Dear Uymba,

Thanks for your post!

You raise a great question regarding consistency of career goals across application essays and recommendation letters. In short, honesty and consistency are the best policies here. In other words, you should ideally be close enough to your recommender such that you can be honest with her about your career plans post-MBA. Then, your recommender can draft an informed statement about your skills and touch upon why she thinks you will achieve your goals, etc. Her letter will therefore be consistent with your discussion of your plans in the essays.

As to your concern that having her remove content about your future with your present employer would be damaging (since those comments would be very positive, etc), I actually don't think you should be overly concerned in this regard. There are many ways for her to still provide a very complimentary letter. For example, a lot of recommenders say things like this:

"While I know that John has expressed a desire to leave the automotive manufacturing sector and take his career in a new direction via strategy consulting, the senior management of our firm have made it clear to him that our door is always open. He will be sorely missed here in the near term, but I am confident that he will excel in his proposed path of strategy consulting...." etc. etc.

In summary, the best case scenario is to bring your boss up to speed on your plans and have her support. As you can see from the sample above, there are many ways that she can rave about your potential without your needing to actually have plans to return.

Best of luck,

Graham