Stanford GSB Admissions Essay - What matters most to you, and why?
December 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? - Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man 1947″
The most important thing to some people is to save a planet in peril and advocate for the over 100 million sharks that will be poached this year by predacious human beings. For others, what matters most is to bring comfort to helpless children living in abject poverty and pauperism in the farthest nooks & crannies of the globe. A lot of people will gladly donate their time and money in order to support the missions of the Armies of Salvation, while others will go to any length to maintain the old order and lie to us that fairness lies in the eyes of the beholder. But you and I know what fairness and justice look like when we see them. Though my interests are eclectic, my self-actualization is to stand up against tyranny and nepotism wherever I see them and tell Africans and African Americans that we can no longer afford to wallow in the shallow waters of mediocrity. That the time is ripe for us to search within and aim for the highest heights in our fields of endeavor.
I want to be like Elizabeth McCartney who left a lucrative job in Washington DC for St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana in order to help the victims of KATRINA find their ways back home. Because she knows that, north, east, south or west, home is still the best. I want to be like Yohannes Gebregorgis, who established Ethiopia Reads, to bring free public libraries & literacy programs to thousands of Ethiopian children because he knows that a mind is a terrible thing to waste and that unless Africa reads, our communities cannot develop the next generation of thinkers, scientists, philosophers, accountants, doctors and astronauts that will help leapfrog the continent to the next developmental frontier. I want to be like Viola Vaughn who built the “10,000 Girls” program in Dakar Senegal to help failing schoolchildren pass their exams or be like Maris Ruiz who crosses the border from El Paso, Texas into Mexico several times a week to bring food, clothing and toys to hundreds of impoverished children and their families.
To achieve my goal, I established Black Herald Online Magazine to serve as a repository for disseminating the stories, struggles and triumphs of men and women of color, so that the new generation can read their stories and say YES! I can do it too. In the last year alone, I published over 100 stories to showcase the accomplishments of black people in commerce, science, fashion & entertainment, banking, politics and education including a story about the “Most Important Blacks in Technology Awards”, a program designed to honor outstanding and accomplished black engineers for their remarkable contributions to the fields of science and technology and another story about the African Banker Awards established to recognize the reforms, rapid modernization, consolidation, integration and expansion of African banking. The time to change the negative cultural narratives in our society is now. Nobody knows our story better than us, consequently, it is incumbent on us to create platforms to broadcast our achievements -if we don’t blow our trumpet, nobody would.
The Stanford Graduate School of Business prides itself as the school of the future where people are equipped with the wherewithal to nurture and develop fledgling businesses into world class enterprises and I look forward to leveraging my Stanford MBA education to develop Black Herald into a household name and continue to positively impact my community one story at a time!!.
NOTA BENE: This is a draft and designed to help you with your MBA applications. Created under the Creative Commons rule and it is copyleft. Use as a guide for your essays. Merry Xmas and Happy New Year in advance. May the new year herald all your unfulfilled dreams, Amen!!
Discuss how you believe you have demonstrated strong presentation/communication skills. (MBA/Masters Essays).
December 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“Between two equally well built products, the one with the better design/presentation will have a higher perceived value” - Raymond Loewy - Father of Modern Industrial Design.
As the student government President of Nigeria’s most prominent university, I had the opportunity to develop and regularly utilize my strong communication skills. It was not uncommon to be interviewed by the national press or invited to talk shows on national TV to articulate the opinion of students on government policies.
In the years prior to being elected, I had had first-hand experience of what skills were crucial to being viewed as a popular leader among students; at the time, it was considered good form for student-politicians to speak with cultivated bombast and speeches of my predecessors were packed with phrases like “circumventing perambulation” and “pyrotechnic demagoguery” and just about anything to keep the crowd roaring. To my chagrin, these speeches often led to outcomes that were more volatile than I thought necessary.
As a keen observer of these episodes, I learned a great deal about the art of public speaking and how one could use this skill to navigate the delicate balance between stirring a crowd while still holding the power to channel its actions. So as President, I adopted a measured style of speaking- calibrated in content and in tone, necessary to back up my claims as a president that sought to avoid the incendiary approaches of his predecessors.
I had started to hone these skills during my earlier involvements in debates as a high-school student and on a stint, shortly before college, as the presenter of a youth variety program on Radio Nigeria, a government-owned AM radio station. The most crucial step in the development of these skills, though, happened when as an undergraduate I became a member of an all-amateur campus drama club where I acted in about 10 plays in 4 years. It was here that I came to learn how to project my voice, enunciate my words, and repeat the same line in many different ways altering my inflection or timing or both, to elicit the desired audience response.
I have found all these experiences very helpful in my recent roles as a teacher and a researcher. As a graduate student, I taught over 10 sections of Chemistry and Physics Classes and gave two talks at international conferences and countless more at in-house group seminars. Earlier this year, I gave a talk at a Symposium on Chemical Kinetics and Dynamics in New York and followed that up three days later by giving the weekly Chemistry departmental seminar at the Institute of Technology where I am also teaching a class on Probability and Statistics this spring.
I have also demonstrated strong written skills in a variety of settings. Apart from writing two bachelor’s theses and a doctoral dissertation, my written work also includes a well-received inaugural speech and scores of press releases during my student government presidential tenure, guest columns which have appeared in student newspapers here in the US, and opinion pieces on a widely-read website catering to Nigerian readership abroad.
A further demonstration of my strong communication skills is my conversational fluency in four languages including Yoruba, English, French, which I started learning at the age of 5, and Japanese which, in spite of the demands of working on a PhD, I learned well enough to pass an examination certifying 300 hours of learning.
I look forward to drawing upon these experiences in the future as a financial engineer who excels in using language to communicate the most complex ideas to colleagues and clients in a very clear and lucid manner.
NB: This essay was published with the permission of the author, a friend of mine (He does not wish to be identified) . Posted under creative commons rule and use as a guide for your admission essays.
The Miss Full-Figured Metropolitan Competition 2008 Pictures
December 3, 2008 | 1 Comment
COLUMBIA MARYLAND - November, 2008 - Jade Greer became the new Miss Full-Figured Metropolitan beating other contestants in a keenly contested competition that took place at the Sheraton Hotel in Columbia, Maryland. The Full-Figured Diva Academy is the Maryland/Washington area’s first and only complete development and training service solely for full-figured women.
Back for its fifth installment this spectacular event was the talk of the town. The show featured full figured models from across the DC/MD/VA Metropolitan area, some of whom stepped on the runway for the very first time. The objective of the competition is to showcase the beauty and confidence of full-figured women while empowering them through promoting and advocating positive body imagery and self-confidence. Ultimately giving a voice to women often left out of the mainstream of fashion. Contestants were judged on qualities such as stage presence, originality, poise etc. For more information about F.F.D.A please visit http://www.fullfigureddiva.com
Black Herald in proud to bring you pictures from the event.
To navigate through the image gallery, click on the first image and double click to move to the next image. The images are still being uploaded, please come back to see more pictures.
