Category: Essay Tips
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#230 Five Keys to MBA Admissions Success with N’doli Jean-Hugues Cherif, Insead MBA ’26
Darren talks with N’doli Jean-Hugues “Cherif,” a French and Ivorian candidate who gained admission to both INSEAD and London Business School’s MBA programs. Cherif, an older full-time MBA candidate with diverse experience across five roles – including audit, management consulting, investment banking and infrastructure project finance in the public and private sector – shares his…
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#221 Excellent Advice for Living (and MBA Applications!)
Inspired by Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I Knew Earlier, Darren shares 10 bits of life wisdom that could materially improve your chances of getting into business school and building a successful career.
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#203 What Are Your Game-Changing Differentiators? with Paul Bodine from Admitify
Paul Bodine, one of the world’s most experienced admissions consultants and president of Admitify, shares how he helps clients with seemingly par-for-the-course profiles discover their game-changing assets. Sixty percent of Admitify’s MBA clients gain admission or interview invitation at Stanford, Wharton and Harvard, and Admitify’s clients win over $2M in scholarships each year. Listen on…
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#200 The 3S’s of Scintillating Storytelling
Inspired by The Moth, Darren highlights three tools you can use immediately to improve your stories, so you can show adcoms who you really are and draw them closer to you. Darren also shares over a dozen questions that will help you identify your most compelling stories.
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#199 10 Application Lessons from 10 Years of Touch MBA
We’re nearing 200 episodes of Touch MBA. Feeling nostalgic, Darren reflects on 10 lessons for applicants from 10 years of Touch MBA!
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#196 How I Got Into UC Berkeley Haas MBA (and HBS, Wharton, UCLA too!) & Breaking into Product Management with Bridget Pujals
Bridget Pujals shares lessons learned from her MBA application journey, culminating in admits to Harvard, Wharton ($70K scholarship), UCLA Anderson ($100K scholarship), and Berkeley Haas ($175K scholarship).
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#176 Use the 5 Senses to Make Your MBA Application Stick
Darren shares how you can use the five senses – sight, sound, smell, taste and touch – to make your application more three dimensional.
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#155 Five Takeaways from MBA Tour Panel in Ho Chi Minh – “Preparing Your Application: Advice from Admissions Directors”
Darren recently attended a panel “Preparing Your Application: Advice from MBA Admissions Directors” at the MBA Tour in Ho Chi Minh. In this episode, he unpacks the application advice given by five admissions directors.
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#152 Kishōtenketsu
Do you feel like your MBA story is a bit bland? Or uninspiring compared to the applicant profiles you see online? What if you haven’t overcome insurmountable odds or accomplished something amazing? Darren explores the possibilities of kishōtenketsu – a four act story structure used by Japanese and Chinese writers for centuries. What makes this story structure…
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#128 How I Got Into Insead
Massine Bouzerar, a 25-year old Canadian, was backpacking through Myanmar in July when he realized he wanted to start his MBA asap. First round deadlines were looming in September. Within 3 months he wrote the GMAT and submitted a successful application to Insead. What should you do when your back is against the wall? Massine…
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#121 21 MBA Application Questions Answered
7 senior MBA Admissions Directors from Berkeley Haas, Cornell Johnson, Virginia Darden, Duke Fuqua, NYU Stern, Michigan Ross, and Yale School of Management came to Vietnam this Fall for an MBA admissions panel. Darren shares the questions asked and lessons learned from the event.
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#113 Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t
Inspired by Steven Pressfield’s book, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t, Darren offers 3 pillars to present a memorable MBA story: concept, theme, and structure (hook, build, payoff).
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#109 Crafting Your Best Story & Applying Through the Consortium with Sabaina Kamara, Michigan Ross ’19
Sabaina Kamara, a Touch MBA listener and Admissions Edge Member, details what she did each step of the way to craft her best story – one that got her admitted to 4 top 20 US b-schools, including Michigan Ross, where she will head to this Fall. Sabaina also shares the benefits of applying through the…
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#100 Our Most Popular Guests Answer: “What 1 Action Can Candidates Take to Dramatically Improve Their MBA Application?”
To celebrate the 100th episode of the Touch MBA Podcast, we invited our 9 most popular guests to answer 1 question: “What 1 Action Can Candidates Take to Dramatically Improve Their Application?”
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#83 MBA Essays that Work – Candid Thoughts on Essays, Authenticity and Being Yourself
With MBA programs shortening their applications and asking for less essays, how can applicants still tell their story? How should applicants approach these MBA essays and what should they write? Darren speaks with Yale SOM MBA Admissions Director Bruce DelMonico and MBA Admissions Consultant and Author Paul Bodine to get 2 different perspectives on this…