Graduate School Trends
MBA programs lead the way with inventive and varied admission application inputs. Doctoral programs remain on the opposite end of innovation requiring only a routine written Statement of Purpose. An exciting area of postgraduate research communication is burgeoning for newly minted PhDs — explaining their research to the public at large via video. Very few medical and law programs ask for anything beyond the written essays. However, regardless of the application format, formulating your core stories can be applied to all application formats and tailored to specific requirements. Honing your story and extrapolating it will definitely be required, but with a core set of foundational stories you are good to go.
Business schools are including video prompts in an effort to prepare students for the real world job search, where more employers are requiring video submissions. Miss Van Hoet, an MBA student, said that as a result of preparing for her Kellogg video prompts, she was better prepared for a job application.
Minh Huy Lai, director of INSEAD’s MBA program, said “With videos we detect the level of English, body language, confidence and public speaking skills.” Another big plus for the video test, according to Mr. Lai, is that “it clearly establishes the identity of the candidate…with videos there is no cheating,” he says.
MBA video essays are challenging but reflect the current trends in video interviewing for jobs, better preparing students to enter the workforce.
Cassandra Pittman, who holds an MBA from Columbia and has been on the admissions staff at two top-ranked MBA programs, says, “MBA video essays are a recent trend for business schools and combine the most challenging aspects of live interviews and written essays with the added pressures of time limits, cameras and technology concerns, and, perhaps the most challenging of all, the lack of any real-time feedback.”
Besides the video test, other MBA admission input trends run the gamut. They include EQ endorsements including one from your current boss, responding to images you select, responding to a photo the school provides, making up a story from a word pair given to you in a group exercise, or writing the table of contents to your life story.
MBA hopefuls aren’t the only ones being asked to tell their stories with over two million students applying to all different kinds of post baccalaureate programs. In 2013, three quarters of graduate degrees were awarded at the master’s level and one quarter were doctoral degrees. The sine qua non of the doctoral application is the Statement of Purpose or the SOP. At this point, SOPs are submitted in written format as I could not find mention of any PhD programs allowing or requiring video submissions, video interviews or video responses to prompts. However, a new exciting trend is for dissertation students to produce short videos explaining their research to the public in layman’s terms. It’s a great idea given how most research findings remain in small academic silos. Having to simplify and explain one’s research to others, not in academia, is a very important skill that can benefit the student, their community and the public at large.
Take a look at 2018 University of California, Riverside, Grad Slam competition video where newly minted PhDs explain their research to non-academics:
Doctoral students expanding their skill set beyond the written dissertation and the public learning about their research is a win win for both groups.
In addition to business school admissions and doctoral research initiatives, one medical school, Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine in New Mexico, allows applicants to choose between a secondary two-minute video project, a five-hundred-word essay, or a digital submission of some kind like an art piece or published research.
Burrell has taken a bold move to move beyond the written application for medical school applicants. According to savvypremed.com, here’s a good example of a successful video submitted to Burrell:
What about law schools? Northwestern was the first law school to introduce a thirty to forty-five-minute video interview hosted by Kira Academic, an online video and talent assessment platform. Questions are posed by law school faculty and center around maturity, motivation, empathy, problem solving and resilience.
Georgetown Law also included this video essay option: “Prepare a one-minute video that says something about you. What you do or say is entirely up to you.”
In conclusion, video inputs are most widely used in MBA admissions, followed far behind by the use of video in disseminating doctoral research, and only one medical school, as well as two law schools utilize video admission
inputs. It’s likely that these video inputs are going to expand over time and become more pervasive across the graduate school admissions spectrum.
Nevertheless, having your core stories prepared and ready to go, will allow you to share your unique trajectory when responding to video prompts that run the gamut across varied prompts requiring creative and imaginative responses. Even if your chosen graduate field does not require video input at admission, it’s highly likely that you will need these skills when job hunting for your first professional post-graduation position.
Your admission success is one story away — whether you record it in response to a video prompt, write about it, or share it in an interview. Prepare it, hone it and practice it to stand out.
I hope you enjoyed this post — if you want to connect, you can reach me here via email Kimberlya.norton@gmail.com or connect with me on social: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. You can also join me at my first book talk and signing in New York city at Shakespeare and Co’s new Upper West Side store opening this month: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/story-the-art-of-standing-out-book-talk-and-signing-tickets-52800721379. Also, you can find my book, STORY: the art of standing out on Amazon — here is the link to buy it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H94D3L1
