Seven Months Isn’t As Long As You Think

by , Feb 15, 2012

My first post describes why junior military officers should consider an MBA. This post will focus on all the things you need to do in the next seven to eight months before some Round 1 applications are due:

1. Collecting Stories

2. Acing the GMAT

3. Talking with Mentors

4. Link up with MBA Veteran Clubs/Associations

This week, Im going to talk about storytelling. Storytelling is perhaps the most powerful skill I think anyone can possess in any industry. This is also an area that you control. You cant control some things in your life, like your undergraduate GPA. But you can control how you convey your experiences to convince people to hire you or to let you into a top school.

Collecting Stories

Resumes, Interviews, and MBA applications are all about storytelling - crafting stories, telling stories, and selling stories. We all have combat experiences and while they may seem unique to us, they are actually pretty similar if you talk to other veterans. The first step is to collect your stories. Look through your Officer Evaluation Reports (or other service equivalent) and other documents to really reflect on what you have done. If you are currently deployed, I would even advise writing a diary or journal of what you are doing. Ive been out of the Army for 14 months and I still find myself remembering new stories that could help me highlight my accomplishments.

a) Resume: I recommend a one-page resume because the resume isnt a detailed explanation about your life. The resume is like an appetizer that entices the hiring manager or MBA admission committee to learn more about you. I went through a JMO recruiter and they helped a lot with translating my military experiences into a language that civilians can understand. If you plan to go straight into an MBA, which I advocate, there are a lot of resources out there for you. The best resource is the MBA Veterans Club of the schools you are applying to. They will show you what format their school uses and provide some advice on what has worked for them.

b) Interview: This will probably sound extreme but I have a spreadsheet of the top 40 or so commonly asked questions that could be asked during an interview. In the second column, I have detailed stories and in the third column, I have one or two sentences that could trigger the detailed story from my memory. Then I purchased a tape recorder and recorded myself answering these questions. I was so surprised to hear some weird things I would do with my speech that I wouldnt have noticed without recording myself. Obviously we all sound great in our own ears, but it is good to hear what you sound like to the outside world. I also started interviewing in front of a mirror and once again, I found weird things that I would do like not maintaining eye contact or a bunch of other things. Finally, I bugged my wife to interview me and videotaped the whole thing. This might sound like overkill, but it works. Ive been through over 30 interviews in the last 14 months and nothing can really throw me off now. Interviewing is a skill and you should practice it.

c) MBA applications: This is really the mother lode of storytelling. You will have a certain word limit to tell a story to answer a question that the particular school is asking. The most common mistake JMOs make is to recycle their essays. I was guilty of this too. Schools just know if you recycle an essay. They read hundreds, thousands of essays per year, so generic or recycled essays are very easily spotted and boring to read. Some questions may seem similar, but that is just what I said similar, not same. By now, you should have tons of stories at your disposal and it is all about picking the right story to answer the right question. You also need to research the school and work with the Veterans Club in reviewing your essays.

Next week, Ill cover the importance of the GMAT, especially to veterans. In the meantime, if you are interested in reading my other posts, click here to check out my blog.