section by section what adcom is looking for and gave me some ideas as to how to minimize any weaknesses I had on my application.... I have been accepted to one of the top 20 schools in the nation. I only applied to one school! So excited.

This book helped me get into INSEAD

If you buy only one book about how to apply to a top 20 MBA, make it this book!

Easy to read, straight to the point, very practical, it makes you take the customers (MBA admissions committee) viewpoint on your application with lots of insights into what happens with your application after you send it in ... By luck I stumbled across this book and I would say it helped me tremendously to get into INSEAD (ranked No. 5 worldwide in latest FT ranking).

Best book on the subject

MUST HAVE BOOK. By far the best book on the subject.

Even if you have already purchased Richard Montauk book or any other MBA consulting book, I still advise that you buy and read this book.

If you have not purchased any book yet, I strongly recommend you to start with this book.

If you are targeting top 15 MBA programs, reading this book will be the best thing you could do to improve your chances.

Pros

1) Very structured approach. It begins with helping you profile yourself.

2) No nonsense material. Very brief, succinct and to the point.

3) It leaves the obvious clutter out. Author does not repeat himself. I think this is the biggest plus of this book. There are many top sellers (no names), which are too thick at the expense of being repetitive.

4) Comprehensive.

5) Refined. Polished.

I couldnt agree more

I have bought a LOT of MBA books, pretty much everything you can think about, but I have never written a review for any one of them. I honestly felt guilty not to write one for this book. That should just give you an idea of how good this book is. This is the book that you WANT to read. Most people who give reviews dont mention what I consider the single most important part of this book: Whoever you are or whatever you have done, if you want to go to b-school, you can.

Amazon.co.uk reviews for the first edition:

Well worth the money

This is a succinct and at the same time comprehensive guide for anyone targeting the top schools. Reading the book in the beginning of the application process will save a lot of time later on. I found it especially helpful at the brainstorming stage and in developing themes and positioning. Tips on essay writing are invaluable.

Well written and full of insights

The book is dedicated towards tackling essays which is an area which many (including me) struggle with. The book repeatedly emphasises the importance of marketing oneself through the application campaign. It does an excellent job in this respect as it is filled with insights such as personality profiling, extracting themes and mapping these themes into the essays ... Full of useful self-marketing tips such as creating your own memorable labels to insert into the essays.

I wish I had read the book earlier! This book certainly stands out among the crowd of books on the subject.

Fantastic. Well-written and very helpful

I highly recommend this book. It is one of the newest MBA admissions strategy offerings, so I figure the info is up-to-date. The 22 specific attributes, and the way they fall on the diagram of 4 general attributes have been very helpful to me in writing my essays. Also the essay archetypes saved a lot of time. The real surprise though is that this book is enjoyable to read. I have reread some sections several times, the advice is logical and nuanced.

Itll make the difference between good and great

A great GMAT score on its own wont get you into a top business school, an average one makes it even harder (but not impossible) your essays make all the difference!

I really enjoyed this book and its practical advice and guidance really helped. Im off to an Ivy League school in the States this year, down in no small part to essays written after reading this book:

BUY IT!

From profile building to essay writing

2nd Edition

Avi Gordon

Open University Press
McGraw-Hill Education
McGraw-Hill House
Shoppenhangers Road
Maidenhead
Berkshire
England
SL6 2QL

email: enquiries@openup.co.uk
world wide web: www.openup.co.uk

and Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121-2289, USA

First published 2010

Copyright Avi Gordon 2010

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of Saffron House, 610 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-0-33-524117-0
ISBN-10: 0-33-524118-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP data applied for

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in the UK by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow

Fictitious names of companies, products, people, characters and/or data that may be used herein (in case studies or in examples) are not intended to represent any real individual, company, product or event.

The first edition of MBA Admissions Strategy has been critically and commercially well received. Most gratifying of all has been the reader response from its core target readershipMBA applicantsparticularly the many who have written reader reviews on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk reader to say how much the book helped them. I too have learned a lot in the intervening years from my clients, from other admissions coaches, and from the business schools themselves, so this new edition gives me the opportunity to add this in.

Also, trends move fast in MBA Admissions, demanding an updating and refinement of the methods of the book. While written essays remain the core of the communication between applicant and admissions committee, and this wont change anytime soon, there are clear trends to augmenting written essays with alternative submissions: presentations, multimedia essays, and so on. This gets more play here. Further, driven by the same trends towards visual and talk-based communication, the MBA interview is becoming ever more important. In this edition the interview gets a whole chapter. Other trends are affecting the MBA Admissions field. Social media, for example, has changed how schools communicate and how applicants do their due diligence. Business scandals and business ethics have changed corporate practice. All these are increasingly reflected in MBA admissions and therefore considered at greater length here.