ISB Essay 1 Topic 2024 – Provide an honest portrayal of yourself, emphasizing your strengths and weaknesses. Highlight the key elements that have shaped your personal journey. Give relevant illustrations as needed (400 words max)
Analysis 2023-2024:
Introspect and finalize about 2 strengths and 1 or 2 weaknesses to write about in this essay. Start the essay by summarizing your personality and stating your strengths and weaknesses. Next, take each strength or weakness and illustrate how you displayed the quality with real life example. For your weaknesses, please also highlight the steps you have taken to improve. A common mistake candidates make while attempting this essay is to state many personality traits but not illustrate them sufficiently through solid real life examples. Be sure to choose your illustrations thoughtfully.
A key point to note is that the admissions committee is trying to understand how your strengths and learnings from your weaknesses will contribute to the overall experience of your peers on campus. Please be sure to address this aspect in the conclusion of your essay.
Analysis 2022-2023:
In the current scenarios B-Schools all across the globe are seeing a demand for leaders who can adapt with rapidly changing environment. The corporate world needs honest leaders who can brave uncertainties and be servant leaders.
Why does the admissions committee ask this question? Apparently, the percentage of candidates exaggerating about their capabilities has skyrocketed. Although there are plenty of filtering mechanisms (perhaps the best one being interviews), still every year the quality of leaders churned out by B-Schools is questionable. ISB attracts some of the best talent available across the globe. Given the cost of education and living expenses, seeking admissions is a self-selection process. Candidates need to ask a simple question to themselves. Am I really deserving to be educated by world’s best faculty, avail the best infrastructure and compete with the best talent across the world? An honest answer would consist of rich examples of situations that eventually became achievements and failures.
Successful candidates have rich experience and know how to handle tough situations. Fictitious examples do not help. Evaluators come across candidates that lie through their teeth almost every day. A candidate must remember that the evaluator has been there and done that so chances of getting away with dishonesty are quite slim. They can call up your references (and their own contacts) for the slightest of doubts. A candidate is expected to pepper the answer with honest examples, anecdotes and experiences (no matter how trivial they seem). A successful candidate would not shy away from accepting his / her mistakes. Portraying the weakness in the light that it looks like a strong point is not considered to be smartness – rather tomfoolery. In 400 words, an exemplary essay will have 1 strength, 1 weakness and at least 1 situation around each one of them. The evaluator wants to see how you manage to use your strengths and weaknesses for the best possible outcomes. Most of the candidates struggle to write down their weaknesses because of
their grooming. Recognizing one’s weakness and working around the same is considered a useful leadership trait.
General Education has the best consultants who can help you uncover the aspects of your personality that you may have overlooked. They have been on admissions committees of various schools and understand what the admissions committees are looking for in successful candidates.
Here are the advises from ISB application consultants on ISB Essay 1:
ISB Essay 1 Topic 2022 – Peer Learning is a major building block of PGP at ISB. Help us in understanding how will you be able to add value to the PGP peer group
through your personal and professional qualities/capabilities?
College application essays makes us want to write extraordinary stories that may or may not have the element of truth in them. But one must always remember that the colleges do not want to hear your make-believe stories, they are rather interested in knowing the real you. So, it becomes very important to tell them who you are, rather than who they would like to see you as.
When you look at the question, there are few phrases that underline the crux of the essay.
The Most Important, Personal Quality, Examples, Significantly, Successful leader It is important to focus on these 5 words/phrases while writing this essay for the ISB application. Let us take a deep dive to understand what ISB wants to assess in a candidate through their essay by looking at the question asked in detail:
The Most Important: It clearly indicates that candidate must choose 1 (max 2) quality to showcase in this essay. Admissions committee receive thousands of applications, ISB is giving a chance to the prospective candidates to select their very best quality as the basic theme for their profile.
Personal Quality: This would not essentially mean qualities like friendly, hard-working but to bring out those other elements of your personality that make you stand out and provide you a USP as compared to others. Everybody who is applying to B-Schools is hard working and dedicated, so that is given. A personal deep dive is required to understand what kind of a person you are. Choose to showcase a quality that has a universal need and something that can help you no matter what industry/country/role you are in.
Examples: Not only do candidates have to identify and describe their best quality/qualities, they would also need to connect them with genuine examples both at work and personal life. For example – being a people person is one quality that not only helps in cultivating professional relationships easily, but also makes you approachable. But it needs to be corroborated with good examples of how it gave you an edge to achieve better results for your client/company at work. Examples are very important because they help the reader to connect/click/relate with the candidate and make reading the essay worthwhile.
Significantly: It emphasizes the importance of diversity and unique selling points for admission in ISB. A candidate must be selective in deciding the qualities and examples that he/she wants the admission’s team to remember. Your stories may seem unimportant to you but if there is something about you that significantly helped you to navigate situations, then write about them.
Successful leader: This is an opportunity to define leadership in your way, talking about the elements that you want to learn/imbibe from a leader who inspires you. How do you think that your unique or best personal quality will help you become a successful leader?
Lastly, structure of the essay is almost like the backbone in your body. If you talk about all things mentioned above but do not have a proper structure while doing it, readers might not understand the way you want them to understand. Always try to write as if you are one of the best storytellers.
Diversity is something that ISB has always focused on, and through this question they are directly asking what candidates are bringing to the table. Focus on the key phrases above and tell them your story.
2022-2023 Essays :
Peer Learning is a major building block of PGP at ISB. Help us in understanding how will you be able to add value to the PGP peer group through your personal and professional qualities/capabilities?
This essay requires the candidate to present how he or she will add value to the class through his or her unique background, interests, hobbies or professional experience. Ideally, a candidate should choose 1 or 2 aspects of his or her background to describe. For example, one could be a trained Indian classical singer and explain how he or she could bring value to the class through their in-depth knowledge of this art form by explaining how he/ she overcame the complexities involved in learning the art and giving recitals. Attempt to explain how these learnings could be applied to personal and professional life.
Remember you do not need to be an international athlete or a celebrity to crack this essay. All you need to do is highlight about 2 facets of your profile (ideally 1 personal and 1 professional) which you believe could add value to the class. Several candidates forget to explain how their skills would add value to the class, which is the purpose of this essay. Be sure to specify in a sentence or two how you will add value to the class through each facet of your profile you highlight.
As ISB wants to seek your Unique Selling Preposition (through this question), you need to be unique at the same time to ensure that your profile makes an everlasting impact on the interviewers. Your primary aims should be to explain the factors that make you unique, distinct and different. Answer this question effectively within 400 words.
Don’t intend to be over smart, or over pretending as the more realistic you will be the more impact you will have on interviewers. The essay works as a simple method for ISB admissions to gauge how enviable a candidate you are for ISB. The quintessence of the prompt in this essay can be better implicit through previous ISB application essay questions.
Before you start writing, please make a strong case to distinguish yourself from an outstanding set of applicants applying for PGP.
Some other important points that you must include are:
The in-depth industry knowledge is that you have earned through your work experience. Also, mention your unique professional background if you have any. Also, make sure to talk about your range of interests like taking initiatives or adding value in community.
If you have been into sports, it would be a great USP to spark your profile. But make sure that each point you mention must not be fictional and should be exactly what you are. For better answers you can also try the different available sources for the preparation of your ISB essays.