Describe your key leadership experiences and evaluate what leadership areas you hope to develop through your MBA experience.

That’s Kellogg’s leadership question for MBA applicants. Simple enough, right? Well, yes and no.

Yes, it’s simple if you take a by-the-numbers approach to the first part of the question, merely restating bullets from your resume in sentence form: “My key leadership experiences include leading a four-person team of engineers to develop a new quality assurance process for a multimillion-dollar client and mentoring three new hires about our policies and practices.”

But taking the “simple” route guarantees a flat essay unlikely to stand out. Instead, you should take a strategic, more story-oriented tack, grabbing them with a concise but rich tale of leadership trials and triumphs: “When I was asked to take over a $1.5 million consulting project for a major new client, I inherited a four-person team of demoralized engineers who were already 50% behind schedule.” Then you’d go on to relate how you led that demoralized team to a positive result, highlighting how you overcame major task-related and interpersonal obstacles along the way with problem-solving creativity, coaching, and persistence.

But that’s just one leadership experience, and the question asks for “experiences,” so I counsel my clients to include two to three such compact stories of leadership, ideally in different domains: professional (usually the easiest one to find examples of), extracurricular (community service, cultural organization, and sports-related experience), and even personal (such as helping to lead your family or a small group of friends to solve a difficult problem or navigate a difficult time).

After presenting the stories you can “sum up” the key leadership skills you’ve gained—developing a vision and rallying others around it; bringing out your team’s strengths and providing development opportunities for them; resolving conflicts; many others—and mention briefly (no room for more stories) how you use these in other roles and contexts such as X and Y.

But that’s only half the question.

The second half is about the “leadership areas you hope to develop through your MBA experience.” “But I just told them how great a leader I am on all these dimensions, so what do I write here?” my clients sometimes say. It’s true that you’ve just related many dimensions of your leadership strength through the stories, but I doubt you’ve addressed everything. A typical area of development involves “soft skills” such as coaching individual teammates and giving feedback, especially of the “constructive” variety. Kellogg is renowned for its people-focus, so these are always worth mentioning. Even if you feel you’ve covered hard and soft skills with your stories, you can always benefit from developing the ability to create/sell higher-level visions (where to take your company, rather than where to take your project), negotiate much higher-stakes deal, and resolve conflicts among groups/units rather than just among individuals. So talk about that stuff. If you have space, even present a real-life scenario from your work where such skills would have been useful.

Now you’ve addressed both parts of the question, so you’re all done, right? Well, no. The key part my clients are most likely to leave out is naturally the part that doesn’t appear in the question: How can Kellogg’s specific offerings help you develop into a stronger leader? Here, in the last part of your essay, you need to map the leadership areas you wish to develop onto Kellogg courses, seminars, workshops, and clubs. Go to Kellogg’s website and find three or four specific ones that relate strongly to your leadership goals, then write about them. Briefly. It also never hurts to mention how much you’ll learn by leading your highly diverse study teams at Kellogg.

Now you’re all done, right? Right.

But remember, if you don't want to go it alone, my fellow Accepted editors and I can help you craft compelling Kellogg essays and those for other programs.

By Dr. Sachin Waikar, Accepted Editor

The University of Pennsylvania announced yesterday the creation of a three-year joint MBA/JD program between Penn Law and the Wharton School. According to the announcement:

"Students in the new program will spend the first year in the Law School and the following summer in four Law and Wharton courses designed specifically for the three-year J.D./M.B.A. The second and third years will include a combination of Law and Wharton courses, including capstone courses in the third year and work experience in law, business, finance, or the public sector in the summer between the second and third years."

The announcement claims that this is "the country’s first fully integrated three-year program offered by elite law and business schools. The new program will target potential applicants with typically two years of work experience, especially in finance, who are entrepreneurs or are planning careers in investment banking, private equity and related fields."

However, Northwestern also has a three-year JD/MBA and claims the program is "fully integrated."

Penn expects to enroll about 20 students in the program each year, beginning in September 2009. For complete details, please visit http://www.law.upenn.edu/crossdisc/study/jointdualdegree/mba.html

Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management is a dream school for many of my MBA clients. And why not? The program features a top-notch marketing and general management curriculum, the standard-issue highly accomplished but well-rounded student body, and what’s viewed as the most people-focused culture among top business schools. Today an increasingly popular Kellogg offering is the Global Initiatives in Management program, or GIM. Each year over 500 Kellogg students—from the full-time, part-time, and executive MBA programs—participate in GIM, “an intensive global business leadership course designed by students” (according to the school’s website). For GIM, student teams plan a 10-week curriculum including two full weeks in the country of focus for field study that typically includes company visits and interviews with top managers, industry experts, and government officials.

According to the website, recent GIM topics have included tourism in South Africa, E-commerce in Thailand, and microenterprise in Ghana. Given the value of insights regarding global business practices and specific industries across nations—not to mention the value of spending two weeks in a foreign land with a group of dynamic classmates—GIM is a very appealing program for Kellogg-minded applicants, and one mentioned often in my clients’ essays. But unfortunately that mention frequently goes something like this: “I would love to participate in GIM.” Or maybe, “I would be very interested in a GIM trip to China, given the increasing importance of that country to the global economy.”

Don’t do that.

Instead, make much more clear both the value of the GIM program to you and what you can bring to GIM. For example, are you an aspiring product manager with pharma experience? Then you could talk about the appeal of a healthcare-focused GIM trip to India to understand the challenges of marketing and distributing pharmaceuticals, biotech products, and medical devices in a fast-growing and increasingly de-regulated economy. To the trip you would bring insights from your pharma experience, including knowledge of US-based marketing strategies and how well these might apply overseas. Remember, GIM trips are student-run, so you should portray yourself as someone who could conceptualize and initiate a specific trip/curriculum. Spell that out: “I would love to initiate a GIM trip to country A to study topic B, which would provide great insights into industry X, which I hope to enter.”

My fellow Accepted editors and I can help you incorporate Kellogg’s GIM program into dynamic and engaging essays that show your fit with the school. In general, the more carefully you construct your essays, the more likely you may find yourself studying Japan’s wireless phone market in Osaka, or microfinance in South Africa, or fast food trends in Beijing . . . on your Kellogg GIM trip.

By Sachin Waikar