MBA Application Essay Help Course

Video Course: The MBA Essay Help Course
Topher Williamson Topher Williamson

Video Course: The MBA Essay Help Course

We’ve created this online video help course to help give you the best start to your essay writing process! Feel free to read more on each topic from these videos in the lessons below as well.

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Understanding Your Audience
Topher Williamson Topher Williamson

Understanding Your Audience

The essays provide the link between the professionally and academically accomplished individual you are on paper, and who the real “you” is. They allow your story and your personality to come out in a way that informs what type of student you will be on campus and how you will add to and enrich the current culture and learning community of the school you are applying to.

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Common Pitfalls
Topher Williamson Topher Williamson

Common Pitfalls

In the first section, we discussed who the target audience is for your essays and how to think about turning inwards to get to the core of why you want to go to business school. In this section, we will discuss the most common mistakes we see business school applicants make in constructing and telling their stories in the essays.

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Harvard Business School
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Harvard Business School

We will begin the next series of articles with a school by school examination of the essay prompts. First up: The Harvard Business School.

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Stanford Business School
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Stanford Business School

Next in our series is Stanford Business School, colloquially known on campus as the “GSB” (i.e. Graduate School of Business).

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The Wharton School
Dave Cook Dave Cook

The Wharton School

The following article will break down the Wharton essays (2) this year and provide a comprehensive approach for how applicants should handle it.

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University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Dave Cook Dave Cook

University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Next in our series is the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, simply known in the school’s lexicon as Booth.

The following article will break down the Booth essays this year and provide a comprehensive approach for how applicants should handle them.

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Columbia Business School
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Columbia Business School

The next school in this course is the Columbia Business School, or CBS. The following article will examine both strategies and approaches to the CBS essays this year and provide a comprehensive overview of how applicants should handle it.

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Intros and Conclusions
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Intros and Conclusions

As we wrap up the discussion of individual strategies, it is time to take a step back and draw some universal insights for well-written essays. Over the years, we have gathered patterns of essays that captivated audiences and others that have turned away Admissions for their cliché-based or less-than-original writing. Still, with this experience, we have read enough bad essays to recognize a good one. Uniformly, good essays were clear, concise, and grammatically correct.

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Editing Checklist and Summation
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Editing Checklist and Summation

In the final article, we want to provide some thoughts on how you should approach editing the essay.
As we discussed, the business school application essay provides you the valuable real estate in your candidate package to tell Admissions what they need to know: who you are, what you value, and the driving influences behind the bullet points on your resume. These motivations are hard to fake and easy to spot, so any qualitative assessment or attribute that you want to come across in your application needs support with examples, stories, anecdotes, or previous experience that you can cite.

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Learn by Example: Undergraduate Experience
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Learn by Example: Undergraduate Experience

So you were eighteen when you went to college. Young, impression- able, and experimental—you just wanted to have a good time. Also, you probably did not select your college or courses to justify them to the HBS admissions committee, did you? Besides, come on, that was such a long time ago! Why does the HBS admissions committee want to know about your academic experience? You do not even re- member where the diploma is now. No, this essay question is not intended to penalize you for those frat parties and spring breaks years ago.

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Learn by Example: Career Aspirations
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Learn by Example: Career Aspirations

So you have spent the last five years trolling the seas in a British naval submarine, have been trading on the floor of the stock ex- change, or have just recently graduated from college. Moreover, you have just spent several essays talking about your scintillating experiences of the last decade. Now it is time for you to answer what is arguably the most important question of the application: What do you want to be when you grow up? More precisely: What is your career vision and why do you need a Harvard MBA to achieve it? A well- structured response to this question will address four critical points.

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Learn by Example: Typical Day
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Learn by Example: Typical Day

This is an essay question that at first glance seems almost too easy: describe a typical day. How hard can that be? Do not be fooled; this is a question worth spending some time on, one that if done well can communicate a great deal about your personality and how you approach the world and solve problems.

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Learn by Example: Accomplishments
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Learn by Example: Accomplishments

While the other essay topics may change somewhat year to year, this essay continues to be a permanent fixture in the HBS application. With a more generous word limit of six hundred words, it offers a unique opportunity to tell the admissions committee what is most important to you as an individual and as a professional.

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Learn by Example: Setback or Failure
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Learn by Example: Setback or Failure

Life would be dull if you got everything you wanted without having to struggle a bit. This question is all about how you deal with adversity. The key here is to turn whatever setback you experienced into something positive. Do not dwell on the disappointment—although describe it vividly—but rather focus on how you solved the problem and what you learned.

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Learn by Example: Ethical Issues
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Learn by Example: Ethical Issues

This topic represents a slight twist on traditional ethics questions that focus on a dilemma applicants have experienced firsthand: it is forward-looking, asking applicants to anticipate challenges they may encounter in the future as business leaders. Applicants may wish to use this opportunity to expand on their career goals or to address ethical issues that are specific to their chosen industry or job function. Despite the forward-looking nature of the question, students may wish to draw on past experiences handling difficult ethical dilemmas and demonstrate how this has shaped their principles as well as their plans for handling such issues in the future.

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Learn by Example: Other Question
Dave Cook Dave Cook

Learn by Example: Other Question

What an interesting topic! Open-ended questions are challenging because candidates have to go through the sometimes harrowing process of deciding what to talk about. They can, however, be the decisive, positive factor in an application. We encourage applicants to think of this question as an opportunity to display elements of their personality that haven’t come across in their other essays. For example, some applicants choose to talk about their family life and their personal values; others touch upon specific aspects of their personalities that they think will differentiate them from the rest of the applicant pool.

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