Crafting a Successful Masters’ Union Application | 3EPO

Essays, Experience & Entrance

As we plough through the festive season and welcome 2022, it’s worth looking back across the year. The sheer scale of what we’ve been through as society has transformed the future of many industries, but none more so than education.

With stories and trends of increasing furloughs and layoffs across the world, we thought about the future.

What would a post-pandemic employee look like? What kind of skills would they need?

It was just circumstance that the founding of Masters’ Union came in the midst of the pandemic. But we had the answer. A student experience at the synthesis of technology and management, passionate peer-learning with droves of ambition and motivation, was the answer.

We needed to craft students to do many roles in one. From product design to programming, finance to forecasting — our curriculum prepares our students for the contemporary workplace.

But you ask, how does one go about crafting a ‘good’ Masters’ Union application?

Presenting, the 3 E’s of a good admissions application to Masters’ Union (or any great business school). Here’s what you need to know.

Essays

We’ve added new essays to our admissions application.

The essay section is perhaps the most important section in any admissions application section. In our opinion, the goal of the essay section is something many applicants misinterpret, so we’re here to put things in order.

• The essay should reflect you as an individual — your clarity and structure of thoughts along with your ability to provide logical arguments to develop your idea.
• The essay should have a personal voice along with showcasing a clarity of thought and structure in your arguments. It should not be a synthesis of different ideas/text pulled and reworded from different parts of the internet. Not only does this not reflect your original thought, but we also dislike abrupt changes in style/tone.
• The essay should be a reflection of your critical thinking skill level. How deeply can you engage with the prompt? What experiences/anecdotes from your life will be relevant to the essay? We leave this to your discretion.

The essay should provide us with an overall idea of your communication skills. How you choose to phrase and structure your arguments, along with the choice of style/tone of writing, provide us with clear indications for our selection.

Experience

Too young? Too old? The Goldilocks zone?

We’ve had many questions across the various online sessions we’ve done over the recent weeks about work experience. With concerns coming from both freshers about representation and older individuals about fitment, we’d like to use this forum to address everyone’s queries.

If you’re a fresher -

• You are at no disadvantage in terms of your application. Statistics for our previous batch dictated our average range of work experience to be between 2 and 4 years of work experience. That is in no way, a reluctance on our part to accept fresh graduate students.
• Approximately 20% of both our founding and second cohorts were freshers. Not only will you belong, but you will find company as well!
• Outcomes for freshers who came into Masters’ Union can be seen in our placement statistics, with an Average CTC of INR 23.20 Lakhs for freshers only. With placements as Management Consultants at Bain & Co or Chief of Staff roles at FinTech firms, we’ve had plenty of stories of transformation from our freshers.

An added investment of the 16-month Masters’ Union experience, appended at the end of your undergraduate tenure, puts your career trajectory into an entirely new orbit.

If you’re someone with more work experience -

• You are at no disadvantage in terms of your application. Individuals coming to business school with a large amount of work experience are usually very tuned to what they want their experiences to look like.
• What you’ll need to put into consideration is the placement aspect. For individuals keen on pivoting their careers to a new industry/sector/function, you’ll need to adopt the growth-mindset once more and work your way up another organizational hierarchy.
• However, if you’re viewing Masters’ Union through other lenses — wanting to partake in a transformative academic experience, get mentorship/guidance/funding for incubating & accelerating your startup or even moving up the hierarchy in your current or similar industry — then Masters’ Union is the right place for you.

Entrance Examinations

The MU-BAAT, demystified.

Another big point we’d like to touch on is our policy with entrance examinations, including our own examination, the MU-BAAT or the Masters’ Union Business Administration Admissions Test.

Here’s what you need to know -

Everyone who completes and submits their MU application is mandated to sit for the MU-BAAT examination unless you choose to submit a valid GRE, GMAT or CAT score. These are the only examinations that we accept as exemptions. This means

1. If you’ve not taken any exam — you appear for the MU-BAAT
2. If you’ve taken any exam except for the GRE, GMAT or CAT — you appear for the MU-BAAT
3. If you’ve taken the GRE, GMAT or CAT and don’t feel your scores are competitive enough — you can appear for the MU-BAAT. As a rule of thumb, you can assume that anything in the top 10–15 percentile of the respective test is competitive enough to make a strong application.

We do not accept the NMAT exam score anymore. The option of choosing Masters’ Union will be phased out from the NMAT exam in upcoming academic cycles. If you’ve taken the NMAT, you’ll have to take the MU-BAAT.

About the MU-BAAT

• It is a 90-minute online examination that will be administered a week after our R1 deadline of 23rd January, at the end of January. The exact dates will be confirmed in the near future.
• You can take the exam online at home via your desktop/laptop. Instructions for downloading software required for the exam are sent in advance and is something we expect every student to have in place.
• The examination tests your verbal and analytical ability, like any similar competitive examination. We don’t want anyone quitting their jobs to prepare for our examination. Familiarity with high school math concepts along with an ability to read, analyze and argue about acclaimed literature, news, reports, studies, etc. is something that should stand you in good stead.

That wraps it up! When crafting your applications to Masters’ Union, make sure you keep the 3E’s in mind and they should guide you well.

I’d like to reiterate that our Round 1 deadline of admissions is on the 23rd of January, so if you’re someone who has read this far and hasn’t started your application, you should really be doing so here.

Apologies to Star Wars fans for ruining their favorite gold-colored motivational guide for my pun.