Striking the right balance between confidence and humility is a critical skill for MBA applicants crafting their essays. Pola Lem, alongside co-hosts Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards, delve into this nuanced topic, providing valuable insights from a Fortuna Admissions piece. The discussion emphasizes the importance of demonstrating achievements with evidence rather than making unsubstantiated claims. Caroline highlights that admissions committees favor concrete evidence over bold assertions. Utilizing frameworks like STAR—Situation, Task, Action, Result—can help applicants illustrate their impact convincingly.

A key takeaway is the difference between merely stating you are a leader and showing specific instances where you led effectively. As Pola explains, vague labels like “passionate leader” can feel cliché or cringeworthy. Instead, detailing a scenario—such as turning around an underperforming team by engaging with specific team members—can significantly enhance the narrative. Maria underscores the importance of painting vivid scenes that allow admissions readers to truly see and feel your experiences.

These strategies are not just beneficial for essays but hold value in interviews and recommendations as well. Applicants should guide their recommenders to provide specific examples, enhancing authenticity and impact. This episode provides actionable advice for applicants seeking to project confidence effectively, ensuring their stories resonate without veering into arrogance.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain minor inaccuracies.

[00:00:03] – Pola

Every MBA applicant hits this wall at some point. The sentence where you have to say something good about yourself. Too modest and you disappear into a pile of similar resumes. Too bold and you seem arrogant. Today we’re breaking down a new piece from Fortuna Admissions on how to strike that balance. How to project confidence, but without the cringe. I’m Pola Lem from Poets& Quants, and my co-hosts, of course, are Maria Wich-Vila from ApplicantLab and Caroline Diarte Edwards at Fortuna Admissions. So let’s get into it. This week’s article makes a distinction between a claim, like saying, I’m a natural leader, versus evidence, which is actually showing a moment that you led. So Caroline, In this sort of context of the MBA application essay, how often do you see applicants leaning on claims without evidence?

[00:01:04] – Caroline

I think it’s a temptation to communicate their strengths and, and therefore make claims about the qualities that they have and that they bring to the table when they come to an MBA program. What candidates need to keep in mind is that Schools are always looking for concrete evidence, and so you need to back up any claims that you make. And so that’s why they give you space in your application. That’s why they have essays. That’s why they give you some room to explain your current job or what you’ve achieved. A lot of the questions in the applications are looking for that concrete evidence, and admissions committees always take the perspective that That past performance is the best predictor of future potential. So when they’re looking to understand your past performance, they’re looking for that concrete evidence. So they’re looking for the facts and figures of what you’ve done. Schools will often ask behavioral questions, and those can come into video questions. More and more schools, as we’ve discussed, have video questions. This will also likely come into the interviews. You’ll get asked behavioral questions, and a typical structure for responding to those behavioral questions is the STAR framework, right?

[00:02:26] – Caroline

So, explaining the situation, the task that you were faced with, and then the action that you took and the result that that had. So, that is a great structure for— you can use that framework for conveying your achievements and the impact that you’ve had and demonstrating demonstrating the evidence that speaks to the qualities that you bring. So, that’s important to keep in mind in what you say in your application, but also of course what recommenders say about you, because that can sometimes be an issue with recommendations where they will talk about the strengths that they’ve observed, but if they don’t back that up with evidence, then that is not necessarily very useful to the file reader. So, it’s important also to work with your recommenders so that they have some really good concrete examples. to give to back up what they’re saying about the strengths that they’ve observed.

[00:03:25] – Pola

I’m definitely glad that we’re talking about concretes. I think that as an interviewer, this is what I really work hard and sometimes struggle to draw out of people. And this piece, I should say, is titled Confidence Without the Cringe: How to Sell Yourself in Your MBA Application Without Overselling. So, I really love that title because I think I think when I hear words like passionate leader, phrases like that, I don’t know, that gives me a cringe. And I know that sometimes that’s not entirely avoidable. You know, you want to very quickly describe who you are to someone in one of these essays. But as much as possible, I think exactly what you said, really drilling down into those concrete details. is extremely useful, not just to a journalist, but to someone who’s trying to get to know you very quickly through an application. So, Maria, this piece gives this example. Instead of writing, quote, I turned around an underperforming team, describe the actual moment. So, the time that you sat down with 2 teammates who’d stopped speaking, the questions you asked, what changed. Why is it that that level of specificity matters so much to an admissions reader?

[00:04:50] – Maria

It lets them picture you in that moment. It really sets the scene. So when a reader has just started getting to know you, your whole life is a blank canvas to them. It’s an empty screen. You were in that moment. You can revisit in your mind. You know exactly what the conference room looked like. You know what the emotions were in the room. You know what those conflicts were. But the reader has no idea. So it’s on you as The screenwriter essentially to choose which elements you’re gonna use to bring that scene to life for them. And usually the best way to do that is to focus more on verbs and insights that you had as opposed to adjectives. So, try to limit the amount of adjectives you use to describe yourself. And the article also talks about this too. So, great. All of those great minds think alike. Like, don’t say, I’m someone who, uh, you know, helps people get along. Actually show me, use those same number of words to say, I sat down, I said, look guys, we’re all on the same team, we need to figure out a way forward. That illustrates it so much better.

[00:05:51] – Maria

And in fact, you’re making the case because you are using that concrete evidence. You’re illustrating it. I can now picture you in that conference room sitting down with those people, as opposed to having to take your word for it, which is just like, hey, I’m a really great person.

[00:06:05] – Pola

Yeah, I think one line that stood out to me from this, a quote from the piece, about that stacking of adjectives you’re talking about is if you say something like, you know, I’m driven, collaborative, analytical. I mean, sounds very cool, but it kind of falls flat because it lacks a scene to attach it to, as you’re saying. So, Caroline, in your experience, what’s the most common adjective that applicants overuse without backing it up?

[00:06:35] – Caroline

Yeah, driven is a good one. I mean, a common pet peeve, or one of my pet peeves, is some applications ask you to describe strengths and weaknesses, or they’ll ask you in some form to describe your opportunities for development. And something that I’ve seen way too many times is people who claim that they are a perfectionist and that that is their weakness. And it’s just, it’s obviously what they’re trying to do is instead they’re trying to look good, right? So they’re not being very honest in most cases about their true weaknesses. And so, I think that there’s also, it’s good to show the confidence that you could really own your true weaknesses and that you can own your failures. And I think that’s an important part of striking the right balance in the confidence that you portray in your application. So, candidates who actually do have real confidence and self-awareness, and maturity are able to own their weaknesses and recognize them and own their failures. And actually, and it may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes the best candidates have the most disastrous stories of failure that they can point to and that they’ve learned from, right?

[00:08:04] – Caroline

And I think the article makes this point that if you’ve never failed, then you are not trying hard enough, right? So, candidates who have really pushed themselves in their careers, who’ve taken risks, who’ve pushed themselves outside of their comfort zone. Sometimes that will have gone well and sometimes it won’t, and they will have learned a great deal from the times when it didn’t go well. And so having the confidence to spell that out in your application, I think, is also very valuable because it shows humility, it shows self-awareness, it shows maturity if you can If you can own up to the things that haven’t gone so well and recognize that that’s part of your learning path and part of your development. And being able to acknowledge those failures and where you need to develop is also a very important part of being a great MBA student, because if you are aware of how you need to develop and where you failed in the past, you are likely more receptive to the learning that you are going to go through in in the MBA classroom and outside of the classroom during the whole MBA experience. So that is also a very important signal that admissions committees are looking for.

[00:09:28] – Pola

Yeah, what you said kind of reminds me of almost like a— this is a poor metaphor, but a soldier going to war. You know, you want someone who’s battle-hardened on your side. You don’t want the guy who’s green and has never shot a rifle before, right?

[00:09:40] – Caroline

Right.

[00:09:42] – Pola

So Maria, this article also warns against essays that go so far in crediting the team that the reader can’t even really tell what the candidate did personally, where they’re writing, we did this, we did that, and everything’s just become we. Is that a pattern that you see often, especially among candidates coming from more collaborative industries like maybe consulting or finance? Absolutely.

[00:10:12] – Maria

And it’s tricky because we are taught that it might sometimes, and at least in a corporate environment, you do want to credit the team and you do want to say, great job, team, we all did it together. Uh, and so, this is a bit of a mindset shift for when people are now applying. But I tell people frequently, your team isn’t applying, you are applying. So, if you say, we did this, we got the client to agree to our demands, What role did you play within that we? What was the I within that we? Did you come up with the idea for what that counteroffer was going to be? Did you take someone else’s counteroffer and phrase it in a more palatable way because you knew the client psychology more than the partner did? Whatever the situation was, I need to know what you specifically did because all of you as a group are not applying to business school.

[00:11:02] – Pola

And if you were, then hopefully collectively you’d be footing the bill, so that would be a bit lower. Caroline, on the flip side, how do you coach someone who’s just saying me, me, me and taking all the credit without naming the people, the other people who are part of their team?

[00:11:25] – Caroline

Yeah, well, it’s a question of drilling down into the detail of what actually happened and the different contributions that people had. And it can be cultural as well. Some cultures are more team-oriented and group-oriented, than others. And so, that can be an issue for, for example, for some Asian candidates, where compared to some US candidates. So, US candidates are often more comfortable about talking about what they individually did, and some other cultures are less comfortable with that. So, it’s a question of drilling down into the details of what actually happened. And it can be, it’s also, often helpful to credit others. So whilst you do have to be very clear about what you did and what you achieved, it’s good to also recognize the role that others played, and perhaps in how other people gave you feedback or other people mentored you. That also shows maturity and self-awareness to recognize that you haven’t got to where you are today entirely thanks to how incredible and wonderful you are as an individual, that other people have played a role in your achievements and getting you to where you are today, and may have played a role in some of your professional achievements as well.

[00:12:52] – Caroline

So, it’s definitely a balance to strike, and I think that sometimes getting a third-party perspective on how that’s coming across, that you are being clear enough about what you did and what you achieved yourself, but also that you are not coming off as too arrogant and not team-oriented enough. Because of course, schools do want people who are team-oriented because when you’re at business school, you’ll be doing a lot of work in a team context. And so, having the ability to work effectively with others, And learn from others and facilitate other people’s learning and lift other people up. That is all a very important part of the MBA experience and an important skill that future recruiters will be looking at as well. So it’s very much about striking the right balance.

[00:13:49] – Pola

In thinking about arrogance and also feedback, the article makes the point that people are often bad judges of their own tone and not necessarily always that good at naming their own strengths, partly because what might come easily to us doesn’t really feel very special. Maria, how do you help a candidate identify a strength they’ve been discounting and equally figuring out how to set that right tone?

[00:14:22] – Maria

Well, as Caroline just mentioned, one of the best ways to do this is to simply ask other people, you know, ask your boss or even your colleagues, like, hey, in that last project we worked on together, what could I have done better? Or what do you think I brought that was particularly strong? Like, what do you think my main contribution was? Because I think that can really help us avoid— the best way to avoid the blind spot is for us to not try to figure out what it is on our own, but to ask other people about that. And I also think, though, reflecting, I have an exercise in ApplicantLab where really, once you tell the story, ask yourself which of these personality traits really helped lead. If I had to distill it down to say somewhere between 3 to 5 personality traits that came across in this story, which personality traits were there? And there’s actually a little button where once you do the exercise, it calculates for you and it tells you what your strongest brand traits are. So, I think some of us might have a solid intuition, but in case you don’t, there are ways to sort of sit down and actually analyze yourself, perhaps try to distance yourself a bit from the story and look at yourself with a more clinical or scientific or objective eye and try to figure that out.

[00:15:37] – Maria

But yeah, I think it’s a tough thing, but I don’t know. This is also why I think applying to business school once you’ve been in the workforce for at least, say, 3 minimum years, if not more, is also valuable because the more work experience you have, there’s so many reasons why it’s valuable to wait. But one of the many reasons is that the more time you’ve been in the workforce, the more you can start to observe, like, when am I at my best? In which circumstances am I at my best? In which circumstances am I maybe not at my best? And so, that sort of reflection only comes from experience.

[00:16:07] – Pola

Yeah, and there’s more structured ways of doing that sometimes if you’re not necessarily in tune with your gut so much. So we’ve already talked a little bit about setbacks and failures and how they can be useful, but there’s a really good quote in here in the piece that says, the setbacks that work are the ones where the candidate is still a little uncomfortable telling the story. Do you agree, Caroline, that discomfort is a good sign in an essay draft?

[00:16:44] – Caroline

Well, I think that it’s good to show that you can be a bit vulnerable and that you can share something that maybe isn’t sort of relating to what I was saying earlier about claiming your weaknesses, that you’re a perfectionist, right? That is trying to make it— just give an example that makes you look good. Right? And so, it’s counterproductive because it doesn’t actually give the FAR reader what they’re looking for. And so, if you have the honesty to share something that is a little bit uncomfortable, it makes you look more honest, more authentic, and it shows that you’re not only trying to share information that in all cases makes you look absolutely fantastic, right? So it shows that you are a complex person with strengths, with weaknesses, that you are on a learning path and that business school is the right next step for you because you have self-awareness, you are aware of how you need to develop and that you are not always perfect at what you do. And that makes— and then it makes a lot of sense that you want to go to graduate school. to go to the next level. So having that ability to be a little bit humble and vulnerable, I think is helpful.

[00:18:13] – Caroline

It’s also quite powerful to read. So it can be quite impressive to read that because most candidates don’t really dare to go there. And so that can help to grasp the FAR reader’s attention. I think that’s also why it’s helpful to have these concrete details that we’ve been talking about that sort of put the file reader in the room, because it brings it to life, right? It’s quite dull to read a list of adjectives about what you think are your greatest strengths. But if you can tell a story, then when the file reader is reading dozens of applications back to back, that story can help it to come to life, and it just makes it so much more interesting for them to read, right? And so, If you can make it more interesting, it will be more memorable and that will help you to stand out. So those stories and those details can really help your application come to life.

[00:19:15] – Pola

Definitely. Yeah. I think back to that point of saying, you know, I’m a, I’m, I’m my, the thing that I get wrong is I’m a perfectionist, right? Like that, that’s my fault. I thought just if it makes you roll your eyes, it’s going to make your file reader roll their eyes. eyes and cringe. So maybe just don’t do it.

[00:19:37] – Maria

Yeah.

[00:19:38] – Pola

So before we wrap up today, we’re going to switch gears a little bit. So there was a post on LinkedIn that caught my eye, and this is a new analysis from Inside Business Schools, which looks at alumni presence from 7 UK business schools across 10 major consulting firms. And The sort of top line here is London Business School comes out at the top with a pretty wide margin, nearly 2,500 alumni across those big firms with strong presence at McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and other boutique shops as well. And then Warwick Business School coming in second overall, but leading in the Big Four firms, Deloitte, EY, PwC. And so Caroline, is that split what you’d expect? And let’s talk about why these numbers are somewhat skewed also.

[00:20:39] – Caroline

Yeah, so I would have expected LBS to come out top, and that is the case. In data that I’ve seen before, when you look at the schools in Europe, then there are 3 schools primarily that are very strong for placing students in consulting. So that’s London Business School, INSEAD, and ESA. So those are, from what I’ve seen, by far and away the strongest programs if you want to go work in consulting when you graduate. And so it makes sense that LBS is number 1 here. I was surprised at how high Warwick ranks here. And it does seem that the data that they’ve based this on is perhaps not very clean, right? So, They mention in the methodology notes that people may not have put the business school on their LinkedIn profile. If they, for example, attended Oxford and Cambridge, it may say on the LinkedIn profile, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge. It may not specify Cambridge Judge or Oxford Saïd, for example. So it may underplay the numbers for some schools. And then also, Warwick leads particularly with Deloitte, E&Y, and PwC, and those firms do a lot more than consulting. So they’re also doing auditing, accounting, tax advisory.

[00:22:14] – Caroline

They’re quite broad professional advisory firms. And so I don’t know to what extent the Warwick graduates, for example, may not be on the consulting side, but maybe on maybe doing accounting work, right? That it doesn’t seem to be separated out here. So I’m not sure how useful this is as input for someone who is targeting consulting and looking to go to business school.

[00:22:42] – Pola

Well, I was about to ask you, Maria, whether you’d take this with a grain of salt as well.

[00:22:49] – Maria

I mean, not just a grain. I would take this entire cup full of salt.

[00:22:54] – Caroline

Mm-hmm.

[00:22:55] – Maria

I mean, at least I do appreciate that they themselves pointed out some of the flaws in the methodology. I think they point out like, hey, this is just meant to be directionally useful because, you know, there’s a huge difference in the sizes of the class between these different schools. I mean, LBS graduates a lot more people than, say, Said at Oxford and Judge at Cambridge. You know, so as a percentage of the class, we don’t know. LBS is a 2-year program, does give people an opportunity to do that summer internship that perhaps some of those briefer or shorter programs may not allow. So it’s really— it’s not even an apples-to-apples or an apples-to-oranges— it’s an apples-to-crumpets comparison, uh, because it’s, it’s a little bit difficult to really parse things out. Um, they also say that it also could be if someone just listed the school as maybe they attended an executive program there or a short-form program or they were an exchange student. So— Look, I get it. This data is super messy and I don’t envy them the task of trying to comb through it. But wow, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna make a statement like this, which is a pretty bold statement, um, I do think that maybe pulling out people who just spent, you know, I was at, I was at LBS for a few weeks on an exchange program is very different than I went there for the full 2 years.

[00:24:13] – Maria

So I don’t know. I just, I think that this is, it’s interesting to look at, but I would really love to see a little bit more rigor put into the filtering of it and also looking at the relative class size as well, again.

[00:24:28] – Pola

Well, that sounds right. The raw data is quite messy, as you’ve both said, and they do, in fairness, caveat this, saying all the— making a lot of these points. But yes, take it with a cup of salt, as Maria says. And on that note, actually, you know what, I’ll say one final thing, which is apples to crumpets is a great catchphrase, and I hope we can bring that in in future episodes. So on that note, that is it for this episode. And if you’re deep into your applications right now, we hope this helped. See you next time. And if you like what you heard today, please check out—

[00:25:11] – Caroline

Our website.

[00:25:11] – Pola

other episodes of Business Casual, you can find those on Poets and Quants or on our various distribution platforms. So thank you everyone for listening, and thanks so much, Maria and Caroline. Have a great rest of your week. Thank you.