While AEO2 reports have long been sealed, signed and submitted, the deadline for AEO1 reports is quickly approaching. Maintaining leadership activities during your first two years at Western is something that the HBA Admissions Committee places a great emphasis on. These activities include extracurriculars, work or volunteer involvement, as well as entrepreneurial experience. Your activities are assessed on five dimensions:
Teamwork: your specific contribution within a team effort
Commitment: the amount of time you have invested in an activity on a per week basis, or the overall duration
Achievement: goals or objectives that you have met, recognition or awards you have received in this activity
Initiative: introducing new projects to increase efficiency, facilitation of others
Breadth: diversity in activities, variety in interests
By demonstrating that you have the ability to be involved on campus while maintaining competitive marks, you are proving that you have what it takes to be a part of an HBA class. The report is a way that the Admissions Committee can give you feedback on your progress so far in university, and allows you to evaluate your activities so you can make necessary changes in your second year. Good luck to all those writing your reports! Here is an image of a woman typing a report to give you encouragement and to let you know that you’re not alone:
My Top 10 Tips:
When choosing your top 3 activities to write about, be sure to choose the ones that highlight your leadership abilities, as well as your skills in the aforementioned qualities.
Your activities don’t necessarily need to be related to business, and they could vary from volunteer experience to summer jobs to being an executive member of a club on campus. Remember, you want to show breadth in your activities and experience in a wider variety of domains will allow you to give valuable insight during class discussions.
Get involved with extracurriculars from the very beginning. Commitment is one of the qualities that are assessed, and you don’t want to be scrambling to find things to write about at the last minute.
However, don’t get involved just for the purpose of this report. You want to get involved with things that you have an actual interest in, which is really benefiting yourself in the long run.
Ask your reference for permission before including them as a contact for your activity. You need them to verify your activity, and you don’t want them to be surprised when they’re prompted to do so. It’s also just common courtesy to do so.
Use tangible examples. Don’t just say you wanted to succeed in the position, emphasize certain objectives that you may have had and if you met them or not. For instance, a goal could be to increase group membership by 5%, or to meet a fundraising goal of $5,000.
Be specific. You don’t want to be like: my high school job gave me the experience I needed to be the executive member of this club, which then led to the offer of this volunteer position that allowed me to get this other job. When talking about an activity, don’t go off on a tangent and include other activities that may be vaguely related. Focus on one that you want to talk about and avoid grouping multiple activities in one description.
Avoid using acronyms. Just because you know what JCDSDYA stands for, doesn’t mean that everyone else will (it actually doesn’t stand for anything but you get what I’m saying). You want to ensure that the Admissions Committee reading your essays will easily understand the point that you’re trying to make, and it won’t help if they have to continuously refer back to where you mentioned what the acronym means.
Don’t procrastinate. Start writing your report when it’s out and hand it in as early as possible, after you have proofread it and made sure that it’s perfect (or close to it). I’ve heard stories where friends actually forgot to submit their report, or Inside Track becoming extremely laggy when everyone decides to submit 5 minutes before the deadline.
PROOFREAD. Regardless of how amazing your extracurricular activities are, grammar mistakes or poor spelling can have a seriously negative impact on your report. Triple check your spelling and make sure that you’re concisely answering the question in your answers. Also make sure that you don’t exceed the word count (I found it helpful to write up all my answers on a Word document before transferring it onto Inside Track).
Cheers,
Jennifer