onTrack: Expert MBA Essay Guidance

Virtually all MBA programs give applicants word limits for each essay they ask you to write. Most often, admissions committees ask MBA applicants to write MBA essays that are approximately five-hundred words in length, but some are as short as one-hundred words, and others theoretically have no limit at all. As a rule, applicants should not submit an essay whose word count is 5% more or 5% less than the requested limit. If you write an MBA essay that is 15% longer than the requested word count, you will send a message to the admissions committee that you are not considerate of others’ time and cannot (or do not) follow directions. If you were to write an essay that fell 15% short of the word limit, you might send a message that you are not a thoughtful communicator or are not terribly reflective. So, keep your MBA essays quite close to the word count!

The MBA admissions process is holistic in nature. No one piece “makes” or “breaks” a candidacy. The MBA admissions committee will evaluate your GPA, GMAT/GRE score, resume, MBA essays, short answers, optional essay, interview, recommendations, and other application elements together. Your MBA essays are your chance to truly own your personal narrative. Much of your application is “black and white,” meaning that it is composed of static facts, such as your GPA or GMAT score, but your essays are your opportunity to provide “color.” Through your MBA essays, the MBA admissions committee will come to understand your values and motivations, as well as your successes and even potentially your failures, and they will learn about your professional and personal aspirations. In your MBA essays, you give the admissions committee a profound sense of who you are, what you stand for, and what your purpose is in pursuing your degree as an avenue to ambitious opportunities beyond. Through your MBA essays, the admissions committee comes to understand what makes you tick, what makes you different, and what makes you special. So, we cannot tell you precisely how important they are, but we can assure you that they are quite important!

You can find successful essay examples in the Complete Start to Finish Guide to MBA Admissions, which is available for free download, in “What Matters?” and “What More?”: 50 Successful Essays for the Stanford GSB and HBS (and Why They Worked), and in onTrack by mbaMission. In onTrack, we review the good and the not so good in dozens of MBA essays and MBA personal statements. We also introduce key MBA essay writing concepts and then guide you through each sample essay offered, highlighting where the MBA essays are strongest and where they can be improved. It is an invaluable resource.

First, carefully reading the MBA essay prompt for each essay is absolutely critical, and you must ensure that you are responding to the prompt thoughtfully and indeed answering the questions being asked! Second, you are almost always going to write your MBA essays in a narrative style, meaning that you let the story do the work, rather than making declarative statements about yourself and your accomplishments. By identifying a compelling (and relevant!) story, sharing your actions, and then reflecting on those actions, you will write an effective business school essay.

The MBA admissions committees are not looking for a certain, single “thing” in an MBA essay. So, we cannot be narrowly prescriptive about which topics or styles will impress the admissions committees. In general, your MBA essays need to be sincere and authentic, meaning that you should strive to reveal experiences and reflections that are true to you, rather than attempting to be something or someone you are not. In addition, you should use a narrative approach in your MBA essays, which will aid in delivering authenticity, because it is a form of writing that enables you to present a story as it happened. Every one of your MBA application essays must have a powerful opening that grabs the reader’s attention and a core conflict that reveals a problem or obstacle that you ultimately helped overcome or resolve. If your story has no problem or conflict, you will struggle to hold your reader’s attention! Finally, your business school essays should have thoughtful resolutions and reflections at the end. In most essays, you need to share what you learned from the experience you are showcasing! Although these elements are not explicitly, or strictly, what the admissions committees look for in a business school application essay, they are the pieces that will allow you to connect with the reader and give your story its best shot at being “heard.”

MBA essays are often quite straightforward. Your goal in writing your essays is not to wow the admissions committee with your prose but to build a simple narrative that enables the MBA admissions officer to enter your experiences, gain perspective on your decision-making, and understand your core values. So, you should definitely structure your MBA essays so that you have a strong opening that puts the reader in the middle of the action, after which, you lead the reader to the core conflict that is ultimately resolved, and then you reflect on that resolution. But your MBA application essays should not feel robotic or mechanical in style. A great MBA essay will have these elements—this structure—but be written in a way that draws the reader in so that they do not notice the structure. If you have a compelling story and rely on narrative writing, your essay will flow naturally.

MBA essays do not stand out because the MBA applicant takes a completely radical and different approach. MBA essays stand out when the applicant has truly reflected on their life and identified a story that both responds fully to the school’s prompt and truly reveals the applicant’s character and values. If you are able to fully answer the essay question and provide a response that illuminates your character and values, then you will likely have a standout essay on your hands.

Many business school application essays will require that you demonstrate your leadership, but that does not mean that you need to write, “I was a leader when…” or force examples of rousing leadership into each essay. Leadership is not simply about giving fiery speeches that motivate others. You can lead by example, you can lead by including others, you can lead by improving a team’s morale, you can lead through creative problem-solving, and you can lead in many other ways!

The short answer: no.

The longer answer is this: you might want to revisit a core, standout experience and explore it anew for each MBA program’s essay questions to the extent that that is possible. Still, for two programs to ask the exact same essay question, with the exact same word limit, is exceedingly rare, so you will not likely have many opportunities to simply copy and paste. And even if you were to have such an opportunity, we would nevertheless strongly advise you to first consider how you are responding to all the program’s essay questions as a whole, rather than rushing to copy and paste. For example, in the rare instance when two schools pose an essentially identical MBA essay question, you might find that one of the business schools requires three additional essays, and the other requires just one additional essay. In that case, are you sure you would want to use the convenient “copy and paste” option, rather than crafting an essay that truly showcases your values? Rather than opportunistically looking to the “copy and paste” option, reflect on your core experiences and strive to answer each question from program to program in ways that enable you to share these experiences. Do the difficult work of brainstorming for each group of MBA essays and of writing unique responses. The MBA admissions committee responds to authenticity, not short cuts.

One of the most common mistakes MBA applicants make when writing their MBA application essays is “telling,” rather than “showing,” the admissions committee what they want the school to know. In other words, they share conclusions, rather than leading the admissions reader to draw the desired conclusions themselves after reading the applicant’s story. In your MBA essays, you should never make a declarative statement like “I was a leader when I…” or “My best skills are….” These kinds of statements are especially problematic at the beginning of your MBA essay, but even at the end of your essay, when you are reflecting on the story you have shared, explicitly “telling” the reader how you feel about your performance is neither necessary nor recommended. Doing so is not only braggy but also, in most cases, redundant. Your MBA admissions reader should understand what your best skills are without you having to spell them out, because your narrative should reveal them naturally!

Another error that many applicants make in their MBA application essays is trying too hard to impress. Some applicants even become boastful or embellish their roles to the point of implausibility. Your goal in your business school essays is not to demonstrate a level of achievement that is impossible for someone in your role but rather to show that you are performing at your highest level in your role.

Yet another error that applicants make in their MBA essays is trying to use novel approaches to writing or gimmicky techniques. The admissions committees simply want to get to know you. They do not need you to use six-syllable adjectives or a radical approach to writing to do so. Of course, a creative approach is sometimes warranted, but you have to ask yourself honestly whether your creative idea came to you naturally in the course of thinking about the story you want to tell the admissions committee or whether you decided to use a creative approach first and are now just trying to make your idea fit into it. If you are doing the latter, you are making a serious MBA essay writing mistake!