When you're applying for a Master's in Business Administration (MBA) program, the short-term and long-term goals essay is an essential element of your application. Effective creation of this essay requires a clear strategy, covering all the subtle nuances of a successful response. This is your opportunity to convey to the admissions board, intelligently and succinctly, your top-notch qualifications, your future vision, and your goals as a successful business leader. Perhaps most importantly, you must elucidate why their MBA program is the perfect one to help you reach your highest aspirations.
Read on to learn expert tips for crafting a compelling short-term and long-term goals essay that details your aspirations as an MBA student and a successful leader.
What Is the Short-Term and Long-Term Goals Essay?
The specific wording of the short-term and long-term goals essay request may vary from one graduate program to another, but all MBA admissions teams rely on this essay to help determine if you’re a good match for their program. You will be asked to explain why the MBA program to which you’re applying is essential for achieving your career goals. In many cases, the essay requirement includes several questions; you must carefully consider all of them and address all of them within your essay.
The questions you’ll see in the MBA short-term and long-term goals essay request are likely to include:
- Why did you select this MBA program?
- How do you envision this MBA program further transforming your personal and professional growth?
- What professional benefits do you hope to attain from this MBA program?
- How do you envision your post-MBA future?
- What are your short-term professional goals?
- What are your long-term professional goals?
- How will this MBA program help you achieve your short-term and long-term goals?
To answer such specific questions thoroughly, you need a clearly defined sense of self-worth: an honest view of your personal qualifications, skills, experiences, and aspirations. You also need detailed thought and communication skills. Convincing the admissions team that you are an ideal candidate requires a concise, compelling response.
Drafting the Short-Term and Long-Term Goals Essay
In order to define your short- and long-term professional goals, you must have a specific understanding of the differences between them:
Short-term professional goals help define where you envision yourself immediately after attaining your graduate degree. They offer precise indications of your intended career path, including your preferred type of industry, company, role, skills, and responsibilities.
Long-term professional goals describe how you envision your career development well into the future, perhaps 20 or more years beyond graduate school.
Gather the important materials that detail your professional history: your CV, current or previous work evaluations, awards, certificates, and letters of recommendation. Use these materials to identify your unique professional strengths, skills, past experiences, and goals.
Carefully build a list of reasons for applying to the MBA program you've selected. Examine the program's published literature, keeping a keen eye out for specified educational outcomes that are closely aligned with your personal and professional goals.
Now it's time to draft your short-term and long-term goals essay. You're well prepared, armed with a full complement of information about your own strengths and those of the program to which you’re applying. Without regard for sentence length or structure, answer every essay question as fully and clearly as possible. Consult your documents for appropriate wording, titles, dates, and other important details. Brainstorm every idea and put it in writing. The resulting paragraphs will be your rough draft, which you’ll now set out to polish.
Refining the Short-Term and Long-Term Goals Essay
Start refining the paragraphs into concise, compelling statements that speak directly to the point. It’s important to set an optimistic tone from the start. Express yourself confidently, decisively, and clearly. Weave appropriate examples into your short-term and long-term goals essay, taking care to answer the questions fully, without exceeding word-count limits.
Use these five tips to craft an impressive, persuasive essay:
Immediately Command the Reader's Attention
Begin with compelling statements describing your long-term professional goals and summarizing how your past experiences inform your vision of the future. Provide a synopsis of your strongest achievements and explain how they inspire your MBA goals.
Convey the Significance of Your Goals
Widen the context of your goals by explaining why they are important to you and how achieving them will serve a greater good. Emphasize your analytical skills by identifying a problem you wish to solve in your career, and describing the benefits that may result.
Highlight Your Qualifications
Promote yourself as the ideal person to achieve your long-term goals. Discuss your passion for success, detailing your relevant professional skills, specific work experiences, and related achievements. Summarize how your unique history and qualifications inspire and qualify you as the right person to achieve your post-MBA professional aspirations.
Discuss Your Program-Specific Goals
Focus on the opportunities offered by this MBA program: the knowledge and skills you hope to develop, faculty members with whom you hope to study, local internship and employment that this program can help you pursue, and so on—all items that are unique to this MBA program, rather than common to many. Discuss your ambitions for expanding and strengthening particular skills during your time in the program. Detail ways in which you plan to utilize the unique benefits which your chosen program can provide.
Conclude With a Call to Action
Your concluding paragraph should discuss the ways this MBA program will help accelerate your professional growth. Discuss your short-term goals by describing your immediate, post-graduation career plans and the ways in which they’ll empower you to reach your long-term goals. End your short-term and long-term goals essay with a confident call to action, requesting admission based on your clearly defined passion, personal qualifications and aptitude for successfully realizing your professional goals.
Make your goals your reality
Develop your business acumen, enhance your global perspective, and build a lifelong network in CSUMB’s Responsible Business Online MBA program. The entirely online curriculum offers in-depth experiences across the full spectrum of business administration, delivered with the flexibility to fit your schedule.
Take the first step toward the success you envision. Schedule an appointment with one of our Admissions Advisors today.