How To Express Your Career Goals On An MBA Application
ApplicantLab |
July 2, 2025

When preparing your MBA application, articulating your career goals is a pivotal component that can significantly influence your acceptance into a top program. In the latest episode of “Business Casual,” John Byrne, Maria Wich-Vila, and Caroline Diarte Edwards dive into what makes a compelling career narrative for MBA applicants. They discuss how your ambitions, while needing to be grand and transformative, must also remain realistic and logically connected to your past experiences.

Caroline emphasizes the balance between ambition and realism. Schools seek applicants whose goals are not only inspiring but also attainable based on their background. She highlights the importance of establishing a clear narrative thread that links your previous experiences to your future aspirations. While MBA programs are ideal for making career transitions, schools want to ensure that you’re not setting yourself up for failure by chasing unrealistic goals, especially in competitive fields like private equity or venture capital.

Maria adds to this by explaining how critically admissions committees evaluate career goals due to their impact on school rankings and employment outcomes. Given that a significant portion of rankings is influenced by post-graduation employment rates and salaries, schools are keen to admit candidates with credible, well-thought-out career plans. For applicants, this means meticulously crafting a career story that convincingly positions them as worthy future alums who can thrive in their desired fields.

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:06] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Burner with Poets & Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-host, Caroline Diarte Edwards and Maria Wickvilla. Maria, of course, is the founder of applicantLab, and Caroline is a former head of admissions at NCI and the co founder of Fortuna Admissions. We want to talk about careers. Obviously, anyone who applies to an MBA program and gets in is very focused on their career. They want it to be meaningful. They want to feel fulfilled. They want to make a positive contribution. I think the MBA degree in and of itself signals your ambition to do all that for yourself. But what at this stage of filling out your application should you be telling the admissions people to enhance your chances of getting in to a highly selective MBA? Caroline, how does someone frame this?

[00:01:01] – Caroline

Well, so there are two words that spring to mind, and this is what I was always looking at when I was looking at applications at INSEAD. So you want to see that a candidate has ambitious goals, but also that they are realistic, right? So you want them to have some grand ambition for what they want to achieve in the future because the school is looking for people who are going on to be successful, that are really going to make the most of the MBA experience and leverage the education, the network, the many assets that you gain from that MBA experience, and that they will succeed in their career, and that they will have a positive impact when they graduate. So being ambitious is critical, but they also want to see that you’re realistic in your goals. So there has to be some logical thread between who you are, the skills that you’ve built so far, your background and what you want to do in the future. Now, there’s a fine line to trend because, of course, most candidates are looking to make some career change. They may be looking to change their function. They might be looking to change their industry sector, or they might be looking to change their geography.

[00:02:15] – Caroline

Many candidates are looking to change all three, and many do change on all three dimensions. But schools like to see that there is some logical thread between what you’ve done in the past and what you’re passionate about and what you want do in the future. You can, of course, use the MBA to reinvent yourself, and most people are looking to do that, and schools are very happy that you’re looking for that transformational experience, but they still want to see that there is some link between what you’re bringing to the table when you arrive at business school, how you’re then going to rework yourself with the program, and then what you’ll be able to go on and do afterwards. And they’re also thinking about it from the perspective of the recruit, recruiter. So while the school is looking at your application and assessing it from the perspective of what you will bring to the business school community and what student you will be, they are also putting themselves in the shoes of the recruiters, and they’re looking at your background and your goals and looking at, okay, well, if this candidate says that they want to go and work for McKinsey, or they want to go and work for Amazon, or they want to go and work in private equity, if I were that recruiter, would I want to interview this person?

[00:03:30] – Caroline

Are they a credible candidate? Would they have the ability to secure that interview? Because schools don’t want to bring in candidates who are set up to fail. They don’t want to bring in students who are going to have unrealistic expectations about how they can use the MBA and what they can do when they graduate. Some career switches are more tricky than others. I mentioned private equity. A lot of people want to go into private equity or venture capital, and it is notoriously difficult. If you don’t have anything that’s relevant to private equity or venture capital in your background pre-MBA, it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to land that job post-MBA. They’re looking from that recruiter perspective to see, are you really a credible candidate to secure that interview?

[00:04:15] – John

Yeah, exactly. Now, Maria, you recently did a forte seminar on this very topic. What did you tell the people in attendance?

[00:04:24] – Maria

Yeah. So just to add on to what Caroline was just saying, looking at things from the recruiter angle, Actually, if we look at the US News & World Report methodology for the MBA rankings, about 62% of a school’s ranking is in some way related to either career outcomes, are the candidates employed three months after graduation? What’s their salary? What is the recruiter assessment score, which is a qualitative score that recruiters give to a school? If over half of a school’s ranking is dependent upon these career outcomes, it’s no surprise that the admissions officers themselves are incredibly interested in what that career story is and that it does need to be realistic. In terms of keeping the recruiters in mind, I’ve spoken with admissions officers from some schools that sometimes they’ll say, Look, if we like a candidate a lot, but the only thing that gives us pause is the career vision, we might take that person’s file down the hallway to the Career Services Office and just ask our friends and colleagues in Career Services, Can this person, in your experience, get this job that they are so set upon? If it seems like no, and that the person is just going to dig in their heels, and if it’s not this job, I’m not going to take any job, and I’d rather be unemployed than not take that one job in private equity, yikes.

[00:05:42] – Maria

That’s not going to necessarily reflect well on the school, certainly not in the US news rankings. A quip that I like to quip, and this will not be the first time for you guys hearing this, but it’s Harvard, it’s not Hogwarts. So business schools can take a lot of your background. If you think of yourself as almost like this unformed hunk of gold, a business school can help you shape that gold. It can help you polish the gold, but it can’t turn lead into gold. These are not alchemists. The example that Caroline just gave of private equity, if you have never built a discounted cash flow bottle in your life or any mezzanine debt type of thing, it’s going to be really, really hard if you don’t have at least the raw ingredients necessary to turn you into a private equity hire. So if that’s you, and right now you’re hearing this and you’re like, Well, that actually is what I want to do, no problem. But just realize that you yourself might have to present a plan in your application that takes a few steps prior to that private equity job. So first, you might need to work in investment banking for a couple of years.

[00:06:50] – Maria

You might need to take some extra classes on Excel modeling or whatever the latest tools are. So as long as you present that realistic plan, the onus is on you to prove that it’s doable. It’s not on them to take a huge leap of faith and just assume that you’re going to figure it out, because if you don’t figure it out, you’re going to blame them. That’s not a good outcome for anyone.

[00:07:14] – John

Another part of the career goals for a business school is to aspire to a leadership position. I think business schools generally want people who are ambitious for their own careers, as long as those goals are realistic. But isn’t it true? It’s not enough to say, Oh, I want a job at Apple in product management. That’s my ultimate goal. It’s way too low to be aiming for an MBA program. Am I right, Caroline?

[00:07:46] – Caroline

Yeah, and often schools are asking about your short term goals and your longer term goals. So they are looking for a more precise image of what you want to do post MBA because they want to kick the tires on how realistic that is, as we’ve said. But in the longer term, it doesn’t have to be quite as precise. And what they would like to see, as you say, is that you’ve got some grand ambition and you really want to have an impact on the world because, of course, the alumni community is a huge asset to the schools, and they want to populate that alumni community with people who are having tremendous impact in the world. And so that is very important to the school. Goals. Something to keep in mind is that with the short term goals, it doesn’t need to be realistic. It also needs to be more specific. The longer term goals don’t have to be as specific. Something else to keep in mind is that, of course, Schools know that your goals will probably change while you’re on the program. If you actually did some study to look at what people say in their admissions application about what they’re going to do when they graduate and what they actually end up doing, I mean, probably the majority of people do something quite different because it is such a transformative experience.

[00:09:06] – Caroline

You’ll be exposed to opportunities that would never have crossed your mind if you had not gone to business school. That’s one of the wonderful things about going off to business school is that it is so transformative. So it does seem a bit odd in some ways that schools are asking for career goals, given that they know that you probably won’t do exactly what you say. But nevertheless, they still ask about that because, and I saw this at INSEAD, if you have a candidate who has a clear plan that they’ve mapped out in their application, and also, of course, it’s not just what you put down in paper, it’s what you say the interview, and you’ll probably be quizz on your career goals, and they will want to understand if you’ve really thought it through carefully at the interview stage. If a candidate has a clear plan, even if when they come to business school, they have a complete change of heart. That candidate who had a clear career vision is more likely to reformulate their vision and come up with a clear plan, even if it’s a very different plan, versus a candidate who comes into business school who is very wishy-washy in their application about what they wanted to do.

[00:10:21] – Caroline

So even if your vision changes, they like to see that you have the ability to map out that plan because you’re more to reformulate it and execute on it. Conversely, candidates who are very wishy-washy in their application about what it is that they want to do, often when they get to business school, they’re pulled in many different directions. They might feel like, Oh, everyone’s applying to MBB. I must get on that train, and I must become a management consultant. Then other people are applying for investment banking, and, Oh, venture capital looks so exciting and shiny, so I I should do that, too. They tend to fragment their efforts across too many different opportunities. Those are typically the students who come up short at the end of the day and struggle to land an opportunity that they’re happy with. That ability to crystallize a vision and articulate it. Schools do see that there’s a correlation between how they behave when they’re on the program and then how successful they are in landing a job when they graduate.

[00:11:28] – John

I mean, in a way, it’s a good way to weed people who you suspect will be unhappy at the end of their one or two years in graduate school for business. One of the things I discovered in surveying so many graduates of MBA programs at business week over the years, is that if you have a happy ending, you love your experience. If you don’t have a happy ending, meaning you don’t get the job you wanted, or you don’t get a job right away, or you don’t get the salary level you were expecting, then that colors your entire perspective on the MBA experience so that you’re far more likely to reply in a more negative way on all the other questions about your education. I think it’s really important for an admissions officer to see, Hey, this goal is realistic. This person has a solid plan. Even if they don’t follow this map that they’re presenting today, they’re being thoughtful enough about so that whatever map they ultimately choose to follow, it will be as thoughtful as the one they’re presenting today. And that has to give admissions some confidence that they’ll have a happy camper at the end of the program.

[00:12:43] – John

Right, Maria?

[00:12:45] – Maria

Absolutely. And I call it the student-alumni recruter circle of life. So if a student gets the outcome that they like, then they become a happy alumnus, as you mentioned. And then frequently, those alumni then go out and become recruiters themselves. They go work for the MBB companies or the banks or the startups that come back and hire students. Then when they’re in a position to recruit others, they come back and they recruit the students. Then those students become alumni, and then the alumni become recruiters. It’s this positive, upwards, sloping- It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful- Virtuous circle. It’s a virtuous circle of life. Yeah, that’s absolutely something that the schools consider. The customer Satisfaction isn’t only on the student side. The customer satisfaction is also on the recruiter side. If a recruiter comes to campus and they spend the energy and the time to interview and they make offers, and then those students say, Well, thanks for your offer, but I’m really holding out for that hedge fund job that I’m never going to get, that also damages the school’s brand with the recruiters, too. So at least a dissatisfaction all around as well on the other side.

[00:13:55] – John

Talk about dissatisfied alums. This week in the news, there is a highly successful Wharton MBA, probably one of the most successful Wharton MBAs ever to graduate from the school. One firm puts his estimated networth in excess of $330 million. He was for a long time rumored to be a likely successor to Jamie Dimon at J. P. Morgan. He currently is Group CEO of a major bank based in the United Kingdom, Standard Chartered. Last year, he made over $14 million in compensation. He just came out and he said his MBA at Wharton was a waste of time. That far more valuable to him was his Humanities degree from Colgate University, where he majored in international Relations. Now, I should point out that he was able to get into the management trainee program at J. P. Morgan right out of Colgate. He decided after five, no, actually, after just, let’s see, three years to go to to get his MBA and then return to J. P. Morgan, where he spent 26 years before leaving and going on to other things. It’s shocking to me that someone as successful as that who got an MBA at the height of the MBA’s ROI in 1988 would decide today that his degree was a waste of time.

[00:15:23] – John

What sense do you make of this, Caroline?

[00:15:26] – Caroline

Well, I suspect that- You think he should have went to NCI, right?

[00:15:29] – John

Yeah, he would have been so much- You’re saying he should have went to Harvard.

[00:15:35] – Caroline

Managing an international company, if he’d gone to NCI, he would have had a much more international network. No, I’m joking. I think it was probably, I suspect he was just talking off the cuff, and it was a throw away comment, and it’s been blown out of proportion, of course. Journalists love to jump on comments like this and make a big deal out of it. But still, it is surprising. I mean, look, he graduated a long time ago. I wonder if he’s forgotten what he learned when he was at Wharton and how much he gained at the time, because it’s so many years ago that it’s probably pretty hazy in his memory. He went back to the same employer, so it’s possible that if you are going back into the same industry, going back to the same employer as where you were pre-MBA, perhaps you don’t feel that it was as transformative as for someone. As we said, most graduates are making a change in their career, which he didn’t. Perhaps people who have made some change give more credit to their degree than someone who perhaps got some acceleration in their career but didn’t necessarily make a dramatic change in their career.

[00:16:51] – Caroline

And then, I don’t know, I just think it’s a little bit odd. Maybe there’s some bad blood there between him and Wharton. I don’t know. I think it’s a little bit of strange comment, given how incredibly successful he is. If he was languishing at the lower management levels at standard charted, then I think maybe he could say, Well, Wharton wasn’t terribly useful. But look at what he’s achieved. I’m sure- I’m remarkable. His water degree helped him to some extent. I think it’s a little bit strange that he may make that comment.

[00:17:25] – John

It’s also interesting that when he graduated back in 1988, the MBA degree was more focused around technical skills, particularly in the area of finance, which is the field he chose. I can’t help but think it would have been very helpful to him in terms of his belief that communication, thinking skills, and empathy are more important today. He probably learned more of that in his undergraduate degree. I also find interesting because, of course, since the 1980s, business schools have really invested heavily on the soft skills side, probably much more so than hard skills. An MBA graduating today has to communicate clearly and effectively to do well in an MBA program. It’s such an essential part of what is taught in an MBA experience. Now, Maria, if he did go to Harvard Business School and half of his grade was dependent on classroom participation and how he answered cold calls, I think he would be a very effective communicator in the MBA program.

[00:18:34] – Maria

Well, I think, yes. I think the point, though, the point that you’re making is a good one. I think that this person credits his undergraduate education with giving him those soft skills. Also, since he was an international relations major, I would assume that it also perhaps gave him an international perspective that he didn’t have before. I think that some people come into business school perhaps without those soft skills and perhaps without that international viewpoint, that business schools today are very focused on providing both of those things to the current students. I think that this person was transformed by their educational experience, but I think that they felt that they were more transformed by their undergraduate experience. But the reasons that they gave for that transformation, the communication skills, the ability to think critically, all of those things, those are things that MBA programs today give, especially for people who perhaps were engineering majors or mathematics majors or science majors. So I actually think that what he is arguing is that it is important for your education to be one that gives you these soft skills. And perhaps for him, he already had those skills coming into business school, and/or perhaps at the time business school was not focused on soft skills.

[00:19:46] – Maria

But today, that’s exactly what business schools are offering. And so I would urge, should he ever get asked about this again, and should he choose to comment on it again, I would urge him to look a little bit more deeply into every business school, not just the case method schools, but every business school is really focused on providing these growth opportunities for their students. Hopefully, that would help change his mind a little bit about the value of the degree.

[00:20:11] – John

What’s interesting is that when he went to Wharton, the annual tuition was $15,000. Today, it’s $93,000. When he graduated in 1988, the average pay was $55,000. Today, it’s the median salary loan without a bonus is $175,000. But the other interesting thing here is because he returned to J. P. Morgan after getting his MBA, it’s highly likely that they actually picked up the tab for the degree, and he never even paid for it, which is the ultimate irony. I think he should be much more grateful than he is. Maybe that’s part of learning empathy and communication skills.

[00:21:01] – Caroline

I think sometimes when you get something for free, you don’t give it the full value that it has. Perhaps that’s the dynamic. Wharton should invite him back. I suspect, as Maria said, he’s not very up to date on what actually the business school experience is like today. I think Wharton should invite him back to campus and get him to meet some of the students and understand what the experience is like today.

[00:21:26] – John

That would be a brilliant idea.

[00:21:28] – Maria

He was also at J. P. Morgan 26 years, and J. P. Morgan being led by the famous HBS alum, Jamie Dimon. So maybe there’s some saltiness there.

[00:21:38] – John

The Harvard MBA, the Wharton MBA.

[00:21:41] – Maria

It’s just a coincidence that I’m pointing out casually.

[00:21:44] – John

I think there’s something to that, Maria. I really do. And for all of you out there, don’t be like this guy. When you apply to a business school and you talk about your career goals, don’t mention that a leading banker in the world said it was a waste of time, but you are going to give it the benefit of the doubt and go anyway. Don’t say that. All right. Good luck on your MBA journey. This is John Burnet with Poets & Quants. Thanks for listening.

P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
How To Express Your Career Goals On An MBA Application
ApplicantLab |
July 2, 2025

Video transcript, for you skimmers out there: 

I love the fact that they. Report on this metric, right? The salary percentage increase, I think is an incredibly valuable metric because there are so many business schools out there that are great for so many people. And at the end of the day, these programs are in fact able to do what a lot of business school applicants are hoping for.

They are in fact able to provide a real change in the trajectory of someone’s career. They are, in fact, able to help people leapfrog. Into a higher career stratum than they would’ve otherwise been able to be in. So from that perspective, I love the fact that the FT reports on the salary percentage increase.

So valuable. I think it helps, when sometimes I talk to people at the beginning of the business school journey, I will frequently hear something like, well, it’s M seven or bust, you know, it’s Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or bust.

And I’m often like, look, slow your roll, man. There are so many programs out there that are going to get you. They might not be the first ones that you think [00:01:00] of, but wow, does that even matter? I mean, whew. Look at some of these numbers. $170,000. That is nothing to sneeze at, especially if it’s one and a half times more than what you were making before business school.

I mean, wow. , That is life changing. , And these schools can really change people’s lives. And I think it’s important to have this metric available because I think it helps open people’s eyes. To, To be a little bit more open-minded. , And I think that’s wonderful.

Where my little quibble is. Is that I believe this is an important metric to report upon. However, I do not believe that it is a metric that should have significant amount of weight in the rankings because if we think about what is the purpose of a ranking, it is meant to be some sort of a representation of relative quality.

Now rankings. The entire concept of them is flawed the entire, for me, the entire concept of an ordinal ranking is ridiculous. Like school versus two versus four, versus seven versus six . You know, like, there, there’s sort of [00:02:00] these tiny miniature marginal differences. I think that school rankings should instead be in buckets.

Like, here is the top bucket, and then here is the also very good, but just underneath the top bucket, the next bucket. Um, but no one, no one listens to me. Uh, but so anyway, to the extent that a ranking. Is intended to be some sort of a measure of a program’s quality. I don’t think that this metric is one that should be included in the weighting.

Look, again, . Life-changing levels of improvements in salary. But when I look at, okay, so these were the top five programs by the salary percentage increase, but now when I look at it by the weighted salary, right, the top five US programs, by weighted salary, it’s not entirely accurate to say that.

Well, these programs, you start with people who have lower incoming salaries and they end up in the same place as the other programs. The numbers do not [00:03:00] really, , the numbers would tell a slightly different story. So if you look at the weighted salary a few years out for the top five programs by salary,

we’re talking about a $70,000 a year difference, roughly 240 a year versus 170 a year. That’s about a 40% difference, which I don’t think is a small, you know, if we were talking 5%, even 10%, I’d be like, yeah, 10%, that’s nothing. It’s, you know, nothing but 40% I do think is a pretty, I think it’s a pretty significant difference, uh, that is worth noting.

And so. Your point about like, well, they were letting in the people who were already on a, you know, if you were making, let’s see if we can, if we figure out, okay, so if we take this, these numbers, then we can sort of back into what’s an implied pre MBA salary, you know, that would indicate maybe something in the mid sixties before MBA versus, you know, one 10 something, [00:04:00] 1, 1 10, 1 15, for these other programs.

I get your argument. Your argument is like, look, these people were already clearly high achievers prior to business school, and so, mm-hmm. Is it not true then that the business school, like they would’ve continued to be high achievers And in fact, this is true, some of the most successful, financially successful people I know skipped business school altogether and they didn’t need it.

, However, I think GMAC often does, polls or surveys of MBA graduates, and I think the vast majority of them, at a minimum say that they’re glad that they went to business school, that they do feel that it was worth, their time. So. How much of this is,, nature versus nurture.

We, we will never know. , But I would gently push back on the fact that I, because these numbers essentially to the extent that they’re lower than say these numbers, it effectively penalizes thes e schools in this ranking. And for that reason, I don’t think that it should be part of the ranking because you’re penalizing a school for letting in more successful people.

But there’s a benefit. [00:05:00] To attending. Like, first of all, if you are a more successful person, think of the opportunity cost that you’re giving up. So the fact that these schools are able to lure away people to give up two years of their salary, in order to go to business school in the first place, I think is a pretty good indicator of the desirability or the perceived desirability of those programs.

Also, I do think that there is merit to thinking about like, who are my peers going to be in a business school? and. If a school is attracting people who were more successful prior to business school, I actually think that that is an indicator of the quality of the school, not only because it shows the people that are willing to give up those two years of salary, but also think about who the peer group is once someone is in the school.

Right? That means that if you are attending one of these schools. This percentage isn’t as high, but you’re surrounded by people who, prior to business school, were already achieving on a different level. And also after they graduate, they continue to achieve on a different level. True. The slope is not as sharp.

Right. But the.

[00:06:00] Result is a larger number. So I think that this implies that perhaps at the school itself, you might be surrounded by people who are driven. some people might say more competitive, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but people who are more driven and also after they graduate, they continue to be driven.

And so I think that also implies something pretty powerful about the ultimate benefit of the network because business school isn’t just the two years you go there and it’s not just that first job you get out of school or that third job you have five years out of school.

it’s also who’s your network gonna be and, and who are you gonna call 10, 15, 20 years after graduation? To invest in your company or to partner with your company or to start a company with. so I do think that there is value to attending a school and to have your peers during school and after school be people who were, for lack of a better term, high performers.

[00:07:00] I don’t think that this should be punished because I do think that this does yield a better business school. Experience and a better result in the long term. And so my quibble, again, I love this metric. I think this is an amazing metric to provide, but my quibble is that this should not be given honestly, any weight at all, and certainly not the high level of weight that it’s given, because again, you’re punishing the schools that, you know, you’re basically indicating that I, what I would say is an indication of quality.

An indirect indication of quality, but an indication of quality all the same. You’re basically punishing the schools that have sort of higher quality, quote unquote, coming in. And, and that to me is. Counterintuitive and kind of wrong. And so that’s why I continue to think that this should not be, uh, reported upon.

Absolutely. Tell us. It’s important. I think it’s great to know. I love using this information, but I don’t think it should be used in terms of like, let’s figure out which programs are the , [00:08:00] quote unquote highest quality programs. But what do you think? What did I miss? let me know. Thanks.

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