ESSAY ANALYSIS FOR IIMA PGPX ESSAYS:

Essay 1 : Describe a situation where your professional ethics were challenged

and how you came to terms with the situation. What did you learn from
this? (Max up to 500 Words.)

We are glad that IIMA has traditionally ditched the regular SoP or the career goals essay
to ask two behavioral questions. There is scope for applicants to reveal so much about
themselves through such questions. The focus is on analysis and introspection of
the values that matter to you and why. And ofcourse, how far are you willing to go
to uphold them. This has to be followed with your reasoning for your actions- leaving
this section out can make your essay limp and unrevealing, and will be the differentiator
between the successful applications and the unsuccessful ones. Ultimately, every
situation teaches you something, and this learning is important in every b-school essay.

We suggest the STAR approach for building this essay:

1. What was the situation?

2. What was the ethical challenge?

3. What were your values that were challenged?

4. What were your thoughts at that time? What dilemma did you face in going this way
or that way? What risk would you take in either situation?

5. Eventually what actions did you take and why?

6. What was the outcome?

7. What did you learn out of this situation (about yourself and about handling such
situations)?

8. (Optional) If placed in a similar situation once again, how would you react?
Once again, we will emphasize on the reasoning for your response to the
situation and the learning you derived from the situation. In terms of space
distribution, keep about 40-50% of the essay for these two important
elements. Mean editing will be a key to successful writing.

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Essay 2 : Describe a situation where you failed and how did you deal with this
experience. What did you learn from this? (Max up to 500 Words.)

In our experience of helping MBA applicants, failure essays are more difficult to write as
compared to the achievement essays. They require a lot more introspection,
analysis and ofcourse the ability to accept, that yes, I was wrong. And we
mean, accept it truly. TRULY! Many a times when we are brainstorming with
applicants, we hear lame failure stories, such as issues due to prioritizing tasks, failing
because they love to take additional work. Its difficult to offer any real insights in such
stories and after 3+ years of work experience, they begin to sound like your
experiences lacked any depth at all.

So when you are brainstorming for essay ideas, go beyond the most obvious stories (like
the ones mentioned above). Think of a time when you really slipped up. Your project
could have suffered, it could have led to negative consequences thats okay, so long
as you learned a major lesson and preferably, got a chance to implement your learnings
in your future assignments.

Now, there is one caveat to selecting stories you definitely dont want to offer stories
which will make the admissions committee doubt your capabilities. For instance, doing
something so drastically wrong that you were asked to leave the organization, or maybe
doing something ethically wrong.

We suggest the following structure for this essay:

1. What was the situation

2. What actions did you take?

3. How did you fail? Why did you fail?

4. What was the impact of the failure?

5. Could you salvage the situation? If yes, how?

6. What was your analysis of the failure?

7. What did you learn out of this situation?

8. What actions did you take to improve?

9. If you already had the chance, how did you do a similar thing better the next time? If
not, how would you do something similar better the next time?

10. (Optional): Is there some IIMA program feature that you will leverage to improve
further?

Your essay may not require each one of the steps mentioned above, so pick out the
ones that most matter in your storytelling. And we will reiterate the most important
tip: let the focus of your essay be on analysis and self improvement. A
common error in such essays is to utilize 60% of the space in explaining the
situation, but you should bedone with that in the first 30% of the essay.