Admissions essays: Question time

HAVING graduated one set of full-time MBA students in the spring, many programmes are readying their application requirements for students planning to enter in the autumn of 2013. Schools that have recently posted their essay questions for applications in the next year include Ross (at the University of Michigan), Tuck, Darden (at the University of Virginia), Goizueta (Emory University), Stern, Haas, Yale School of Management, Booth, Wharton, Stanford, and Harvard.

Those planning to apply should begin immediate work on answering two different questions. First, how does an MBA help further your career goals? Second, have you ever learned from your own failure, and if so, how? Nearly every school asks some variation of these two questions. Harvard’s is the simplest:

Tell us about something you did well.
Tell us about something you wish you had done better.

You have 400 words for each question, by the way. This is less than in the past. Admissions directors, mindful of their staff’s time and their prospective students’ desire to impress, are imposing more parsimonious word limits.

This is why many people, who write better than they think they do—capable of being simultaneously witty and sympathetic in a short email to a distressed friend, say—lie awake at night worrying about application essays, or turn to expensive application consultants for advice. The applicant is charged with meeting the demands yet standing out: appearing as both a unique snowflake and a team player, to mix clichés.

There are some variations. Haas’s staff want to know which song expresses the applicant best. Cornell UniversityJohnson School requests the table of contents to Your Life Story (its capitalisation). Booth asks for a four-slide presentation that will “broaden our perspective about who you are.” And Stern, in a question titled “Your Two Paths,” requires applicants to forecast two different career tracks and explain how an MBA fits into both.

(Speaking of clichés, a warning to Stern applicants: avoid quoting the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken.” Nearly every American has to read it in school, and it thus gets quoted endlessly. Meanwhile there are thousands of other perfectly good poems that go ignored. Odds are the Stern readers are already rather tired of it.)

Stanford’s admissions office includes a host of formatting tips that would serve you well when applying to any of its competitors. For fonts, for example, it recommends 12-point Arial, Courier or Times New Roman. (Of the three, pick Times New Roman. Even if you have a poignant story of leadership, sustainability, and Comic Sans, tell it in Times New Roman.) Stanford also gives advice on what to include in the mysterious “any additional information” section: qualifications not on your CV, such as independent research, or explanations of unflattering past events, such as an arrest.

So how do you present yourself as dignified yet passionate and persuasive in the space of 400 words? One technique is to switch the questions to a different setting. Pretend, say, that your unhappy friend has said, “Distract me. Tell me why you’re applying for an MBA.” And then compose an email answering the question. If your friend will sit over a drink and a tape recorder, listening to your answer, so much the better. The result will be too informal and too rambling for the admissions committee; but it will be in your own voice. And the closer your written application answers sound to your own voice, the less likely you are to be dismissed as stilted and robotic. This is true even if you have to translate from your first language to English.

But also keep in mind that you must satisfy yourself with the answers. This may sound ridiculous: you can impress yourself much more easily than a faceless, forbidding admissions committee. But read your answers back out loud, and if they are thin and unconvincing, you will hear it. And then you may start wondering if an MBA is the best choice for you after all.

At that point you have two options. One is to quit the field, and feel no shame, even if you have already been attending MBA fairs, badgering former bosses for recommendations and telling everyone you plan to apply for an MBA. Better to withdraw now than to find yourself on campus, or graduated, still feeling listless.

The other is to double back down on answering the questions—not for the committee’s sake at this point but for your own. Why do you want an MBA? What do you see yourself doing? Could you do it without an MBA? What are you most afraid of missing out on if you fail to get into the programme of your choice? If you graduate into a rum job market and can’t immediately get a high-paying job to work off your student loans, will you regret having taken the degree?

This self-questioning may prove even less fun than writing the admissions essays in the first place. But having done it, when you sit back down to answer the questions, you will have greater knowledge of your goals and how an MBA might help you meet those goals. Such knowledge is not guaranteed to propel you to a flood of acceptances. But it will stand you in good stead to take advantage of the acceptances (or rejections) you do get.

Readers' comments



there is a lot of bull in those essays. Which is a good start for the next two years of bull to come, which will serve only to deal with the tons of bull awaiting in the biz world. Master of Bull Administration, Stanford GSB '83.




Life itself is a lot of bull since you have to deal with imperfect human beings throughout.Being steeped in concentrated bull for two years is good training. What they don't teach you there, life will teach you later in harsh lessons generously imparted.


the advice in this article applies to applications to any institution asking for a personal statement of some sort, whether it be a college essay, mba program, or medical residency. My sister is applying for her first residency and I'm helping her edit her personal statement. My most important piece of advice? Find your voice and write what you really feel, not some fluffed up bs version of it.



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