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The Iconic HBS Essay is Gone. How to Master the New Prompts.

June 2024 marked a significant shift in Harvard Business School’s MBA admissions process, with the first major update to the essay component of the application since 2016.

That is, the 900-word, open-ended HBS essay— As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program? —has been discontinued in lieu of three shorter prompts. 

In this article, we’ll cover the new HBS essays, speculate on why the changes were made, and give our best advice on how Harvard Business School applicants should tackle the new essay themes.

The Harvard Business School Essay Is Now “Essays”

Harvard Business School’s MBA essay prompts for 2024 appeal to “business-minded”, “leadership-focused”, and “growth-oriented” individuals.  

The prompts are:

Business Minded

• Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you strive to make on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

Leadership-Focused

• What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)

Growth-Oriented

• Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

At first glance, MBA applicants might feel some relief when reading the requirements for these new prompts. Yes, they’re 100 words shorter, but there’s also much more guidance about what to write about—it would seem. 

However, the narrower the focus, the easier it is for you to “lose the thread” and get bogged down in the language of the prompt.

Increased specificity can also lead to formulaic responses, which lack the personal storytelling that helps your essays standout. (It also increases the chances of applicants turning to ChatGPT or other LLMs for assistance).

As a result, we feel that you’re going to have to work a little harder to distinguish yourself when responding to these prompts—and you’re going to have to resist the temptation to use ChatGPT for your HBS application .

How to Approach the New HBS Essay Prompts

The biggest pitfall MBA applicants fall into with specific, shorter essays like these is to respond too directly to the prompt without considering the bigger picture.

When approaching the essay writing process, don’t worry too much about the exact themes in each prompt. Instead, reflect on the reasons you feel you should be admitted to HBS in general. 

Think through your answers to the following questions:

• Why are you qualified?
• What do you hope to do post-MBA?
• How has your background shaped this motivation?
• What in your background provides evidence that you will be successful in your goal or goals?
• What impact will your success have on the wider community, career path, and so on?

By orienting yourself to the bigger picture, you can avoid focusing too narrowly on “curiosity” or “leadership qualities.” 

Next, think about the topics you don’t need to address in your essays. Factors such as academic ability and career experience will be covered separately in the application or the resume. 

Decide what hasn’t been addressed elsewhere, and strategize on how to work this information into the prompts provided.

This is where a consultant can mean the difference between a generic essay and a memorable and highly impactful response. An MBA admissions consultant can help you think through your motivations and craft MBA essays that seamlessly complement your application while showcasing your personality.

If you’re looking for even more insight about how to tackle the three HBS prompts, consider our advice on writing a strong MBA personal statement—including 4 common mistakes you’ll want to avoid . 

Why was the Harvard Business School Essay Changed?

We don’t have any insider information on why the original HBS essay prompt was replaced, but we can speculate generally on some factors that might have led to this moment.

New Director of Admissions, New Essays

In October 2023, Rupal Gadhia joined Harvard Business School as the Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid. These changes coincide with her tenure, and we can safely assume that this is not a coincidence. 

Typically, when admissions essays shift from longer, open-ended prompts to shorter, more focused ones, it’s because many applicants were not effectively addressing the essay’s purpose and were using the space ineffectively.

Perhaps the regime change paved the way for this update—perhaps it was even in the works for some time.

In addition to a new Director of Admissions, the HBS essay updates also seem to align with a change in the types of candidates HBS is seeking to admit.

A culture shift in the Harvard Business School Admissions Committee?

In previous cycles, Harvard Business School has been quite direct about its interest in individuals with a “habit” of leadership and an analytical aptitude and appetite.

However, this cycle sees a shift towards a broader, softer set of qualities, potentially setting the runway for a minor increase in non-traditional MBA admits. 

These qualities directly correspond to the new HBS essays, and Harvard Business School gives some guidance as to how certain candidates should interpret the purpose of the new prompts.

As stated on the “ Who Are We Looking For ?” page, the HBS admissions team will look for individuals who…

• Business-Minded: “are passionate about using business as a force for good – who strive to improve and transform companies, industries, and the world.”
• Leadership-Focused: “aspire to lead others toward making a difference in the world, and those who recognize that to build and sustain successful organizations, they must develop and nurture diverse teams.”
• Growth-Oriented: “desire to broaden their perspectives through creative problem solving, active listening, and lively discussion.”

Now, it is important to remember that Harvard Business School relies heavily on its donors and its reputation with recruiters, who in turn depend on the MBA class composition as it stands today. So we are not likely to see a large shake-up of the school’s MBA class profile overnight.

Further, it’s impossible to predict what industries and profiles are likely to benefit from these changes in admissions criteria. 

But if the essay prompts and changes to admissions criteria are genuine and indicative of a broader shift in admissions committee thinking, then we can expect to see individuals who invest in others (especially those who are different from themselves) fare quite well. 

Wrapping Up

These changes to the HBS application essays coincide with the appointment of a new Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid and a subtle broadening of the admissions criteria for HBS’s MBA class. 

While these shifts may not lead to a dramatic change in the class profile overnight, they do signal an evolving approach to assessing candidates.

For applicants, the key takeaway is to pay close attention to the new essay prompts without getting bogged down by the specific themes. 

It’s essential to maintain a holistic view of your MBA applications, emphasizing your overall qualifications, goals, and the unique experiences that align with each program’s values.

Engaging an MBA admissions consultant can be a strategic move, offering you tailored insights and helping you craft Harvard MBA essays that stand out. By focusing on the bigger picture and strategically addressing the prompts, you can present a strong, authentic application that highlights your readiness for the HBS MBA program.

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• Achieving Work-Life Balance as a Top MBA Graduate
• How One HBS Alum Leveraged Her MBA for Entrepreneurship

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HBS – How to Answer the New Essay Prompts (2024-2025)

HBS sent the MBA community reeling when it announced (after months of rumors) that it would be changing its longstanding, single essay prompt this year. The prior question , “As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program?”, was introduced in 2016 and lasted for 8 application cycles.

Now, under the new leadership of Rupal Gadhia, who replaced Chad Losee as the Managing Director of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid in 2023, the school has joined the latest MBA admissions trend: more but shorter essays.  

The 2024-2025 HBS Essay Prompts

Business-Minded Essay: Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

Leadership-Focused Essay: What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)

Growth-Oriented Essay: Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

For a full list of 2024-2025 application deadlines and essay prompts, click here .

A Mixed Bag

Our team has mixed feelings about these new essay prompts. On one hand, the change is a huge positive for applicants who were often anxious and paralyzed by the ambiguity of the prior open-ended essay prompt. The now very direct questions leave little to assumption and lay bare the school’s intentions behind each question.

However, as you may have noticed, the word count is extremely limiting in these essays. In fact, we’ll go as far as saying that the low word count limit will likely be the hardest part of writing these essays . Fitting impactful and introspective stories into 250-300 words will be an extraordinary feat in writing and editing. And we wonder if the brevity will come at the cost of depth. But the good news is that all applicants are playing by the same rules – and are subject to the same limitations. And we have no doubt you’re up for the challenge.

What Does HBS Look For?

As a starting point, it’s helpful to consider the qualities HBS looks for . Note that these qualities were updated this year as well and it’s no coincidence that they align with the essay prompts above.

• Business-Minded
• Leadership-Focused
• Growth-Oriented

HBS wants strong, conscientious leaders who will change the world. Every successful candidate needs to not only meet the criteria above but do so in their own distinctive way.

Start Big Picture, Then Drill Down to Each Question

It can be tempting to jump straight into the prompts and start brainstorming the best story to answer that specific question. But we urge you to pause and look at the big picture first. Go back to your personal brand and what you stand for. What is the message that you want to deliver to HBS loud and clear?  

Write that message at the top of your essay brainstorming document and refer to it frequently. Use it as your guidepost as you ideate on individual essay topics. And ask yourself, does this story a) answer the prompt? AND b) support and reinforce that message? Your answer should be yes.

The Career Goals Question

The first essay prompt centers around the “why” behind your career choices to-date and your aspirations for the future. HBS is looking for clear cause and effect here and a strong essay will draw simple but powerful connections between your past and your future.

We recommend starting by writing down key inflection points or “aha” moments in your past that sparked your interest in using business as a force for good. These can be but certainly don’t have to be professional experiences. From that list, choose the most influential 1-3 past experiences that you will expand on and connect with your passion for creating an impact.

Then the remainder of the essay can describe your future aspirations. It’s important to convey not just what you hope to accomplish, but also why it matters to you and how you plan to leverage your unique background and insights to make a difference.

The Leadership Question

In this question, HBS is asking you to elaborate on both who you are as a leader and how you’ve had an impact . In other words, this essay must reveal your character, your special brand of leadership , and how you lead – and how those have left a mark on others.

To accomplish this, we recommend following the outline of the prompt. Open by sharing a defining moment or experience that explains the origin of your leadership values and character. This will most likely be a personal experience and can certainly reflect the influence of a role model or leader you admire, a challenge you overcame, or even a unique family dynamic. Anything is fair game here so get creative.

Then you can tell a story of a specific time when you positively impacted others through your leadership. To select the best story here, we recommend writing down all of the key moments in your life where you demonstrated leadership, regardless of whether it was in a formal role. Then from that list, choose your proudest or most defining experience.

Lastly, with the remaining word count, you can close the essay by describing the kind of leader you hope to become, connecting that future vision with the leadership brand you have today and your career goals.

The Growth Mindset Question

If the first two questions put you in the driver’s seat of impact , the third question reverses the roles and asks you to discuss a time when you’ve been impacted . More specifically, the question is asking about a time when you sought out a new experience, new knowledge, a new perspective, or any other avenue that was the opposite of certainty.

Unlike the other questions that ask you to connect the dots between multiple experiences, this question is asking you to recount one specific story or anecdote. We recommend choosing the one most compelling story – the story that exemplifies your curiosity AND strongly supports your personal brand / overarching application theme.

Because curiosity is a core value for HBS, we recommend choosing a story where the stakes were high and the impact on you was truly meaningful. If you’re struggling to identify a good story here, start at the end. Identify specific instances where you experienced personal or professional growth – where there was a clear before and after. Then, backtrack to the actions you took that led to those leaps in growth.

A classic STAR (Situation, Action, Task, Result) format will help you make the most use of the limited word count here. Describe the context of the situation, what sparked your curiosity, and the steps you took to satisfy it. Then conclude by explaining the impact of your curiosity on your development.

What to Avoid

You’ll notice that none of the questions ask you “why HBS” or “why MBA”. This is not a trap. HBS simply isn’t interested in understanding your reasons. So, we don’t recommend spending your specious word count on addressing “why HBS” or “why MBA”. These essays should be deep and personal. What drives you? Who are you as a person (if someone were to start writing a biography about you right now?) And importantly, for HBS, it should point to good examples of how you are a leader.

Get Personal

Your experiences and accomplishments don’t have to be massive things relatively speaking – not everyone has started a non-profit or is on a mission to save the world – but if they are significant to you and your trajectory and evolution as a person, then that’s the point. The goal is to show who you are, what drives you, and what has helped you become who you are today.

Lastly, check out HBS’  Portrait Project . The stories students share and the level of personal depth they go into is exactly the kind of direction you should be taking with these essays. 

Reading this essay analysis is a great starting point in your HBS application process. It will point you in the direction and help you avoid some common pitfalls. But remember that general guidance will only get you so far. Feedback on your individual story and writing is what will supercharge your essays.

If you would like some personalized guidance, click  here  to request a free 30-minute consultation!

After embarking on my own MBA journey, I co-founded Vantage Point MBA Admissions Consulting to help aspiring business school students get accepted to the top MBA programs in the U.S. and Europe. As President, I currently lead a team of over 25 superstar consultants to give our clients an unmatched experience, with a focus on white glove, personalized collaboration and mentorship.

2024-2025 Stanford MBA Essay Tips

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2024-2025 Harvard Business School MBA Essay Tips and Example Essays

Jul 1, 2024

• Who is Harvard looking for?
• How should I answer Harvard essay questions?
• We help your Harvard essays shine

UPDATE : This article was originally posted on July 23, 2018. It has been updated with new information and tips below. 

When many people think “business school,” the first MBA that pops into their mind is Harvard Business School. Established in 1908, HBS has been at the forefront of business education for more than a century. 

However, receiving more than 8,000 applications per year, Harvard Business School is one of the most difficult MBA programs to enter. 

That’s why we’ve prepared this guide to help you use your Harvard admissions essays to stand out. We’ve rounded up our best tips and links to Harvard Business School MBA sample essays to ensure you give your HBS application your best shot. 

1. Who is Harvard looking for?

Every year, Harvard Business School admits the largest single MBA class in the world, with around 1000 students starting each year. In general, Harvard tends to admit applicants with 5 years of work experience and outstanding test scores. The median GMAT for the Class of 2025 was 740, and the median GRE was 163Q, 163V.   

Harvard also places a strong emphasis on diversity, with the Class of 2025 containing 45% women and 39% international students. 

In addition,  some of the key characteristics HBS looks for in applicants are:

If this sounds like a community in which you’d be right at home, you’ll first have to prove you’ve got what it takes by successfully answering Harvard’s brand new essay questions. 

2. How should I answer Harvard essay questions?

Writing any admissions essay is a tough task, however, Harvard raises the bar. Keep reading for a more in-depth look at how to turn this rather open-ended task into standout essays! 

2.1 Goals short answer tips

Briefly, tell us more about your career aspirations (500 characters, including spaces) . 

Then, you’ll see a box where you have 500 characters to share your goals. In the box, directly state your short-term and long-term goals in simple, clear terms. You have a whole essay to talk about the impact and motivation behind your goals, so you don’t need to focus on that here. 

If you’re struggling to define your goals for the MBA, check out this post ! 

2.2 Essay 1 tips

Business-Minded: Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you strive to make on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

A MAJOR change, HBS has introduced three short essays, including this goals-type essay , to replace the long, open-ended question it favored for years. 

However, with only 300 words , HBS forces you to clearly state some of the most fundamental — and important! — information in your MBA application . 

First, we suggest that you review how HBS defines “business-minded” and how they expect to see this in your application. 

You have a 500-character short answer in the application form itself where you need to state your short and long-term goals, so there is no need to restate them here. You can just jump right into the experiences that have influenced your career choices. 

We do suggest that you start off the essay with context into why the goals you’re pursuing are right for you. This might be a STAR-format story (or 2 mini STAR stories) that is related to your goals or part of your personal track record that motivated you to pursue the goals you stated. Make sure that the story or stories that you choose are all directly related to your career goals and that you can make a clear link between them and your career path both now and in the future. 

If it helps you to briefly mention your goals ( think a few words here) to help transition your essay from past to future, you can briefly mention your career aspirations on a high level. For example, you might use something like, “Looking ahead, as a leader in the healthcare space…” and then continue on with the second part of the essay. 

In the second part of the essay, the focus is all on impact. Here, you want to be crystal clear about the legacy you hope to leave behind with your goals. 

The question asks you to think about impact beyond just your own career and prompts you to consider the impact your goals will have on businesses, organizations, and communities. We always encourage our clients not just to think about the direct impact their goals will have but also how their goals will make the world a better place. 

For example, if you want to launch a startup that offers services to SMBs, which are currently underserved in your country, make sure to show how this will impact the business landscape, as well as how it will make the lives of those your company will improve as a result of using your service. 

Additionally, we often encourage clients to think about the concept of a “parallel goal.” For example, if your main goal is to move up the ranks in the private equity industry, perhaps your parallel goal is to continue the work you’ve done to break down gender barriers in the male-dominated finance industry. Or, if you’re planning to become an operations-focused consulting partner, perhaps your parallel goal is to serve as an example for other LGBTQ+ leaders in your firm and continue mentoring younger professionals in your industry. 

If you do have a parallel goal, make sure that it connects with your previous track record. You don’t want to mention how you’re dedicated to mentoring others in your future career if you’ve never mentored anyone before, as this will come across as inauthentic. If you do mention this type of goal in addition to your “main” goal , make sure you also show the impact you hope it has. 

In short, make sure you consider the wide-reaching impact of your goals and clearly state it. It’s also a great idea to back this impact up with why you’re passionate about pursuing these goals at some point in this section since your passion for your future is what makes your career plans come alive!

2.3 Essay 2 tips

Leadership-Focused: What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)

This question is challenging because it asks you to cover so much ground in just 250 words. 

First, we suggest that you review how HBS defines “leadership-focused” and how they expect to see this in your application. 

Then, start with a reflection on your leadership style. You need a clear definition of your leadership approach here for this essay to work effectively. It’s short, so bringing in stream-of-consciousness explorations of leadership or examples that are all over the place will demonstrate a lack of coherence and focus that won’t impress the adcom. 

Once you’ve thought about this, work on developing a list of your best leadership examples. We suggest one personal/extracurricular and one professional story if you can and if it’s aligned with your leadership theme. This shows a great range of leadership and demonstrates that you’re a leader not just because it’s required of you at work but also because you seek to lead and make an impact wherever you find yourself. 

After choosing your examples, it’s time to start writing. We suggest you start with a hook intro that brings in some type of wording that directly states your overall leadership style or focus. This will give the essay the organization and coherence we’re looking for while also grabbing the adcom’s attention. 

Then, bring in your two leadership examples. You won’t have space for long STAR-format stories here, so you want to summarize them in a few sentences. Make sure you still cover what happened, how you demonstrated leadership, and the results/what you learned in the end. Considering the word count of the essay, we suggest you spend ~75 words for each example. 

Finally, end your essay by exploring the leader you want to become. Be specific about how you want to improve and how you want to continue to make an impact as a leader. You want to connect this with the definition of leadership HBS gives above, but don’t dedicate word count to talking about HBS’ specific curriculum and leadership classes you want to take during your MBA. 

Instead, focus on the bigger picture and make sure the growth you say you want to pursue directly aligns with the stories and theme you mentioned above. We suggest you spend ~75 words on this section before ending with a killer conclusion sentence that ties it all together.  

Need more guidance? 

Our MBA Resource Center has dozens of successful HBS MBA essays that worked to get our clients admitted to help you plan out a winning Harvard Business School essay. Our library also includes guides for all top global MBA programs, detailed essay brainstorms, interview tips and mocks, CV templates, and recommendation letter guides. Click to join ! 

2.4 Essay 3 tips

Growth-Oriented: Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

First, we suggest that you review how HBS defines “growth-oriented” and how they expect to see this in your application. 

Though you may be tempted to cram in as many examples of curiosity as you can in this question, HBS clearly asks you for a single experience, though they do not dictate that you must draw this example from your professional experience. 

As such, considering the fact that you want to show growth in this example, brainstorm a list of examples in which you faced a clear challenge and were able to overcome it using curiosity.

Does the question say there has to be a challenge? No. 

Do essays where applicants use overcoming challenges as a platform for demonstrating skills tend to work better than others? Yep!  

So, we suggest focusing on examples where your curiosity was key in solving the problem you faced. As such, an example where applying your already expert programming skills was what helped you face down the challenge won’t work well here. 

Instead, think of examples rich in creative problem solving, like learning a new skill to ensure a solution was reached or even demonstrating active listening and understanding both sides of an argument to resolve conflict.

Finally, make sure your story has a clear outcome or resolution and that it impacted your growth as a leader or person in some way.

When you start writing your essay, begin with a hook introduction that sets the stage and makes your reader want to keep reading to find out what happens. 

Then, show the challenge you were facing. When writing this essay, do not skim over the conflict part of your story . Though we work hard to avoid conflict in real life, a bit of conflict in your story here demonstrates your curiosity applied to real life.  Finally, we truly feel you should stick to the STAR framework to ensure you deliver a winning answer. 

Continue by showing what you did (this is the part in which you’re actively demonstrating your capacity to lead). During this section, focus on showing how you accomplished what you did and why you felt the actions you took were appropriate for the challenge. 

End your essay by showing the result you were able to achieve (we suggest you focus on examples with positive outcomes), what you learned, and specifically how you grew in some concrete way as a result of the experience. 

TOP TIP : It’s important to specifically call out “curiosity” in this essay. This will ensure that you fully and clearly answer all aspects of the prompt. Make sure, however, that you are specific about your curiosity – how you applied it, what you learned, etc. Don’t just name-drop curiosity and keep going. Make sure it’s an integral part of the story. 

2.5 Optional Essay tips

Please share additional information here if you need to clarify any information provided in the other sections of your application. This is not meant to be used as an additional essay. Please limit your additional information to the space in this section.

We know you’ll be tempted, but please don’t send us any additional materials (e.g., additional recommendations, work portfolios). To be fair to all applicants, extra materials won’t be considered.

This section should only be used to convey information not addressed elsewhere in your application, for example, completion of supplemental coursework, employment gaps, academic issues, etc. Feel free to use bullet points where appropriate. 

Though with such a short application you may be tempted to use this response to add additional stories and information you couldn’t quite squeeze in elsewhere, restraint is necessary here. Make sure you focus on explaining gaps in your application only, though you can use these explanations to highlight related achievements. 

You only have 75 words, so you’re only going to be able to state the facts!

We have written extensively on the issue of optional essays, giving tips and tricks for how to address issues like low GMAT scores or poor academic performance here . 

2.6 Reapplicant Essay tips

Please use this space to share with the Admissions Committee how you have reflected and grown since your previous application and discuss any relevant updates to your candidacy (e.g., changes in your professional life, additional coursework, and extracurricular/volunteer engagements). (250 word limit)

We have written a separate post on the topic of reapplying to business school , including insider tips and tricks to help make sure your second shot at your dream school is successful

3. We help your Harvard essays shine

One of the most common mistakes we see in MBA essays is that candidates fail to tell compelling stories . This is important because if your stories are not compelling, they will not be persuasive. At the same time, they must be backed by strong examples that establish a track record of success and prove to the admissions committees why you belong at their school. 

Striking this balance between content and creativity can be tough, however, as succeeding means not only choosing the right stories but ensuring they are told in an optimal manner.   

This is why our iterative developmental feedback process here at Ellin Lolis Consulting helps you mold your message through the application of our storytelling expertise until it reflects exactly what makes your profile stand out and show fit with your target program. 

That’s the approach we took with Fernando, who was admitted to Harvard. In their words, “ I absolutely recommend Ellin’s work to anyone who is applying to – or thinking about applying to – an MBA program. She definitely made the process smoother and helped me get to the end goal: get accepted at Harvard!”

Not only can you take advantage of our editing expertise through multiple edits – you can also benefit from it after a single review! If your budget is tight, our editors will be happy to help polish your text as much as possible and leave “bonus comments” so you can keep working on it on your own!

No matter how long we work with you, we will always ensure your essays shine . Sign up to work with our team of storytelling experts and get accepted.

4. Deadlines

The HBS MBA deadlines for the 2024-2025 season are below. You can access the HBS application here .

HBS MBA Round 1 Deadlines

Application Deadline : September 4, 2024

Interview Notification : TBD

Decisions Released : December 10, 2024

HBS MBA Round 2 Deadlines

Application Deadline : January 6, 2025

Decisions Released : March 26, 2025

HBS MBA 2+2 Deadlines

Application Deadline : April 25, 2025

Decisions Released : June 27, 2025

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Sample Essays from Admitted HBS Students

• Sample HBS Essay [2020]: Vulnerable But Invincible
• Sample HBS Essay [2016]: The Mechanical Engineer
• Sample HBS Essay [2015]: The Author

I read the new 2020 Harbus MBA Essay Guide wondering what I was going to gain from it. I’ve been reading HBS MBA application essays for 26 years. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. I also had read the previous Harbus MBA Essay Guide , and the question Harvard is asking hasn’t changed since that one was published. However, while I started The Essay Guide a skeptic, I quickly saw its value, and can whole-heartedly recommend it to HBS applicants. 

Even after having read hundreds of HBS essays, I still found it worthwhile to read The Essay Guide . For applicants who have preconceived notions of what an admissible essay should be, The Essay Guide will open your eyes to 22 successful and different responses. For applicants who are wondering how on earth they should approach their essay, the guide will give them 22 different answers. 

For me it reinforced several valuable lessons:

• There really is no template for a successful HBS essay. The diversity of essays that are acceptable — no pun intended, well maybe a little intended — to Harvard Business School is striking.  
• The commitment of most of the authors to telling their story is also noteworthy. Several said they asked friends to confirm that the essay really mirrors them. Others wrote that they were determined that the essay present an authentic portrait of them.
• Most of the students wrote the essay over the course of months. Give yourself time to draft a persuasive, introspective, and authentic essay. 

Harvard’s question is a fantastic one. It is a probing one. And it requires you to probe yourself so that you can provide a profound reflection of you as you tell the HBS admissions committee what you really want them to know.

A successful Harvard Business School application essay [2020]

This sample essay is from The Harbus MBA Essay Guide and is reprinted with permission from Harbus .  

Essay: Vulnerable But Invincible 

Home country: USA

Previous industry: Consulting

Analysis: The author takes a rather bold approach here. She uses the essay to point to the times when she showed vulnerability in the workplace. This essay presents a strong example of how an essay can be used to complement different aspects of your personality – while resume and application can be used to highlight accomplishments, the essay has been intelligently used to show author’s capacity to be strong enough to talk about situations when she broke down in a professional capacity, but took lessons from each of these situations and employed them to her strength.

I have cried exactly four times at work.

The first time was early in my career. It was 2AM and I was lying in bed struggling with an Excel model. An overachiever my whole life, I was wholly unused to the feelings of inadequacy and incompetence bubbling up inside me. After clicking through dozens of Excel forums with still no right answer, I gave up and cried myself to sleep, vowing to never let myself feel so incapable again.

The second time was a year and a half later. I was unsatisfied with my project and role, and questioning my decision to be a consultant. That uncertainty must have been apparent to everyone, because my manager pulled me aside and bluntly told me that my attitude was affecting the entire team. I cried in front of him, devastated that I had let my doubts bleed into my work.

The third time was just a year ago. I was overseeing a process redesign and struggling to balance the many changes needed. The Partner called me into his office to say, “I’m worried our process is not as sound as it needs to be. I need to know that you care about this as much as I do.” I nodded, say that I do, then ran to the bathroom to cry, overwhelmed by how much change I knew was coming.

Each of the first three times was driven by frustration and anger. I had tamped down my emotions to the point where they overwhelmed me. Particularly as a young woman in business, I never wanted to be viewed as a stereotype or incapable. I was ashamed of my tears and terrified at how others would perceive me.

However, each of those experiences proved to be a turning point. My tears motivated me to ask for help when I needed it, pushed me to restructure my mindset and approach, and gave me a moment to breathe, rebalance, and reprioritize. In each case, my work was better for it. I have also used each experience as a learning moment. Each time I asked myself what decisions led me to the point of tears, and what I could have done differently. I could have raised my hand earlier for help, initiated a conversation with my manager about my uncertainty and dissatisfaction, or involved the Partner more actively in the planning and prioritization. While I can’t change the past, I can learn from it, and am more considerate of such outcomes when I make these decisions today.

Emotions are an inevitable part of the human experience, and as such, an inevitable part of the office. Rather than keeping them at bay, I have begun embracing my emotions to be a better manager and leader, and build more authentic connections. As a manager, I understand my team as people, not just colleagues. I have regular conversations with each of my team members to understand their individual goals and motivations, so I can take those into consideration when building the team structure and delegating responsibilities. As a leader, I invest in traditions and events that foster camaraderie and high morale. I am the proud founder of [NAME OF OFFICE PROGRAM] in the office, a beloved tradition that is now an integral part of the office and that I hope will continue even after I leave.

The fourth time I cried was at the rollout of a process redesign I oversaw. This was our first time demo-ing the new process end-to-end for the rest of the team. As the demo progressed, I felt the team’s energy turn from nervous anticipation to dawning excitement, and finally to sheer awe and amazement. As the demo ended, one of my teammates turned to me, and asked in a hushed voice, “Are you crying?” And I was. This time, I cried not with frustration or anger. This time, I cried with joy for our success and with pride for my team. Embracing my emotions allowed me to show that tears are not shameful and don’t need to be hidden in the workplace. I am no longer ashamed of my tears, and I am proud to demonstrate that a strong leader can be pragmatic and emotional all at once.

Word count: 705

Author’s comment: “I started early on my essay (~ 3 months before the submission deadline) because it was important to me to iterate and be thoughtful. I started by laying out potential themes and stories for my essay, and while there are a lot of similarities, the core message changed quite a bit. Don’t get too attached to any one story or theme and allow yourself to let go of a draft if it’s not the right one. What I found most helpful was having 2-3 close friends that I trust wholeheartedly review multiple drafts, because they were able to provide continuous feedback and help me combine pieces from multiple drafts. None of them had ever gone to or applied to business school, but were experienced in writing and communication (e.g. one is a screenwriter) which helped me focus on communicating MY story more so than what is the story that HBS Admissions would most like.”

A successful Harvard Business School application essay [2016]

This sample essay is from  The Harbus MBA Essay Guide  and is reprinted with permission from Harbus. 

Essay: The Mechanical Engineer

Author’s home country: United States of America Author’s previous industry/profession: Operations consulting, operations management  Author gender: Male

Analysis:   The author focuses his essay on two themes – his professional experience as an operations consultant and an experience which motivated him to go for an MBA. Through the essay, the author is able to highlight his professional skills, achievement as well as give a clear picture of his long-term career plans and his reasons for doing an MBA.

I’m [APPLICANT’S FIRST NAME] and I have journeyed here from the hallowed grounds of [APPLICANT’S U.S. NEW ENGLAND HOMETOWN], where I spent my formative years amid wild dreams of achieving greatness by setting world records and winning the Olympics. As I’ve hung up my [OLYMPIC SPORT’S TRADITIONAL SHOES] in favor of business shoes, those dreams have evolved into a desire to achieve greatness in a different arena. Today, my dream centers on helping companies leverage technology to propel their operations into the future, providing unparalleled customer service and delivery, with an operational efficiency to match.

I graduated with a BS in Mechanical Engineering in [GRADUATION YEAR] and spent my first 3 years out of college working as an operations consultant. It was my job to walk into a manufacturing plant and drive significant operational change – for example, I once spent 3 months walking the sticky floors of a milk plant in [MID-SIZED U.S. SOUTHEASTERN CITY] helping plant management boost throughput by 30% in order to take on a new customer. We accomplished this goal with zero capital spend, a feat many had believed was impossible. In our projects, the biggest challenge was almost always convincing managers to reach for that extra tad of unseen opportunity hiding within the operation, because oftentimes it was very difficult to look beyond the daily struggles that plagued their operations. I worked directly with 5-8 person “rapid results teams,” coaching them on how to think about operational improvement, motivating them to sprint towards it, and leading them through the analysis required to capture it. I left those milk, water and oil sands plants with many enduring friendships and inspiring operational victories borne from our journey from ambitious goals to concrete results.

<< READ: What is HBS Looking For? >>

I’ve spent the past two years working in supply chain management at a private industrial goods supplier. I chose direct management because I wanted to drive these same inspirational improvements in an operation I owned. My role was to manage and improve the operation, and through my experience, I learned the nuts and bolts of the supply chain industry. However, my dream of innovating supply chain operations pushed me to consider transitioning to an organization with an ambitious, transformative purpose. In fact, last year I had a unique opportunity to reflect on what type of impact matters to me. This opportunity was my first ever trip to [NORTHWEST AFRICAN REGION], the place of my family’s origin.

On the second day of the trip, I journeyed to [LOCAL NORTHEASTERN AFRICAN TOWN], a small town nestled next an enormous active volcano that is surrounded by a wide expanse of rich volcanic soil, which is used to make wine. This wine is sipped by adventure-seeking tourists relaxing after a long day on the volcano, and thus the town’s two major industries, wine and tourism, are sustained. When we arrived at the town, I was shocked to see it buried by an avalanche of volcanic rock from an eruption [A FEW YEARS PRIOR]. As our guide lamented on the dreary prospects of the Page 2 of 2 town, I was amazed to see just how important these two industries had been to its development.

Through this real world example, I was able to clearly visualize the impact businesses can have on their broader environment, an understanding that had not been as evident to me while working in the larger, more complex American economy. For example, I had spent hours walking among the dilapidated buildings speckling the warehouse district in Cleveland, but only after my trip did I connect them to the decline of the Midwestern manufacturing industry. Upon my return, armed with this broader perspective, I decided my next step would be to attend business school. There I would gain the technical, operational and leadership skills to make my transition to an organization whose goal was to drive change in its broader industry and community, as those wine and tourism companies had done in [LOCAL NORTHEASTERN AFRICAN TOWN OF FAMILY’S ORIGIN].

So, that is how I arrived in front of you today. My goal is to humbly learn as much as I can from our section, our professors, and our experiences. I am excited to get to know you, and will always do my best to support our section intellectually and athletically (we will be the future section Olympics champions!).

How about yourself?

Word Count: 711

Author’s comment:   While the initial draft of my essay did not take more than an hour or two, it was the revision process that I spent a significant amount of time on. I think the most important part of the essay writing process is to ensure that your story and personality come through – and this is perhaps the most difficult part! To help with this, I had individuals who were not as familiar with my story and why I wanted to go to business school provide me with feedback in addition to those with whom I worked closely.

Linda’s comment:

I would hate for any of you to read this essay or any of the other essays in  The Harbus MBA Essay Guide , which I recommend, and think “This is a great template. I’m going to tell a story just like this one!” Bad idea. Wrong response.

The one take-away from this essay and the other successful essays in this book is that the reader feels a little like s/he is meeting the author – not someone else and not some masked being.  Individuality is the common thread in those essays; it isn’t brilliant prose or incredible writing. It’s authenticity and humanity. And yes, the author is accomplished too.

I chose this essay from the Harbus collection because I know there are many engineers applying. Some — both in and out of their field — think of the profession as boring or common. But this essay is neither boring nor common. I loved it because the writer comes to life, and  his passion  and personality shine through. He doesn’t get bogged down in technicalities, industrial jargon, or an alphabet soup of acronyms. He tells his story with energy and clarity, from his perspective, and with a focus on his impact.

Now that’s an example you can follow: Tell  your  story with energy and clarity, from  your  perspective, and with a focus on  your  impact.

Check out what recent applicants have to say about working with Accepted:

A successful harvard business school application essay [2015], the 2014-15 harvard business school essay question:.

You’re applying to Harvard Business School. We can see your resume, academic transcripts, extracurricular activities, awards, post-MBA career goals, test scores, and what your recommenders have to say about you. What else would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy?

This sample essay is from The Harbus MBA Essay Guide and is reprinted with permission from Harbus.  

Essay: The Author

Author’s Background: Finance & Media

The author sets the stage for the remainder of the essay by first presenting a notable accomplishment of hers and then explicitly illustrating the entrepreneurial drive and diligence she used to see it through. More importantly, the author’s opening introduces a theme – storytelling – that is consistently interwoven through different stages of her life. The reader is lead through the author’s childhood, professional and extracurricular experiences, along with accomplishments, all the while being reminded of the integral role storytelling has played. Beyond highlighting her gift, or passion for the art of storytelling, the author goes on to connect this theme with her future career ambitions, as well as describe how this could also serve the HBS community.

In 2012, I realized a life ambition – I completed my first novel, all while working full time at [Top U.S. Investment Bank]. I could not wait to share it with the world and eagerly went in search of a literary agent. But each agent I contacted declined to represent my novel.

Storytelling is my lifelong passion; it saw me through a difficult childhood. After my father left, my mother raised me as a single parent in [U.S. City/State], a rural Bible Belt town two hours south of [U.S. State]. We did not have much money and that coupled with my bookishness made me a target for bullies. Books and writing were an escape; they gave me an avenue to articulate the feelings of abandonment and powerlessness I otherwise did not want to express. Writing made me happy and the more I wrote, the more my talent blossomed. I began to win awards and my work was published in youth literary journals. These experiences made me more confident, a key part of my success later in life. It all started with a pen, a notebook, and my imagination. Nevertheless, I was passionate about my work and was determined to put it into readers’ hands. In true entrepreneurial fashion, I self-published my novel through the digital platforms Smashwords and Createspace. I worked with a promotional expert to organize a month-long book tour to promote the book to prominent book bloggers and their readers. The result? My novel has received multiple 5-star reader reviews, from Amazon to Goodreads, and was a semifinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

Stories are an integral part of the human experience. They uplift and inspire, give us permission to dream and to visualize what could be. Storytelling has been an integral part of my career, from building financial models at [Top U.S. Investment Bank] that illustrated my expectations for the companies that I covered to delivering a presentation to [International Daily Newspaper] ’s chief revenue officer explaining why reducing ad prices for tender house advertisers would not lead to an increase in revenue.

My passion has also informed my growth as a leader; I believe my most impactful expressions of leadership have been my efforts to help others write the narratives of their own lives and careers. At [Top U.S. Investment Bank], I created an informal mentorship program for female and minority interns and first-year analysts in the research division and led a “soft skills” class to help new analysts handle difficult interpersonal situations. For four years, I’ve mentored a young Hispanic woman through Student Sponsor Partners, a nonprofit that gives low-income students scholarships to private high schools. Being a mentor gave me the privilege of guiding another first generation college student along what I know can be a lonely, difficult path. This fall, she started college with a full scholarship.

Storytelling will be a part of my future career path; as an MBA graduate, my goal is to obtain a position in strategy and business development at an entertainment company that specializes in film or television. Long term, I want to start a multimedia and merchandising company with a publishing arm (books and magazines) as well as film, TV, and digital operations. Using strong, fictional heroines and informative lifestyle content, my company’s goal will be to educate and inspire women to become their best selves. My particular focus is creating compelling, multidimensional characters to inspire young women of color, who are constantly bombarded by negative images of women who look like them in media.

I’m pursuing a Harvard MBA because I want to become a better business strategist and strong general manager. Also, I want to further develop my leadership and presentation skills as I will manage professionals on the content and business side; it will be my task to unite them behind a shared strategic vision. Specifically, I want to learn how to motivate teams and individuals to perform at their highest level, and to become more adept at persuasion and generating “buy-in” from others. Harvard’s unique approach using the case method and emphasis on leadership development will challenge me to grow in both these areas. I also feel that I have much to contribute to Harvard’s community. My varied background in finance and media has given me a unique perspective that will be valuable in classroom discussions and team projects. I want to share my passion for the entertainment industry with my classmates by chairing the Entertainment & Media club and planning conferences, career treks, and other opportunities.

My background gives me the capacity for fearless thinking that is needed to meet the challenges of the entertainment industry’s shifting landscape. A Harvard MBA will strengthen that foundation and help me to become the kind of dynamic leader who can bring the vision for my own company to life and be at the forefront of entertainment’s structural shift.

Time & Effort: “It was about 6 or 7 drafts. Not sure on the hours.”

Word Count: 805

This sample essay is from The Harbus MBA Essay Guide and is reprinted with permission from Harbus . We highly recommend the book!

If you would like advice on responding to this year’s HBS essay question, (which is different from the 2014-15 prompt) please read our Harvard Business School essay tips .

Linda’s comments:

Bottom line: You want your readers to feel like that they are meeting you — not someone else, not a scripted piece of shallow PR devoid of personality and humanity, and not some phony combo of you and the author of an essay in a guidebook or on a website. They really and truly want to meet you!

So think about your story. 

Applying to HBS?

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Related Resources:

• Get Accepted to Harvard Business School , a free webinar • Harvard Business School MBA Essay Tips & Deadlines • What is HBS Looking For:   Analytical Aptitude and Appetite , The Habit of Leadership , Engaged Community Citizenship • M7 MBA Programs: Everything You Need to Know in 2022 • More sample MBA application essays

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How To Write Harvard HBS Essay With Examples

Harvard Business School’s MBA is one of the most well-known, acclaimed professional degrees in the world. When applying to HBS is a competitive next step in your education and career, every aspect of your application deserves careful deliberation and preparation, especially your HBS essay. 

The application essay requires even more thought because Harvard Business School views essays as a real-time representation of who you are (besides the interview and statement of purpose ), professionally and personally. This blog will take you through a step-by-step process so you’ll know exactly how to write the Harvard Business School essay.  

Hopefully, it will also help invigorate your pride in your own story, for Harvard Business School will be more likely to see your potential if you demonstrate that you see it too.

Harvard Business School Essay Prompts

The Harvard Business School essay is just one component of a complete MBA application, but it certainly has its own considerations. So, it is important that you take time to consider the essay separately from the rest of the documents and information in your application. The essay prompt is as follows:

As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program?

This essay question is particularly challenging for many applicants due to its vague nature.  The other potentially unexpected kicker to this prompt: there is no word limit. Regarding the length of your essay, the Harvard Business School webpage suggests that you “use your best judgment, and try to be clear… and concise.” 

We’ll discuss how to best work on this deliverable later in the blog, as it is an important factor in the overall presentation of your writing. 

Unless you have an exceedingly in-depth resume, the essay is definitely going to be the most personal aspect of your application. The essay is your chance to use your own words to describe yourself, your values, and your insights. 

It will be the most significant signal to the admissions committee as to how your background has influenced you and how HBS would fit well into your future.

How to Write Harvard Business School Essay in 6 Steps

Organization is key to ensuring quality in your HBS essay. It’s important to order tasks in an accomplishable, reasonable way where each goal is clear and manageable. 

Exploring blogs about MBA essay writing is one way to get ideas flowing. To help wrap your head around organizing your essay-writing efforts, here are some beginning-to-end steps for the creation of your HBS essay:

• Self-Reflection
• Decide on the Right Story and Its Theme
• Write an Outline
• Start Your Essay Carefully and Deliberately 
• Draft Your Essay and Revise
• Get an Outside Perspective ‍

1. Self-Reflection

Start the process of HBS essay writing with something as equally fundamental as it is simple: thought. Consider the role that the essay will play in your application and how to make the essay benefit your goal of getting into Harvard Business School. 

There are two sides to useful self-reflection regarding a goal like a Harvard MBA.

First, think purposefully about your career goals and tie them to an MBA at Harvard Business School. Ask yourself, how would a Harvard MBA help you get to where you want to go, professionally? What would you most like to gain from your time studying at HBS? 

Thinking about these things and then including them in your essay will demonstrate to the admissions committee that you have a clear trajectory for your MBA experience and your career. 

Additionally, revealing these considerations in your essay will speak to your confidence in your aspirations and in your decision to apply for Harvard Business School, which will likewise be attractive to the admissions committee.

The other side to a useful introspection would be considering what you as a student would contribute to Harvard and to its MBA program. A US News article about successful MBA essays encourages you to highlight what you would contribute to the HBS MBA program, so that you come across as a useful addition instead of simply a “taker.” 

If you were in the admissions committee's shoes, what would be the most enticing aspects of your past education, your experiences , and your personality. Essentially, you should think, specifically and without judgment, about what your biggest strengths as an applicant are, realistically. 

Knowing this will help you, both consciously and subconsciously, weave your most compelling characteristics into your essay so that the admissions committee gets to know your best side. ‍

2. Decide on the Right Story and Its Theme

You absolutely do not want to use your essay as a canvas on which to dump information about yourself. Harvard is not interested in reading an essay that expands on your entire resume or simply describes you. Tell a story! 

Elucidate on an impactful experience or explain a significant lesson you’ve learned. You’ll probably either overflow with abounding exciting examples to choose from, or you’ll struggle to find even one compelling anecdote. 

Don’t worry if you sit in this situation for a while; after all, you’ll ultimately still need to decide on just one topic, whether that means whittling down your options or sifting through your past to isolate that one perfect story. 

Once you finally do settle on that one excellent, fascinating subject that excites you enough to write about, you should also deliberate about what you intend your themes and tones to be. What would the ideal takeaway(s) be for a reader of your essay? 

Additionally, and this is annoyingly subjective, so apologies; how do you want to sound ? You should have a picture of how your essay will present your information, and you should have a picture of how your essay will present you . 

The admissions committee will use the essay to try to imagine you and the role you’d play at Harvard , so keep in mind how they would do this with the essay you write. ‍

3. Write an Outline

This step is fairly straightforward. Take the most important points of your topic, and put them in an order that would flow well as you write. Make sure, as you lay these points out, that they align with each other coherently and that they reflect your intended theme. 

From there, write out some thoughts on how best to integrate each point into a complete essay. You might want to explicitly write out which details are most crucial to each part of your story or subject. For example, let's say your compelling story about a transformative internship abroad begins by explaining what you were doing before it. 

Then, intuitively, you’d have to include details about where you were at this stage of the story and whether you were working, studying, traveling, etc. Put this information in your outline, so you know that you don’t leave things out and lose your reader. ‍

4. Start Your Essay Carefully and Deliberately

The way you begin your essay is quite important and will in many ways determine how the rest of your essay will shape out. First things first, make sure you feel good about your first sentence. 

Just like the opening scene of a movie, the first statement or two of your HBS essay will introduce your writing style and general tone to the admissions committee readers. Consistency always improves readability, and consistency starts with your opening sentence. 

Try to make the first couple sentences intriguing to garner some interest right from the get-go.

From the first sentence, ensure you’re keeping to your tone, at least peripherally. We can all agree a shift in tone tends to break the flow of good writing, and to have that break early on in your essay might throw the admissions committee off. 

The more sentences you write in a consistent tone and manner, the easier it will be to continue to write in holding with them. Because you’re trying to tell one, coherent story, the reader will be most interested if your writing follows an intuitive flow of ideas.

5. Draft Your Essay and Revise

From this last point, try as best you can to find a steady pace, and begin expanding on your outline. The nice part of this step is that you don’t have to get carried away with wording, sentence structure, or length. Again, focus on including all the relevant details and continue matching your tone. 

Try to write at a reasonable rate for decent chunks of time instead of writing intermittently while giving in to distractions. The more consecutively you write each sentence and paragraph, the better they’ll run together when someone’s reading them.

The reason you’ve already prepared an outline, and plan to edit throughout the rest of your writing process, is to make your first attempt at writing the essay as easy as it can be. 

Mistakes and breaks in your thinking can easily be caught by careful reading after the fact, so capitalize on inspiration when it hits and simply get your first draft onto the page. When writing an important, personal essay like this one, it also serves you well to keep boosting your confidence. 

If you fixate on word choice and how your writing is sounding, you’ll be more likely to break up the flow of your statements and make reading your essay feel choppy. You are telling your own story, and the point of the essay is for the admissions committee to get a better idea of your personality and character, so take pride in the fact that you’re unambiguously the best writer for this subject. ‍

6. Get an Outside Perspective‍

Once you’ve written the entirety of your essay and edited it carefully and precisely, get some extra peace of mind by having one or two other people read your essay. The more insightful and writing-experienced your readers of choice are, the more you’ll benefit from their critiques and opinions. 

The crucial part of this step is to get thoughts from someone unattached to your writing. As fervently and specifically as you may edit your own essay, you’ll always struggle to distance yourself from your emotional attachment to certain phrases, details, or even words. It’s ok. Every writer goes through this with the things they write. Trust us.

This other person allows you to hear a perspective from someone who read every sentence as how it sounded, not how it was intended. In this way, they fill the shoes of the admissions committee, but at a stage where you can still make changes to your essay. 

Don’t take criticisms personally; it's better to hear them now than to be at their mercy after submitting your application. 

No, you don’t need to force yourself to accept every change proposed by your reader(s). The point of an outside perspective is not to find a qualified editor and let them rewrite an essay about something important to you. 

This step is more useful just in reinvigorating your own thoughts about your paper because, in the late stages of your essay writing, it's much easier to get bogged down with the same considerations and forget the bigger things you’re trying to say to the admissions committee.

3 Successful Harvard Business School Essay Examples That Worked

Here are successful Harvard Business School essay examples to give you an idea of what to write. 

Sample Essay #1

“Start again,” my mother would demand after tossing my less-than-perfect homework into the trash. As a kid, I was taught that ‘work is finished when it’s not just your best work, but the best.’ Most kids would resent a parent for this, but I didn’t: my mom practiced the same rigor with her own work. She had to—a Latin immigrant with only a high school degree in 1980s [City] was held to a higher standard, especially one fighting to change both the media’s and corporations’ impressions about Latinx consumers.

I have applied this doctrine of “do better, be better” throughout my life, focusing on improving my own communities, be it through offering students a taste of food around the world with a college underground pop-up kitchen or planning a [Latinx event] as a conference chair. Last year gave me the chance to continue to work on being an inclusive leader in the Black/Latinx (B/LX) community as a ‘white-passing’ individual. Ultimately, however, these concerns were unimportant when given the opportunity to improve things now for the B/LX community. My new work projects helped me confront leaders I felt had not supported teams during the summer’s tragedies. I learned how feedback framed as suggestions could have powerful consequences. In fact, one of my managers actually came to me for advice on how to engage his peers in order to help his local community use pooled funds from [consulting group].

These experiences have helped me refine my long-term aspirations. Though I would still like to build on my mother’s legacy of a community-minded entrepreneur, I dream of founding my own venture capital fund. I want to alter the face of business by empowering young, diverse entrepreneurs who will bring novel approaches to lingering problems from past generations. Rather than improve my community only through projects supporting others’ priorities, I intend to be an active participant, building an incubator for entrepreneurs of color to eliminate barriers that maintain inequality such as urban food insecurity and underfunded education systems.

HBS will immerse me in the rapidly evolving entrepreneurial environment, helping me to understand process and practice creating ideas as both a founder and funder. On campus, I intend to be an active participant in HBS’ Anti-Racism goals, fighting to bring equity and inclusion with the same passion I have brought to my office and B/LX network. After graduating, I plan to continue engaging with HBS, either by working with student-run investment groups (like IVP’s Steve Harrick and the students behind the inclusion-focused Phoenix Fund) or working with professors to influence HBS’ future (like alumni Lulu Curiel and Eric Calderon, who helped develop a case study with Professor Alvarez to improve Latinx representation in MBA programs). Internalizing the case-method and the hands-on experiences acquired in my two years on-campus will embolden me to disrupt the status quo, both from the grassroots and executive levels.

What Made It Successful 

So, what works well in this thoughtful, personal HBS application essay? Starting with the introduction, the anecdote that this writer starts their essay with grabs attention through the strict rigor that their mother required for them growing up. 

Again, the key to the first few statements of an application essay lies in their ability to compel the reader to read on. An excellent introduction. will ensure  reading your essay is  a pleasure instead of a chore. 

Further on in this essay example, the reader understands where the applicant's motivation for equality and fair representation stems from, and this theme persists throughout the piece. It’s through demonstrating strong points like these that the reader reaches a higher empathy for the writer, which never hurts when applying to Harvard Business School. 

We also gain appreciation for the leadership skills of the writer due to their clear descriptions of past examples. Crucially, do not just hear how these examples played out, but what lessons the writer learned from them that they continue to apply. 

Finally, the essay’s conclusion cites both short-term and long-term goals for the writer's schooling and career, and this section feels very specifically written for HBS. 

Including references to Harvard Business School and its alumni, as done in this example, shows the admissions committee that your efforts in writing this essay are totally aimed at getting into HBS’s MBA, and that you’ve thought hard enough about the decision to do in-depth research.

Sample Essay #2

Our life experiences shape our skills, perspective and help define our paths. Reflecting on my personal and professional journey, I would like to share three lessons which have strongly shaped my journey and outlook.

My first lesson is about people. I feel fortunate to have understood the enormous potential in empathizing and collaborating with individuals to achieve community success, organizational targets and personal goals.

Perhaps due to my father’s frequent job transfers, I grew-up as a reticent, lone worker, shying away from forging long-lasting relationships. While excelling academically, I skipped participating in anything at school that required dependence on other people. It was only at my undergraduate institution, [University] that I really started building relationships with my hostel-mates and exploring the various opportunities [University] offered.

However, soon dark realities came to the forefront when a final-year student committed suicide while my close friend, [Name], got sucked into a vortex of depression due to his poor academic performance. Deeply shaken, I resolved to address mental-health issues on campus and joined the Institute Counseling Service, comprising student volunteers, faculty and professional counselors who sought to provide emotional and academic help to students.

Driven to make a difference, I led 240 student volunteers, strengthened our mentorship program to identify students in need of professional help and organized Orientation Programs. To dispel the stigma associated with mental-health and build trust, we increased the approachability of counsellors by initiating hostel visits and collaborated with NGOs to use theatre and generate awareness. I personally mentored students and it was heartwarming to create an environment in which people were able to discuss their personal issues freely with me. While I gained friends for life, I realized there is no greater happiness than witnessing one’s mentee overcome difficulties and be successful! Listening to varied personal experiences inculcated empathy and fostered ability to forge strong interpersonal connections.

This experience stayed with me during my professional journey with [Consumer Goods Company]. Just out of college, I had to navigate union strikes, reconcile socio-political contexts and motivate 600+ unskilled workers, several years my senior to transform the quality performance of an $800M factory in a small town. Leveraging interpersonal skills, I understood employee concerns and created an experiential training program. Listening to them, educating them, sharing success and owning failures together, I immersed myself in the workforce environment, instilling a culture of innovation and change. Our efforts reaped dividends as we eliminated all consumer complaints and achieved the best-ever performance in quality metrics, securing [Consumer Goods Company] market-share and launching 24 premium product variants. Thus, I learnt to drive organizational change by harnessing people’s potential.

My second life lesson is about values. I feel long-term success can only be achieved if one has the character to stand by one’s principles during testing times.

At age-5, I recall accompanying my mother to court hearings to witness a long-drawn trial involving my father. Overtime, I understood how my father had been slapped with a fake harassment case because he refused to accept a bribe for professional favors. Standing by his principles, he was later acquitted emerging as my inspiration and teaching me values of honesty and integrity.

After 17 years, these values were tested. Early-on in my role as Quality Manager of [Consumer Goods Company] plant, consumer complaints for a particular defect inflicted 10% market-share losses in [Big City]. On probing, I realized that we had overlooked an important data trend during manufacturing that could have averted the disaster. While corporate auditors were preparing a report attributing the occurrence of defect to chance, I presented the true picture, taking full responsibility. It was a difficult decision as our factory had already lost credibility prior to my joining. Our General Manager intervened to manage the crisis and while recognizing my ethics and courage, placed faith on my ability to redeem myself.

Motivated to prove myself, I worked incessantly with my team, ensuring that I drive systemic changes and build a culture of continuous improvement. Within one-year, we achieved benchmark performances, restoring faith in the unit/team. During our annual performance review, our unit was appreciated for data-integrity, reinforcing my belief in my value system.

The third lesson is about impact. I believe true success is achieved when people are guided by a desire to create sustainable impact and make a positive difference in society.

During a factory-visit, I engaged with our CEO, and advocated driving growth by monetizing [Consumer Goods Company] distribution network to service regional firms/startups. Intrigued, he inducted me into his office in the Trade Marketing and Distribution function in a strategic role, a move unheard for any non-MBA engineer. Initially, I engaged with product entrepreneurs to offer them [Consumer Goods Company] distribution for scaling-up. One case was [Company], a [City]-based startup that innovated on cost-effective sanitary napkins. We are helping them reach 60M consumers in [Country], a country where 75% women resort to unhygienic alternatives. Curious to understand their success, I engaged with the founder, [Name]. I realized [Name] was driven by a desire to positively impact the lives of rural women and this motivated him to innovate continuously.

Reflecting on this conversation, I identified how [Consumer Products Company] could play a larger role in adding to consumer-value and go beyond giving distribution access to CPG startups. If tech leaders such as Google, Microsoft could incubate technology startups, we needed to explore similar models in the CPG space. I formulated a strategic investor model to incubate and eventually acquire CPG startups, a first for an Indian CPG firm, and pitched it to senior leadership. They appreciated my vision of synergizing with startups, providing [Consumer Products Company] marketing expertise and product development insights to encourage product innovation, thereby creating an inorganic growth roadmap for [Consumer Products Company] vision of achieving $15B by 2030.

These lessons provide the foundation to succeed and define my professional ambitions. Going forward, I envision energizing the [Country] CPG startup ecosystem, stimulating innovation and strengthening symbiotic relationships with Corporations to deliver high social-impact products, creating sustainable value for 1.2B Indian consumers. While my experiences have created the primer, I see Harvard as the perfect catalyst to transform me into a change leader. Building on my life lessons, I can’t wait to engage with classmates who bring with them a wealth of global experiences and stories!

Sample Essay #3

I remember my hands trembling as I clenched the scissors, and my mother’s gorgeous locks fell to the ground − I was six years old. Compelled to quit her studies after marriage, my mother resumed her masters in [course] after ten stifling years. With my father’s solitary income going into tuition for my mother, sister and me, a proper haircut was a wasteful luxury. My parents shielded us from their struggles, but the gravity of our situation hit home as I cut my mother’s hair.

When my mother finally cleared her examinations, I expected things to change. Instead, she declined lucrative offers to join public-services, catering to marginalized populations through [country’s] public healthcare system. My parents unwavering desire to lead a life of meaning, fuelled my own. Over the course of my journey, I have carved my own path to making a difference – one of spreading my ideas and impact, beyond what I could accomplish alone. I would like to share how three transformative experiences, starting over a decade ago, have progressively shaped this lifelong approach.

At 13, I was devastated to see my sister’s tiny frame shake violently as she coughed from asthma. What affected me most was learning that we had all contributed to these respiratory problems, by making [city] the most polluted city in the world.

I refused to remain a silent spectator and started an environment club, [club], at school. Digging-up compost pits and conducting tree-plantation drives, our team explored every opportunity to make our premises greener. The efforts of our small 10-member team indicated to me the potential to spur larger change by motivating all 1500 students to step-up. Our idea to achieve this, by integrating environmental-awareness within our curriculum, was dismissed by the administration for lack of resources. Undeterred, I started writing applications to garner financial support, and within months, led our team to the first place in a national competition. The $15K we won infused both resources and enthusiasm to implement our eco-friendly curriculum.

Juggling my graduation-examinations and endless hours of organizing activities for the entire school, we grew [club] five-fold. Students stepped-up to expand our efforts, from transitioning our school to using solar energy to organizing large-scale zero-waste campaigns. ‘Exponential’ was no longer just a graph I studied, I could tangibly see my impact multiplying by mobilising individuals around me.

Eager to replicate our success beyond school, I initiated environmental workshops for children from urban-slums in [city].

“Boys don’t need to save money for dowry, do they not have to conserve environmental resources either?” asked 11-year old [name]. Half-way into my first workshop, my analogy of saving money to explain the concept of conserving environmental resources, had derailed my session-plan.

Having witnessed the consequences of gender-disparity in my own childhood I started my non-profit [non-profit], during college, to promote holistic life-skills education to uproot such evils. I was happiest spending weekends in community-centres and public-classrooms, with my team of student-volunteers, conducting activity-based workshops for hundreds of children. I vividly remember when, beaming with pride, [name] told me that she had saved enough money to buy her house. She not only grasped complex concepts of banking and savings, but acknowledged herself as a financially-independent female – albeit in a game of Monopoly!

By graduation, we grew to a 20-member team and reached 1,000+ children. However, once I moved to join Investment-Banking, our student-volunteer model disintegrated and fundraising for a full-time team seemed impossible. While struggling to sustain momentum, I saw a class-teacher enthusiastically taking initiative to support our program, during a workshop. Watching her, it struck me that scaling-up [non-profit] was not the only way to further impact.

‍ "Over the course of my journey, I have carved my own path to making a difference – one of spreading my ideas and impact, beyond what I could accomplish alone."

Restructuring our workshops into a comprehensive curriculum, we showcased it to the state academic department. Winning their support, we trained 100 public-school teachers and principals to deliver the program. Within two years, these teachers extended our program to 10,000 children and even co-opted their colleagues. Their efforts reaffirmed my conviction that enabling change-agents at a systemic-level could accelerate impact at scale.

To steer my journey in this direction, I decided to quit my investment-banking job in [country] and return to [country]. Forgoing the financial comfort I was finally providing my family weighed on me, but I chose to follow my heart. I joined [foundation], a philanthropy focused on driving systemic change to tangibly impact India’s education landscape.

Innovative, low-cost teaching-aids developed by [company], my [foundation] portfolio-organisation, drastically improved learning for children in rural classrooms. However, their low-monetization potential generated minimal funder interest, threatening their existence. Their question, “How will we serve these children, when we can barely stay afloat?” echoed my own struggles at [non-profit].

Collaborating with the [state] government, I helped [company] reduce costs through subsidies and extend their program to 40,000 students. I was leading large-scale projects with public systems at [foundation], but I realized that empowering social-enterprises such as [company] to drive systemic change could create ripple-effects throughout the ecosystem.

My ten-year-old self wouldn't believe just how far I have come – my hands no longer shake when I take decisive actions, whose outcomes I cannot always predict.

Today, non-profit social-enterprises in India fail to reach their potential, owing to lack of financial and strategic support - the largest remains 1/100th the size of its global peers. So, I took on the mandate to launch an Accelerator within [non-profit], to ensure this support, even though this meant leaving my team and starting out alone. My path was uphill, given [non-profit’s] strategic shift towards working directly with governments − the initiative was peripheral for every decision, be it budget-allocations or team-building.

The eagerness of portfolio-organizations in leveraging every support opportunity kept me going. Months of co-creating monetization strategies and facilitating government meetings paid off, in one instance, enabling immense expansion for the portfolio-organization to reach 800,000 children. Such successes helped evangelize our potential and we are now raising an independent fund to support 30 entrepreneurs to help transform education for 5M children.

My ten-year-old self wouldn’t believe just how far I have come – my hands no longer shake when I take decisive actions, whose outcomes I cannot always predict. Striving to continually widen my impact has helped me progress from empowering school-students to supporting social-entrepreneurs, towards enabling an entire ecosystem of social change-makers.

Battling one constant challenge throughout, that of inadequate resources, has highlighted how social-finance could be the ‘driving-force’ towards my goal. Most importantly, I have learnt that beyond individual efforts, by spearheading thought-leadership and global alliances, I can mobilize the entire ecosystem, catalyzing robust social-investment markets in India.

My friend [name] described how assimilating diverse perspectives through the case-method at HBS helped him understand nuances of business across cultures, while the vibrant community provided access to global networks. HBS equipped him to launch and grow his company across eight emerging economies, through partnerships with local entrepreneurs. Similarly, I am convinced that the ideas, experiences and relationships built at HBS will help me realize my vision where every [club], [non-profit] and [company] can go on to create the change it aspires to.

Mistakes to Avoid in Your Harvard Business Essay

1. Show Don’t Tell

If you use your essay to outright explain what you’re trying to show the admissions committee about yourself, you run a much higher risk of losing readability and taking your application from an opportunity to a plea. Instead, demonstrate your takeaways, your best qualities, through your story and its examples. 

The reader is far more likely to be compelled by the conclusions of your essay if they feel like they came to them themselves. By not explicitly explaining the point of your essay, you come across more sure in the topic you’ve chosen and its ability to reveal the point. ‍

2. Avoid Lackluster Anecdotes

Your essay will be bolstered or weakened by the intrinsic quality of the experiences about which you write. Only include anecdotes that you’d be just as comfortable and confident about retelling to dinner guests or friends at a bar. 

Obviously, the formality of those situations and the Harvard Business School MBA application differ starkly, but the gist of this statement is that if you’d feel awkward telling a story to your friends, it’d be hard to make it sound good for an unseen admissions committee reader. 

If it’s a story you’ll enjoy writing about, it’ll stand a better chance of being enjoyable to read. ‍

3. Don’t Narrate – Craft a Compelling Story

Ensure your topic flows seamlessly through relevant experiences and lessons. Establishing clear cause-and-effect relationships among different events not only maintains the reader's interest but also justifies each inclusion in your essay. While coherence is essential, be cautious not to force connections between unrelated experiences or anecdotes; instead, strive for a well-integrated narrative with a cohesive beginning-to-end structure."

4. Don’t Do This Yourself

Utilize guides and blog posts about the undertaking of applying to an MBA program, getting as specific to Harvard Business School as you can. 

Reviewing a concise guide about applying to Harvard Business School can be the best way to ensure that your application is sound, not just for any MBA program, but for Harvard Business School’s MBA.

 Many resources, like Final Application Reviews, will focus heavily on your essay, but will also provide insight on every aspect of your application so you feel best about your attempt.

If you still have questions about the HBS essay, check out these frequently asked questions. 

1. How Can I Best Edit My Essay?

To best edit your essay, focus on refining syntax, word choice, and common mistakes in MBA application essays. Research prevalent errors, specifically addressing them to catch the admissions committee's attention. Utilize tools like Grammarly for a comprehensive review, increasing the likelihood of submitting an error-free essay.

2. How Long Should My Essay Be If There's No Word Limit?

In the absence of a specified word limit, aim for conciseness while conveying your message effectively. Generally, one to three pages or around 500-1000 words is a reasonable guideline, allowing you to present a comprehensive narrative without unnecessary information.

3. Is the Essay Portion Different If I’m Reapplying?

No, if you're reapplying to Harvard Business School, the essay portion remains the same as for first-time applicants. There is no distinct essay prompt for reapplicants.

4. Can I Use the Same Essay If I’m Reapplying?

HBS does not explicitly prohibit this, but, intuitively, it’s probably a better idea to write a new essay. You would have no way of knowing that your essay and the topic you chose played no role in your initial rejection. 

5. Are There Bad Topics to Write About?‍

Yes, some topics are best avoided in your essay. Steer clear of overly controversial or sensitive subjects and refrain from solely highlighting academic or professional achievements unless they contribute to a broader, more personal theme. 

Also, avoid repeating stories already addressed in recommendation letters to provide the admissions committee with new insights. Choose an original and unique topic that reflects your character, emphasizing its personal significance. 

If you struggle to justify your topic's importance, consider opting for a more compelling subject for your essay.

6. Can I Over-Edit My Essay?

Excessive editing can make your writing sound stiff and fragmented. The concept of "over-editing" suggests a misuse of time better spent on other tasks. It's challenging to determine the perfect editing point, but if changes result in minimal, unclear differences, you may be over-editing. 

Recognizing this, it's advisable to ease back on editing efforts, especially if changes are made simply because they come to mind.

Conclusion‍

Harvard Business School's MBA program is highly competitive, and the HBS essay is your chance to stand out. Choose a topic that excites you and reveals your unique experiences. Use organizational resources and time management for effective essay development. 

Simplify the process with outlined steps, ensuring authenticity and enthusiasm. Maintain confidence in your chosen topic and writing style for a more assured essay. This is an opportunity to showcase why you're applying to Harvard Business School, so approach it with confidence and purpose.

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Harvard Business School MBA Essays & Analysis 2024 - 2025

Harvard Business School (HBS) has released its MBA Essay Questions for the 2024 - 2025 application cycle. This year, HBS has opted to do away with its iconic 900 word essay, instead choosing to ask three essay questions with shorter word limits. Let’s explore each in turn.

Here are the Harvard Business School MBA Essays for 2024 - 2025.

Harvard MBA Essay 1

Business-Minded: Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you strive to make on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

This is your classic career goals essay. The 300 word limit is shorter than the typical career goals essays at other schools, so be direct and brief while writing about your answer. 

HBS states that it looks for candidates who “are passionate about using business as a force for good”, i.e individuals who have a clear impact they want to make in the world. 

We recommend starting with a story that explains what has inspired your career decisions and goals. This experience should give rise to your ‘purpose’ - the positive, overall impact you want to have on businesses, organizations, and communities. 

Now that you have outlined your core mission, explain how you will create a path towards it. What do you plan to do right after your MBA? These short-term goals should be specific, clearly stating your target role, company/companies, industry, and geography. Briefly, discuss the skills you will build and the impact you will have through this role.

Finally, describe your long-term goals. These may be less specific than your short-term goals, but they should align with your ‘purpose’. Explain how you’ll achieve your purpose through this long-term dream job. 

Harvard MBA Essay 2 

Leadership-Focused: What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)

Harvard’s mission to “educate leaders who make a difference in the world” has been its main influence when it comes to evaluating its MBA applications. The school traditionally focuses on leadership qualities and demonstrable impact. So it comes as no surprise that one of HBS’s essay questions this year is geared directly towards your leadership approach.

In this essay, you will need to connect your experiences together to demonstrate what has influenced your leadership style and how you effectively lead others. 

You may want to start with an experience which was formative to your growth as a leader. This could be a challenging situation, something new you experienced, a turning point in your personal life, or someone who impacted you. With only 250 words, space is tight, so make sure your story focuses on what you learned. 

Then, your second experience could explain how you applied this lesson to positively impact others, or how you plan to apply this lesson in the future. 

The AdCom wants to see evidence not only of leadership, but also how you collaborate and invest in others. They want to know that you will add value to the school’s community, so make sure your stories reflect well on the relationships and trust you build as a leader. 

Typically, your leadership approach ties back to your career goals and your time at HBS. So if there are any leadership programs or student clubs you will be involved in, you might want to conclude with those. 

Harvard MBA Essay 3

Growth-Oriented: Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

This is a curveball of an essay question! It’s unique to HBS, so you may have to dig deeper to find a story that demonstrates your curiosity, appetite for learning, and adaptability. 

HBS asks this question to understand your academic readiness. The case study method that is heavily used in the HBS classroom requires students to actively listen, think critically, and collaborate with others. So in this essay, use a story that demonstrates how you take initiative, solve problems creatively or unconventionally, or learn through challenges.

Note that HBS hasn’t asked the “Why HBS” question anywhere, so you might want to include how you will bring your curiosity to the class, an extracurricular, or other community activities.

Use the SCAR structure to answer this essay. 

Situation: Provide context to your Curiosity story

Challenge: Outline the challenge you faced

Action: Describe the action you took

Result: Discuss the outcome and quantify it where possible

Analysis: Introspect on the what you learned from this experience and how you'll apply it in the future

Harvard MBA Essay 4

Briefly tell us more about your career aspirations. (500 characters)

This is a short but important essay. You've already written about your goals in Essay 1, so keep them consistent with your essay answer. Here, you can describe your employment plans, industry and function in the online application portal. This essay is an opportunity to showcase precision, clarity, and strategic planning about your goals after your MBA. 

Center the essay around your short-term and longer-term goals. Be aspirational but also practical. These goals should be achievable, actionable, and logical.

"My post-MBA plan is to return to Oliver Wyman, which will sponsor my MBA. Upon my return, I will focus on FMCG clients, helping them to restructure and navigate new regulations. After 3-4 years, I may transition to one of these client companies, directly leveraging my leadership and strategy skills to transform the way that Vietnamese consumer goods companies finance their M&A. My long-term goal is to launch a health-tech startup with my sister in Hanoi."

Harvard Optional Essay 

Please use this space to share any additional information about yourself that cannot be found elsewhere in your application and that you would like to share with the Admissions Committee. This space can also be used to address any extenuating circumstances (e.g., unexplained gaps in work experience, choice of recommenders, inconsistent or questionable academic performance, areas of weakness, etc.) that you would like the Admissions Committee to consider. (500 words) 

Few applicants have followed the “traditional” employment route with no bumps in the road. So it’s not an issue that you took an unconventional path, as long as you make it clear. 

But it is a problem if the reader of your application doesn't understand your journey. This essay is your opportunity to make it crystal clear.

Some unconventional aspects of your application might include: a low GPA in an academic semester or a gap in your resume because of Covid-19. Or perhaps you have an overlapping experience you’d like to address.

Important: Don’t be tempted to use the entire word count! Instead, be as concise as possible in explaining your exceptional circumstances, and close the essay with a constructive outcome, such as what you learned from the experience.

Check out our Harvard MBA Interview Guide  for in-depth insights into Harvard's interview process, what they're looking for in prospective candidates, interview questions, and tips to ace your interview. 

For the full HBS MBA application course with example essays  based on real essays by previous applicants, check out the Harvard application program on MBAconsultant.com.  

We help determined applicants get admitted to top business schools. Get in touch if you think we can help you with your MBA application. Book a free   20 mins chat  now.  

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The Ultimate M7 MBA Essay Guide

Everything you need to know to write a killer essay for your M7 MBA application, including prompts, deadlines, expert advice, coach recommendations, additional free resources, and more.

Posted August 6, 2024

Featuring Matt K.

Master’s Programs Ask Me Anything

Starting tuesday, august 20.

12:30 AM UTC · 30 minutes

Table of Contents

Your essays are perhaps the most important element of the MBA application. They’re also one of the parts of the application where applicants struggle the most. In this guide, we break down a system to help you brainstorm ideas, create a structured outline, write a powerful essay, and polish it into something you are proud to submit.

Also, be sure to read: The Road to the Prestigious M7: Tips to Secure Your Spot

What Are You Trying to Accomplish with Your Essays?

When you’re about to leave for a trip, you would never leave before figuring out where you’re going. The same goes for the essay writing process; before you get started, you have to know your goals.

Many of our candidates struggle to choose the right angle from which to approach their essays. Before you start writing anything, let’s first identify what you are trying to achieve with your essays. In our experience, every successful MBA essay accomplishes three main goals:

Answer the specific essay prompt;

• Show the admissions committee (adcom) who you are; and,
• Communicate (directly or indirectly) why you are a fit for their program.
• Let’s explain each of these a little more in-depth:

1. Answer the Specific Essay Prompt

To the admissions committees reviewing MBA applications, you may think there’s nothing worse than reading an essay that completely ignores the prompt. Actually, there is: reading an essay that not only ignores the prompt but also answers the prompt of a competing school!

So first things first: write an essay that answers the question and doesn’t come across like repurposed content. Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t repurpose any content at all; you should absolutely leverage content when applying to multiple schools. However, it shouldn’t read like copied-and-pasted content to the admissions committee. It may sound simple, but make sure you are responding to the respective essay prompt.

2. Show the Adcom Who You Are

Almost every other part of the application shows what you have accomplished (GMAT scores, resume, activities & interests, honors & awards, etc.), but the essays are about showing the adcom who you are . You are an individual with dreams, worries, goals, doubts, passions, and insecurities – not a walking application. Admissions committees know this, and they aren’t looking to admit applications; they are looking to fill their schools and create a cohort of exemplary individuals.

The essays are your opportunity to highlight the complex dimensions and special qualities of yourself that are too difficult to cover in other places. Chances are, you are not the first person applying to these schools with your GMAT score, university, or career path; but you are the first you applying, so take advantage of this to stand out among other applicants with similar credentials!

3. Communicate (Directly or Indirectly) Why You Are a Fit for Their Program

At the end of the day, each school is looking for leaders who will make a positive impact on the world and the M7 essay can help you make that case. However, each school has a different take on what the formula might be to accomplish that. They want to know that your background will be a good fit for their program.

Avoid simply listing reasons why you will be a good fit for their program; instead, be mindful of what the school is looking for, and authentically highlight how you have those traits. Show that you are passionate about that specific school.

A few questions from some schools’ applications directly ask you to explain why you are a good fit for their program and read something like: “Why did you choose our school?,” or “How does our school fit into your professional goals?” But while other schools don’t directly ask you why you’re a good fit for their school, they still certainly intend to understand why you’re going to contribute to their unique program.

No matter which essay prompts you are responding to, every word you write should point to why you are the perfect candidate for that school.

MBA Essay Guide

Download our free guide to writing an all-star essay for your MBA application

Brainstorming Answers to Each Essay Question Type

We are finally ready to start writing! The first step is to brainstorm. Based on the essay prompt, brainstorming could go in a few directions. We break the essay prompts into three main categories. Almost without exception, every prompt can fall into one or more of these essay types:

1. Personal statement prompts: Ask for a general personal statement related to who you are or what you value (HBS, Stanford GSB, Kellogg, Booth, MIT Sloan)

2. Why an MBA/Why this school prompts: Ask why this school will help you, or why you’re choosing that school (Stanford GSB, Wharton, Booth, Columbia, MIT Sloan)

3. Behavioral prompts: Ask a behavioral question, or ask for a story (Stanford GSB, Kellogg, Columbia)

Let’s do a deep dive to explain a little more about each type of prompt and to get you started with your brainstorming.

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Essay Prompt Type #1: Personal Statement

Admission committees ask these kinds of questions because they want to find out who you are, what makes you different, and how you became who you are today. They already have a dozen other pieces of your application to judge you by; now, they want a deeper look into your character, sense of self-awareness, and individuality.

These prompts may sound like:

• What matters most to you, and why? (GSB)
• As we consider your application, what else would you like us to know? (HBS)

To help you choose the right direction to take in writing a personal statement essay, type or write two lists of five bullets each. Please note – there is a space for you to answer these brainstorming questions at the end of this section.

Strengths, important experiences, top skills, and/or achievements that you feel are your strongest strategic differentiators against other applicants. Try to back up each point with one or a few personal or professional experiences that have built that characteristic or led to your achievement in that area.

Personal characteristics that you feel like you'd be remiss to not mention. These are key aspects of you that you feel will fill in essential pieces of the overall picture of who you are, and that aren't adequately captured in your resume, recommendations, etc.

You probably won’t end up including everything in your essays, but that’s not the point. This exercise will help you consider enough options to choose the most important characteristics to cover.

Here are a few additional questions to ask yourself when making the two lists:

• Who are you? As in, if someone were to describe you, what would they say about you? (It may be helpful to ask your close family and friends what they think are your defining characteristics.)
• Reflect on your life, who you are, the decisions that you’ve made, and the direction you want to go. Which themes or common threads emerge? Are there stories, quotes, or anecdotes that may illustrate that theme?
• Make a list of important events, decisions, or people in your life. How are they connected?
• If you had to give a TED Talk about your story, what would you say? (Note that “your story” is not the same as your professional story.)
• Have you experienced any struggles, setbacks, challenges, or hardships? What did you learn from these experiences? How have they affected you and made you a better person and professional?

See what our Founder, John, wrote on his own brainstorming list as he began writing his MBA application essays:

List #1: Strongest differentiators in experiences, achievements, etc.

• Church Mission in Brazil - Dedicating 2 years of my life to helping and empowering others in a foreign country
• Entrepreneurial/Professional Leadership Experience - Kore, Uber, etc.
• Investing experience through several internships in VC/PE
• Community Service – Google, youth mentoring, BYU Tech Club
• Family Situation - Ability to lead and inspire others during challenging times through positivity, strength, and a genuine concern for others

List #2: Important characteristics

• Strategic hustle and ownership of personal development/career path
• Pattern of leadership throughout life - mission, Kore, Tech Club, Uber, etc.
• Deep desire to help and empower individuals around me and those who are at a disadvantage in life
• Relentless pursuit of self-improvement and success; not to be "better" than others but to be my very best self
• Ability to think independently, solve challenging problems, and make things happen

Essay Prompt Type #2: Why Our School?

This type of question comes in a few forms, such as:

• Why Stanford? Describe your aspirations and how your Stanford GSB experience will help you realize them.
• Why do you feel Columbia Business School is a good fit for you?
• How do you plan to use the Wharton MBA program to help you achieve your future professional goals?
• “... introduce yourself to your future classmates via video. Include a bit on your past experience and why MIT Sloan is the best place for you to pursue your MBA.”

Keep in mind that the adcoms don’t just want to know why you will take advantage of the opportunity if admitted to their school; they care even more to see why the school will benefit from your attendance. The good news for you is that answering the former also answers the latter, and here’s why: If you can prove that you will treasure the chance to go to their school, they will count on you to get great grades, participate in the community, not drop out, and go on to be a highly successful representative of the program.

That’s why, almost always, the best way to answer these types of prompts is by looking forward rather than backward. It may be worth mentioning your alumni lineage or other notable connection to the school, but as a rule of thumb, talking about the past should be a peripheral part of your essay.

To brainstorm for this essay, follow these steps:

Think about your own life plans. What are your ultimate career goals?

• List 1-5 long-term career goals for the biggest accomplishments you hope to achieve, positions you want to hold, and/or the company you most want to work for.
• For each goal, write down 2-5 steps (or smaller goals) that you can take that will get you to your top goal. Think about necessary career moves and hard skills you need to learn (becoming an assistant manager, learning high-level accounting, studying and applying data science, etc.), but also the soft skills you need to improve on in order to qualify for your goals (leadership skills, active listening, teamwork, etc.). Pro tip: Here, you want to be ambitious and inspiring in laying out your future career, but not naïve. Walk the line between shooting for the stars and sounding dreamlike and uninformed.

Think about the school you are applying to.

• List the top 3-5 items about the program’s strengths and purpose that resonate with you. (Refer to their mission statement, website, and/or social media accounts.)
• Identify which of those items resonate with you and your goals best. Circle, underline, or otherwise emphasize those items.
• With these points in mind, specifically write about how this school will help you achieve your long-term goals, your smaller goals, or both. How will this program, specifically , supercharge your career? Pro tip: To demonstrate that you've done your research, and to help the admissions committee envision you in their program, indicate which classes you might take when earning your MBA and why, which professors you might hope to study with, and in which clubs you might participate.
• If you have a story or other reasons you chose to go to this school, list them as well. (You may or may not end up including them in your essay, but go ahead and get them off your chest so you can examine their strength and relevance.)

Essay Prompt Type #3: Behavioral Prompts

A behavioral question asks for a story from your past that illustrates who you are, including your character, skills, and personality. They are also common in the interview portion of the MBA admissions process, so you have more than one reason to master this type of question.

• They want to see what lessons you have learned and real-life examples of your actions. Here are a few samples of what that may sound like:Tell us about a time within the last three years when your background influenced your participation at work or school. (GSB)
• Share a time in which you engaged with a perspective, identity, community, or experience that was different from your own and how it impacted your worldview. (Darden)
• Think about times you’ve created a positive impact, whether in professional, extracurricular, academic, or other settings. What was your impact? What made it significant to you or to others? (GSB)

Behavioral questions can be a little more subtle, so you may not know right away they are asking for a story. Here are a few examples:

• Tell us about your favorite book, movie, or song and why it resonates with you? (CBS)
• Describe the biggest commitment you have ever made. (Yale SOM)

Here’s a big hint for knowing if an essay prompt is actually a behavioral question: the truth is, a lot of MBA essay questions (particularly the general personal statement prompts) are actually behavioral questions in disguise. For most of these essays, the the admissions committees want to hear a story. That’s why behavioral prompts are so important to study and really nail.

To choose the right story, first, pick a few options from your life that you might want to talk about. Don’t write out the whole story at this point; just jot down a few notes to identify the main points. For each option, write down at least one powerful result from the experience. To choose powerful results, think about how you have changed as a student, professional, friend, or person as a direct result of the experience. The strongest story results prove that you allowed the experience to change you and make you better, more committed to your morals and ethics, etc.

Creating Your Essay Outline

Once you’ve brainstormed some ideas for the main ideas and elements you want to include in your MBA essays, you’re ready to begin creating an outline.

After brainstorming, a lot of people try to jump straight into writing a full essay from beginning to end. While you can just start from the beginning, we strongly recommend beginning with at least a general outline. If you are like most people, it will make the writing process easier, keep you on topic, and make every part of the essay focused on the endpoint. Remember, your complete MBA application essay may or may not resemble your outline, and neither way is bad. An outline is about making the process easy and the outcome effective.

No matter which of the three prompts you respond to, your essay should read like a story. Therefore, although there are many acceptable ways to make an outline, we recommend building your outline like a story.

Here are two ways to think about it:

Beginning, Middle, and End

This is the story format with which most people are familiar. The most important part of your story is the end , so know what point you want to drive home. This should be reflected in your essay outline.

The story you write may or may not be very chronological; rather, it should show personal development, an increase in strength of the points you bring up, and/or another positive change.

Your beginning doesn’t need to look like “once upon a time,” and it doesn’t need to mean the beginning of your literal academic or professional life. Remember, this is just the beginning of your essay . You decide where it begins!

If the MBA essay is a meal, this part is the setting of the plate and silverware, with a small appetizer and maybe a few dressings. Set the scene and get the reader ready for what’s coming next.

What kind of energy level do you want to begin with? Do you want to start on an emotional note? With something funny? How you choose to begin sets the tone for the direction of the rest of your outline and essay. Start with something compelling, but save a little space to develop the story.

The beginning should take up very little of your essay, and your outline should reflect that. From the elements and ideas you brainstormed, ask yourself which story, theme, idea, and/or tone you want to emphasize, and pick just one or two of them to start with.

The middle is the carbs, the bread and potatoes of your essay. This is where you collect all your ideas and develop them toward an end.

Which points do you want to use to build on your beginning, and to lead toward a powerful ending? These could be anecdotes, lessons learned, or just the details of a story. Make a list of those points, and try to order them in a way that each builds on the other.

This is the meat of your essay, the protein that’s going to stick with the adcom for a while after they’re done reading.

This should be the most compelling part of your essay, and it should answer the big question: “So what?” Here, you need to spell out for the reader why all of what you said not only answers the prompt, but sets you apart as a person, a professional, and an applicant. Your MBA essay should make you go from one of a million, to one in a million.

Your ending should explain why you are the hero of the story, how you changed, and what you learned. You could also include a final short anecdote or emotional strong point.

When writing your outline, it may be helpful to begin by choosing the end before the beginning and middle. That way, you know where you are going every step of the way and the adcoms will be able to trace your steps without even thinking about it.

The STAR Method

The STAR Method is a powerful choice to outline any type of essay, but for the third type of essay prompt–behavioral questions–we strongly recommend you use the STAR Method. As already mentioned, behavioral questions also come up in interviews, and you need to be ready to answer with the STAR Method. Keep in mind that the STAR Method can outline your entire essay, but you also may want to incorporate a few smaller stories into your essay using the STAR Method on a smaller scale.

In other words, bookmark this page for future reference!

Each letter of the STAR Method can make up a part of your outline: Situation, Task, Action, and Result.

S - Situation

Set up the situation for your story. In these essays, your goal is to make the situation as short as possible while still giving enough context for the reader to easily follow your story.

Especially as you are just making your outline, this part can be as simple as:

S - “During my internship in Ecuador, …”

While similar to the situation, task is just a little more specific scene-setting. It can also be very short. For example:

T - “I was assigned to help an elderly couple assess and grow their small artisan jewelry business that was struggling to keep its doors open.”

This is the part where you really start to shine, and that’s why the situation and task parts should be as short as possible. Get to the good part as quickly as you can!

At this point, write about your actions . Other people may have been involved, and you should give credit where it’s due, but put maximum focus on explaining what you did to save the day. How did you solve the problem and come to a great decision? What people skills did you use? What did you do that proves both your aptitude in your industry but also your work ethic? Use active language: “I decided to,” “I proposed,” “I designed,” “I executed,” “I negotiated,” “I built,” etc.

In the end, this essay part will be quite a bit longer, perhaps one to three paragraphs, maybe more, depending on your story.

For your outline, just write out three to five bullets of things you did to take action, with strong verbs.

This is as important as (or more important than!) explaining your actions. Result is when you tell the adcom exactly why what you did matters.

You can write about measurable results: productivity improvements in percentages, revenue changes in dollar amounts, etc. However, in your essay, the adcoms care less about how your actions helped your organization and those around you; mostly, they want to see how this experience changed you . How did you become a better businessperson, student, and person because of what happened?

In the end, this section should make up the largest and the meatiest part of the essay, roughly half (or more). The results are the most important part of your story! While you can mention objective results, try and focus on the subjective results that show how you changed as an individual.

Starting to Write

Writing the first couple paragraphs can be the toughest part of high-stakes MBA essays. As you begin, set aside 30 – 60 minutes to get going without distractions. Keep your outline and brainstormed ideas nearby.

When you’re just getting started, remember: the most important thing is to get the content on the page. Don’t worry that what you’re writing is inadequate; it’s probably better than you think. Plus, it’s okay and even normal if you end up deleting much of what you write.

Keep your outline, the ending, and the big ideas in mind. Of course, don’t be married to anything. Especially in these early phases, you can absolutely change your mind. If you start writing and you decide you want to go a different direction completely, just go back to your brainstorming exercise and see what other options you could explore, and build a new outline accordingly.

Unless you really have the creative juices overflowing, don’t burn yourself out all at once. Write as much as you can within 30 to 60 minutes, then take at least a few minutes away. (Get up and walk around, away from screens.) Come back with a refreshed mind and fresh eyes, ready to see what else you should add.

MBA Essays – Writing Tips & Tricks

From the earliest to the latest phases of writing your MBA essays, here are some extra tips and tricks to help you out:

• Give yourself lots of time: Don’t try to write your essay all in one day. The writing process will take weeks to go from brainstorming to polishing up. Writing your essays is a very self-reflective process and will require sufficient time to be deeply thoughtful.
• Remove distractions: To make the most of your writing time, go somewhere away from distractions, silence your phone, and close or minimize irrelevant computer tabs.
• Take advantage of your voice: If you struggle writing out big ideas, record yourself or use dictation as you talk through your ideas and tell your stories. Some people find this to be helpful. Once you have at least a rough draft written, read it out loud to yourself. This can be very effective in helping you hear what it might read like to somebody else, identify where your story needs work, and catch errors.
• Frequently check your goals: Frequently throughout the writing process, check what you’ve written against the prompt, your outline, and the big idea you want to drive home to the reader. Make sure you stay on track and laser-focused on your goals.
• Ask for help: Talk through your ideas with someone else, and ask them to read your essay. (See next section.)

These next tips came from Isabella J. , an expert MBA Leland coach with a writing background:

1. Carefully read the essay prompt.

Every MBA essay prompt has slight nuances that affect how you should structure your essay and choose which stories to highlight. Understanding what kind of question it is can help, but make sure to also pay attention to the details of the wording to understand where the committee is placing emphasis. Before beginning your essay, verify that you know precisely what the question is asking for.

2. Be succinct, less is more.

Complex sentences with fancy words do not necessarily translate into good story-telling skills. Also, with limited word counts, it’s important to go straight to the point. Don’t make the adcom think too hard about what you’re trying to say. Share the key highlights and delve deeper into the important details.

3. Showcase how you can add value.

When considering candidates, the adcom is looking for someone who will enhance classroom discussions, improve the experience of other students, and become a valued alum who will continue to contribute to the community. Use your essays to demonstrate how you will be part of this larger community and benefit it.

4. Avoid jargon and use simple, approachable language.

As a general rule, don’t assume that your readers are familiar with your job or the language that you use on a daily basis. You don’t want your accomplishments to be lost in out-of-industry translation so make sure that everything you have written down can be understood by someone who doesn’t know what you do. Nothing you have in your essay should take two or three reads in order to be understood.

5. Proofread, proofread, proofread.

This might sound trivial to some, and overstated to others. However, it is so important that your essay reads well to an outsider and is free of any grammatical or spelling errors. Seek out fresh perspectives and make sure your arguments are logically clear to your readers. If you want any essay writing help or other professional writing services, book a free intro call on my profile to get started.

School-Specific Essay Advice

Our MBA admissions experts have attended the highest caliber of business programs, including all of the M7 schools and more. Here are their tips for nailing each school’s specific MBA admission essays, with prompts and deadlines included:

Stanford GSB

Stanford requires two essays from its MBA applicants, the combined length of which cannot exceed 1,050 words. The goal of the Stanford GSB essays is to see who the applicant is outside of their professional and academic achievements. Stanford emphasizes that there is no “right answer,” and that the best essays are those which accurately portray the applicant’s values, passions, aims, and dreams.

2024-2025 Application Deadlines

Round 1: September 10, 2024

• Decisions Released: December 5, 2024

Round 2: January 8, 2025

• Decisions Released: April 3, 2025

Round 3: April 8, 2025

• Decisions Released: May 29, 2025

Deferred: Can apply in any round but Round 3 is the most common

Stanford GSB Essay Prompts

The prompts for the two essays are as follows:

What matters most to you and why?

With a recommended length of up to 650 words, GSB asks applicants to self-reflect and write from the heart. Consider what different people, life events, and experiences have shaped your perspectives.

Why Stanford?

This essay has a recommended length of up to 400 words. Applicants should describe their dreams and goals and what role GSB will play in helping fulfill them.

Read : 3 Things You Need for Successful Stanford MBA Essays

Expert Advice

1. Answer the Question

Though it may sound obvious, many applicants struggle with this point. As both prompts are quite open-ended, it is easy to go off on tangents and include irrelevant details. As you’re writing, continue to ground yourself by asking “What is the question? What am I trying to answer?” If the information does not directly relate, then reconsider its pertinence and necessity.

2. Differentiate

A mentor of mine once asked me, “What makes you go from one of a million applicants to one in a million applicants?” Almost everyone that applies to GSB will have a great resume, test scores, and GPA. However, no one has the same story. Your job with the essay is to differentiate yourself from the crowd; show how you are unique from the other 7,000 applicants. You are who you are for a reason and the essay is your chance to prove that to Stanford.

3. Have a Vision

Especially relevant to the second essay, having a vision and being able to communicate it to the admissions committee is key. It’s important to spend time self-reflecting on your past and your future aspirations. Why do you want an MBA? Why do you want to go to Stanford? How will your Stanford degree help you reach your professional and personal goals? Having these answers in the back of your mind will make your argument more powerful and help keep a thread of continuity throughout your responses.

I’ve worked with many applicants who feel that their personal story is not special, crazy, or inspiring enough to grant admission, but they are wrong . Everyone can write an essay and present a convincing reason why they deserve to go to GSB. Lean into the parts of your vision that are the most important to you. If you didn’t have a noteworthy childhood, then focus on your vision for the future, or what you’re doing now to make it happen.

4. Build and Flow

Both of your essays should have a structure that flows and builds to a point. They can be written well and have perfect grammar and syntax, but if they don’t build to a point, the reader will end up distracted and confused. The GSB admissions committee wants you to present a story. They do not want disjointed paragraphs that portray an inconsistent picture. Each part should lead to the next and tie into the overall theme. This will also help you pare irrelevant information to make sure you stay focused on the question at hand.

5. Give Yourself Enough Time

For many people, writing the essay is the most difficult part of the application. It can be hard to organize your thoughts and put them down on paper in a clear and succinct manner. For this reason, it’s important to start the essays early, at least three months before the application deadline. Write a draft and then put it down for a few days so that when you next pick it up, you have a fresh perspective. It’s also important to have a peer or mentor review it, ideally someone with experience writing. An alum/na of the school is an excellent choice as well. I recommend getting a solid draft together at least six weeks before the application deadline so that you have time for final reviews.

- Ben L. , GSB MBA, ex-McKinsey, Essay Expert, Policy and Speechwriting

Stanford GSB Sample Essay

Type : Personal Statement

Traditional MBA – Stanford GSB

Prompt: What matters most and why? (650 words)

What matters most to me is a fuzzy, yellow tennis ball, because like a tennis ball, I have learned to always bounce back.

Like many kids in my town, I grew up playing sports. My childhood summers were spent running through sprinklers, horsing around with my siblings, XXXX and YYYY, and long, sweaty hours on the tennis court. Despite the oppressive ZZZZ heat, I remember loving those months.

Unlike most kids, the summer before my fifth grade year, our parents sent us to a tennis academy in AAAA. Driven and intense, my parents saw tennis not as a summer activity, but a means to an end. That summer, they made that end clear: we were expected to attend either Harvard or Stanford, and for me and my sister, we were expected to also play tennis at one of these schools.

This tennis academy was intense. Conditioning began at 6:00am, and practice ran from 8:00am to 6:00pm, with a half hour break for lunch. Worse, my siblings and I were separated based on our age. Tennis, previously a joy, became a grind. I was homesick, constantly sore, and the closeness I felt with my siblings disintegrated as we began to crack under the strain. My skills improved and I won more matches, but the pressure from my parents to build a college-ready record only tightened, like the strings of a racquet.

After a year of full-time training and boarding school in AAAA, I returned to ZZZZ. This time, though, I had a new coach. BBBB, a former tennis professional with a scruffy beard and bald head, was brutally demanding. I found myself in constant battles with him until, one evening, things came to a head. The humidity enervated me as we entered our fourth hour of practice. BBBB told me we could go home— as soon as I hit one hundred forehands in a row. Ninety minutes later, I still hadn’t succeeded. My feet felt cemented to the court, my eyes burned, and the skin was peeling from my palms. I wanted to quit, to slam my racquet into my bag, and to walk the fifteen miles home. But then, something happened. I realized I had a choice. I didn’t have to play tennis. Not for Troy, not for my parents, not for anybody. There on the court, I asked myself, “Do I want to play tennis? For myself?” And something deep within me answered, “Yes.”

I grit my teeth and kept going, eventually crushing those one hundred balls. I fell to the ground with relief as BBBB congratulated me. That night, I finally understood his coaching technique—BBBB cared about me and every time he pushed me, he was trying to get me to bounce back, to build my identity, make my own decisions, and stand by them in the face of pressure. That night, I chose tennis for myself because deep down, I still remembered those early summers with my siblings, and realized my true love for the sport. That night, I found a power, an agency unlike anything I had ever experienced. In the following months, I rapidly improved, stopped squabbling with BBBB, and began winning tournaments.

My true test, however, came my junior year of high school: the college decision. XXXX had left home for Stanford, YYYY for Harvard. Proud as I was of them, this only increased the pressure on me. Both were fantastic schools, but Stanford and Harvard’s competitive athletics meant I would not be able to play tennis at either one. Once again, I had a choice: pursue my parents’ dream schools, or make a choice for myself and choose my own path and play tennis at a school of my choosing.

For months, I struggled. Stanford and Harvard are two of the best schools in the world, for good reason. But when I remembered my training with BBBB and the power I felt bouncing back, I knew what I had to do. I decided to attend CCCC—to “fail” in meeting my parents’ expectations, but to succeed in setting my own.

Arriving at CCCC, I felt an enormous sense of agency, and I knew I had made the right call. It was my decision to be here. This was my school. In the classroom, I dove headfirst into my passion for science and sustainability, and on the tennis court, where I captained the team, I pushed my teammates hard, not to fracture them, but to establish a sense of camaraderie, like the one I felt all those summers ago with XXXX and YYYY, and to empower each of them with their own ability to bounce back.

Tennis has given me the power to choose my path. Because real resilience isn’t measured in games and sets, but in committing to your own choices and deciding to succeed for yourself when everyone around you is telling you to do something else. What matters to me most is a fuzzy, yellow tennis ball, because tennis has taught me to be resilient under pressure, follow my own trajectory, and always, always bounce back.

Harvard Business School

Round 1: September 4, 2024

• Decisions Released: December 10, 2024

Round 2: January 6, 2025

• Decisions Released: March 26, 2025

Deferred: April 25, 2024

HBS Essay Prompts

Business-Minded Essay : Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

Leadership-Focused Essay : What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)

Growth-Oriented Essay : Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

On its website, Harvard advises applicants, “Don’t overthink, over craft, and overwrite. Just answer the question in clear language that those of us who don’t know your world can understand.”

1. Tell a story

Your job with this essay is to paint the most accurate picture possible of who you are and why Harvard should accept you. The essay is the one part of the application that shows character and as such, it can make a big difference in your application. Capitalize on your individuality and demonstrate to HBS that you understand yourself, and are aligned with its missions and values. At the end of the day, you want your answer to the question, “Could this essay also describe someone else” to be “Absolutely not.”

2. Be concise

The HBS essay has only recently added a word limit. As you’re writing the essay, it’s very important to not ramble. As you’re writing, ask yourself, “Does this admissions committee need to know this?” If not, it’s probably safe to take out. Include relevant information and paint an accurate picture, but do so in a clear and concise way that doesn’t bore the adcom.

3. Don’t Just Answer “Why HBS?”

Unlike most of the other top business schools, HBS does not explicitly ask you to respond to the “Why HBS?” question. With that being said, many applicants feel like they need to use their essay to only answer this question, even though the university doesn’t make any mention of it. Most of the time, this is not the right approach. Your essay, at the end of the day, should be about you. The exception is if your reason for wanting to attend HBS makes your overall essay stronger. If that’s the case, then include it. However, the same adage from earlier applies: If your “Why HBS?” story could also apply to another applicant, don’t include it.

4. Build, Build, Build.

As you write your essay, make sure that there is some thread of continuity connecting the different pieces together. Introduce a theme or lesson, and touch on it every once in a while. Then, use the conclusion to tie everything together. This will not only make your essay more interesting, but it will also prevent it from coming off as disjointed. Also, sticking to a theme will help you ensure that everything you include is actually relevant.

HBS Sample Essay

Traditional MBA – Harvard Business School

Important Note : Harvard’s essay prompts for this application cycle have changed, but still take a moment to read through one of our MBA essay expert's sample essays answering Harvard’s previous prompt. It contains a strong element of storytelling, an air of professionalism, and a clear thesis of explaining the applicant’s life story and how their circumstances influenced their future career prospects.

Prompt: As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program?

When I was 12 years old, my father was fired from his job. He had joined a new company four years prior with a promise from its founders that he would one day be made a full partner. They reneged on that promise, so he started exploring other options; when word got out, they fired him. I watched helplessly as he started multiple business ventures over the next six years, each one ultimately doomed by a seemingly endless string of injustices—an otherwise meticulous business partner consumed by a concealed drug habit, or an employee who secretly embezzled company funds. Family savings dwindled, and after my sophomore year of high school we were forced to foreclose on our home and move to a different state. Changing schools not only meant abandoning all of my friends and starting from scratch socially—a terrifying prospect for an introvert like me—but it also cost me a chance to qualify as my high school’s valedictorian, an unspoken personal goal I had silently worked toward for years.

My instinctive reaction was to be angry at the injustice of it all—angry at how unfair it was for my dad, and especially angry at how it was impacting me. But my parents never complained, and they never gave up. They helped me see that the seeming injustice of my circumstances did not excuse me from trying my best. Following their example, I decided that even if I felt it was unfair that I couldn’t be valedictorian, I could still finish high school with perfect grades—and I did.

I hated the powerlessness I felt while my family was experiencing setback after setback, none of which seemed deserved. But when I was able to overcome my circumstances and still excel, I felt a tremendous sense of liberation and accomplishment. I knew I wanted to help others facing injustice to experience that same empowerment.

I have always been keenly sensitive to the sting of injustice. To me, justice means both equality of opportunity and consistency of consequences. Everyone should have the same opportunities in life regardless of arbitrary circumstances. Outcomes should also align with the merit of our own actions rather than with chance. These convictions feel like an innate part of me—they are simply how I believe the world should be. Ever since that pivotal experience in my youth, I have felt deeply motivated to overcome injustice whenever I encounter it, and I have dedicated considerable effort to studying and fighting it.

In college, I worked for four years with a favorite professor researching business ethics. The topic appealed to me because it involved not just establishing clear rules for how moral people and businesses should act, but it also delved into shades of gray. What should you do when you make a promise, but unexpected events make you question whether you should keep it?

Together we published several academic books and articles, deepening my understanding of morality and how it is often challenged in the world of business. As a result, I felt better equipped to identify and address issues of injustice going forward.

Midway through college I took a two-year break from school to volunteer as a full-time missionary in XXXX. I wanted to share the joy I had found in religious life with others and to empower those less fortunate than I. My first assignment was in a remote mountain village where we spent 10 hours a day knocking on the doors of the town’s tiny lamina shacks—often as torrential rainfall soaked us to the bone—trying to find people to teach. As door after door closed on us, I began to despair. I wondered if I would ever have the chance to touch these people’s lives in the way I had hoped.

Then one Sunday, a local churchgoer brought her new husband, YYYY, with her to Sunday services. I noticed that YYYY’s head was covered with jagged scars. He was slow in understanding and responding to us—and not just because of the language barrier. YYYY had been hit by a car when he was a child, causing permanent damage. But he had a pure heart and was willing to listen to our message. We taught him the gospel and he accepted it, transforming his life and filling it with joy in the process. He worked tirelessly in the fields during the day making a meager living, but he came home with a smile on his face.

He began showering his wife with love and affection. And he was always making jokes and laughing: one time he surprised us at the door in his wife’s apron and gave us an enthusiastic curtsey.

Like many of his countrymen, YYYY was a victim of terrible injustice—he was born into poverty and had limited future opportunities. But through the gospel, he found hope and joy. I knew that my efforts had helped him feel empowered despite the unfairness of his circumstances, and I felt that my sacrifice had been worth it.

I have also had opportunities to confront and overcome unfairness in the workplace. When I chose to enter the field of management consulting after graduation, I knew my new job would present me with dilemmas. Consultants are famous for getting to solve big, strategic problems—which appealed to me— but also for ruthlessly cutting workforces and laying people off—which did not. As a consultant, I knew I would have to be extra vigilant to try to reduce the injustice around me instead of contributing to it.

I encountered just such a dilemma while serving one of my very first clients. My project involved me working directly with ZZZZ, the client business intelligence manager, who in our first meeting together was confrontational, belligerent, and completely uncooperative. I knew ZZZZ’s team would need to maintain our tech solution after we left, so I wasn’t willing to proceed without her participation. I made time to meet with ZZZZ one-on-one and discovered the source of her distrust: past AAAA teams had consistently developed solutions without her input and then thrown them to her team to manage before moving on. When glitches arose or the solution needed to be updated, she came under fire even though her team hadn’t been involved. I immediately saw how unfair this was to her team and assured her this time would be different.

I approached the partner on my project and proposed that we co-create the dashboards with ZZZZ, which would involve weeks of extra work and expense. The partner vehemently disagreed, suggesting instead that I bypass her and build our solution independently since we already had the support of her superiors. But I felt strongly that unless we treated ZZZZ fairly, it ultimately didn’t matter if we finished the project in six weeks instead of eight. According to our firm’s values, we were committed to “building client capabilities to sustain improvement,” and I knew that’s what ZZZZ and the client deserved. I eventually convinced him, and with ZZZZ’s full support we built a great product that both teams were enthusiastic about.

I am proud of these small but significant choices I have made to foster fairness, but I want to do more. I’ve always been a strong advocate of the power of business to promote justice; free-market capitalism has provided economic freedom and abundant opportunity to billions of people. However, I’ve become increasingly troubled by the ecological destruction and income inequality that have accompanied capitalistic striving. To me, these are issues of fairness. Corporations escape the true cost of the externalities they create, cheating future generations of the beautiful world we enjoy today. At the same time, the fruits of economic production are unfairly concentrated in the hands of the owners of capital, sending executive compensation soaring while working class wages stagnate. Just as I have always wanted to empower victims of injustice, I feel compelled to do something to level the playing field.

Four months ago, I decided to take a stand. I put my consulting career on hold and moved cities to join an education startup. Income inequality starts with inequality in education, and traditional higher education has become increasingly more expensive and less relevant over the last thirty years. At this startup, I’m on the front lines of disrupting higher education by developing affordable online pathways for students from all backgrounds to develop the skills they need to succeed in their career. I’m being paid far less, but it’s worth it for me to be able to help people in need.

The more I learn about these issues, though, the more I realize that lasting change will only come by transforming the deep-seeded incentives that perpetuate the unfair realities of today’s system. Potential solutions like internalization of costs, negative-interest monetary systems, and gift-based economies have the power to rightly shift incentives while preserving the potential of free enterprise, but achieving such a transformation will require innovative policies and coordinated effort across business, government, and society. I feel empowered to help bring that future about, and that’s why I want to attend Harvard Business School.

At Harvard, I will have the opportunity to strengthen my leadership, equip myself with the tools to amplify my impact, and learn from the perspectives of an incredibly diverse student, faculty, and alumni network. I believe Harvard is unique among business schools in its commitment to leading systemic change. I’ve confirmed that through dozens of conversations with alumni—my father, uncle, and others— who have described to me how many of the students at HBS share my convictions, as demonstrated by Dr. Serafeim’s packed class each term on reimagining capitalism. I felt that energy firsthand when I visited Harvard last Spring and attended classes at both HBS and the Kennedy School. I’ve chosen to apply to the business school because I believe the key to creating effective policy is understanding how it will be interpreted and implemented by those it affects. But I also plan to cross-register in HKS classes and collaborate with professors like Dr. Risse and Dr. Robichaud, as I did at BYU. With your consideration, I look forward to pursuing an MBA at Harvard as the next step in my journey to create a more just world.

University of Pennsylvania Wharton

• Decision Released By: December 10, 2024

Round 2: January 3, 2025

• Decision Released By: April 1, 2025

Round 3: April 2, 2025

• Decision Released By: May 13, 2025

Deferred: April 23, 2025

• Decision Released By: July 1, 2025

Wharton Essay Prompts

How do you plan to use the Wharton MBA program to help you achieve your future professional goals? You might consider your past experience, short and long-term goals, and resources available at Wharton. (500 words)

Wharton’s essays ask two complementary questions: how will Wharton help you, and how will you help it? For this first prompt, make sure you have a clear understanding of yourself and your goals. Dig deep and find characteristics that are unique to Wharton.

Taking into consideration your background – personal, professional, and/or academic – how do you plan to make specific, meaningful contributions to the Wharton community? (400 words)

The class size at Wharton is small, and the school wants to make sure that every MBA candidate is bringing something to the table. With this prompt, prove to Wharton that you will be an asset to the program. What will you bring that’s different from everyone else applying, and how does it fit into what Wharton is looking for?

Wharton Sample Essay

Type : Why MBA/Why This School?

Traditional MBA – Wharton

Prompt: How do you plan to use the Wharton MBA program to help you achieve your future professional goals?

My dream is to become Founder/CEO of a supply chain company that uses technology to innovate packaging and shipping logistics in a sustainable manner. The industry is ripe for disruption and given companies like Flexport's success using technology to improve operations, I am confident that there is room for a company of my own. Like Flexport, I would use technology to innovate the industry, but also use packaging to decrease weight, allowing distributors to transport more packages per trip, reducing trips and emissions per delivery. I would use renewable energy to fuel vehicles, allowing for clean transportation while maximizing travel efficiency. In the short term, working as a Logistics/Operations Director doing supply chain management at an e-commerce company like Amazon, I would learn how they operationalize two-day shipping and remain profitable, observe how they build customer-friendly websites, and develop a culture to motivate employees into operational excellence as I move toward becoming an effective CEO.

Growing up in XXXX, my parents pursued their passion for medicine and created their own medical practices as entrepreneurial surgeons and instilled in me the idea of creating my own business. After becoming infatuated with stories related to climate change in high school, I went to XXXX and enrolled in its YYYY program [and played NCAA ZZZZ]. There, I realized that to pursue my passion for renewable energy, I needed to learn about the macroeconomic implications of the energy industry and majored in economics and environmental science. Professionally, I've worked at XXXX in investment banking, YYYY, a solar energy company, and part-time at ZZZZ, my mother's entrepreneurial skincare firm where I manage finances, manufacturing and packaging partnerships. At XXXX, I was an analyst in the XXXX group where I learned financial analysis, modeling, and business valuation, and covered YYYY as a possible investment opportunity. I was drawn to YYYY’s innovative solar leasing model, its female CEO, and the opportunity to learn to manage operations in the nation's largest public residential solar company.

To become Founder/CEO of a sustainable supply chain company, I hope to attend Wharton because of its case method learning which gives students exposure to diverse professional perspectives. I am excited to learn from Morris Cohen, who founded D3 Analytics, a company that applies concepts of machine learning and big data to a new paradigm for supply chain management. In Professor Cohen's Ops Strategy Practicum, I hope to learn evolving patterns of operations strategies adopted by firms for sourcing manufacturing, distributing products, and managing product designs. I would take Venture Capital and the Finance of Innovation to learn finance of technological innovation with a focus on the valuation tools in the venture capital industry and equip me to raise capital when launching my business. I am interested in taking Entrepreneurial Marketing to learn new approaches to drive growth for my company by gaining customers and driving revenue while recruiting A-level employees to scale my logistics business.

Kellogg School of Management

Round 1: September 11, 2024

• Decisions Released: December 11, 2024
• Decisions Released: May 7, 2025

Kellogg Essay Prompts

Intentionality is a key aspect of what makes our graduates successful Kellogg leaders. Help us understand your journey by articulating your motivations for pursuing an MBA, the specific goals you aim to achieve, and why you believe now is the right moment. Moreover, share why you feel Kellogg is best suited to serve as a catalyst for your career aspirations and what you will contribute to our community of lifelong learners during your time here. (450 words)

With this question, Kellogg is asking what your candidacy will bring to the program. They want to see who you are, outside of a resume and list of accomplishments. It may be helpful to work backward for this prompt. Start with a list of your major and minor life experiences, accomplishments, challenges, hobbies, etc, and see if there are any themes that weave them together.

Kellogg leaders are primed to tackle challenges everywhere, from the boardroom to their neighborhoods. Describe a specific professional experience where you had to make a difficult decision. Reflecting on this experience, identify the values that guided your decision-making process and how it impacted your leadership style. (450 words)

In this prompt, Kellogg wants to see that you have a) made an impact, and b) grown as an individual. Make sure the experiences you talk about demonstrate both of these points.

Kellogg Video Essay

In addition to the written essays, Kellogg requires a video essay to give you a chance to show your personality in real-time. The video will consist of three questions, each intended to help you showcase your unique characteristics. This aspect is technically optional, but it is a great place to show an aspect of your candidacy that can’t be found anywhere else in the application.

The three questions include the following:

Please introduce yourself to the admissions committee. —What do you want your future Kellogg classmates to know about you?

What path are you interested in pursuing, how will you get there, and why is this program right for you? —Why are you getting an MBA and why do you want to go to Kellogg?

This question will be based on a challenge that you’ve faced and what you’ve learned from it.  — Don’t use the same experience that you used in the first essay; instead, use this question to highlight another impactful story. Also, don’t skimp on explaining in detail what you learned from it. How did you grow? How did you change? How was your perspective altered?

For these questions, you will have 20 seconds to think about your answer and then one minute to give your response. The video essay is due 96 hours after the application deadline and a link to the submission will appear on the status page after the application and payment have been uploaded. In total, it should take around 20-25 minutes to complete.

1. What part do you play on a team?

Kellogg loves the concept of teamwork. Part of what sets Kellogg apart from the rest of the top-tier MBA programs is the emphasis on working in groups. Even the Kellogg (not so serious but kinda serious) dance team is called Groupwerk. In the essays, you'll want to make it 100% clear where you fit in on a team. What has your team counted on you for? How have you been able to match your skill set with team needs? If you can demonstrate through your essay that you can quickly identify and address gaps on a team, you'll stand out.

2. Connect your past, present, and future

Kellogg is hyper-focused on finding leaders who are open to new perspectives, new relationships, and new experiences going forward. The "values" essay, however, asks you to talk about how you've been influenced in the past. Kellogg wants to know more about the impact you'll create while enrolled, but they'll also want to know about what has made you, you. Being able to craft a clear narrative around your values that focuses on past, present, and future you will paint a better picture of the uniqueness that you can bring to campus. Remember, though, to focus on quality over quantity.

3. Don't stress about the video

I spent hours agonizing over the video interview. What would I wear? Where would I record the videos? What will happen when I (inevitably) mess up my first take? On the day of the interview, nothing came out the way I had imagined or rehearsed. The questions caught me off guard, and I definitely rushed a few answers. I didn't even finish my sentences for a couple of the questions before the time limit expired. And yet, I was admitted. Kellogg wants you to be yourself. They will, for the most part, appreciate the imperfections. You can't go into the interview totally unprepared, but don't freak out if you stutter, hesitate, or get cut off by the timer. Take a deep breath and don't get in your head. Approach the interview like a stimulating conversation with a friend and you'll crush it.

- Dallin H. , Kellogg MBA, Big Tech, Startups/VC

Kellogg Sample Essay

Traditional MBA – Kellogg

Important Note : Kellogg’s essays have changed for this year’s application cycle. Still, the sample essay below, written by a previous MBA alumnus, will have all the bits and pieces of writing techniques we’ve covered to help give you an idea of how a behavioral prompt can be answered.

Prompt: Kellogg’s purpose is to educate, equip and inspire brave leaders who create lasting value. Provide a recent example where you have demonstrated leadership and created value. What challenges did you face and what did you learn?

In 2017, XXXX’s parent company, ZZZZ, acquired YYYY and merged the two companies to become ZZZZ (later ZZZZ). At the time, I oversaw video for XXXX.com, and roughly 35 percent of XXXX.com’s overall revenue was driven by video monetization. Leadership looked to our team to help translate our successes onto YYYY.com, which was not monetizing its video placements despite a staggering number of views.

I noticed that the videos on YYYY’s homepage were too small to be discernible as videos and thus were unlikely to attract viewers, and in turn, advertisers. I suggested increasing the size of the video player to boost engagement to YYYY’s technical leadership within the first month of

our teams merging, but they initially brushed off the idea. Tensions were high since layoffs were expected, and there was magnifying glass on headcount redundancies. It took four months of persistent convincing to even get the new product on the roadmap.

YYYY and XXXX might seem like similar companies that could seamlessly integrate, but headquarters on different coasts along with very different organizational designs and cultures made collaboration tough to navigate. I was very comfortable in pitching and ushering new products at XXXX, and I initially made the mistake of assuming YYYY would have similar processes in place. In reality, XXXX’s culture championed cross-functional collaboration to a greater degree, while YYYY had a much more vigorous vetting and user testing process. To mitigate these challenges, I first created a biweekly video product touch-base between key engineering, product and content stakeholders, which maintained momentum for a dedicated Slack channel with nearly 30 key participants to provide project updates and a forum for feedback. At the same time, XXXX’s video reporting infrastructure was more robust than YYYY’s. Prior to launch, I worked with business intelligence to identify the metrics needed for proper measurement. One week into testing the new product, the Analytics Lead revealed staggering results and even suggested the reporting tools may be erroneous. The figures were found to be accurate; the team had just never seen such significant and immediate uplift. The numbers continued to grow and we were able to pass off the newly found viewable video supply to happy sales teams. A quick glance at the YYYY homepage shows that the optimization is still live today.

I was initially frustrated by the red tape and extensive user testing that YYYY implemented, but I came to appreciate how their measured procedures led to more efficiencies down the line. At the same time, I still appreciated the need to balance process with agility -- a hallmark of XXXX. Lastly, I saw how involving all stakeholders helped foster a team spirit and feelings of mutual respect that set the stage for more collaborative projects as our teams continued to integrate.

University of Chicago Booth

Round 1: September 19, 2024

Round 2: January 7, 2025

• Decisions Released: March 27, 2025

Round 3: April 3, 2025

• Decisions Released: May 22, 2025

Deferred: April 3, 2025

• Decisions Released: July 1, 2025

Booth Essay Prompts

How will a Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals? (Minimum 250 words, no maximum)

This prompt is one of the “Why MBA/Why this School?” question types. The important things to remember are to demonstrate self-awareness and clearly articulated goals as well as an understanding of Booth and its values and characteristics. Your answer to this question should be completely unique to Booth.

An MBA is as much about personal growth as it is about professional development. In addition to sharing your experience and goals in terms of career, we’d like to learn more about you outside of the office. Use this opportunity to tell us something about who you are… (Minimum 250 words, no maximum)

Similar to Wharton’s prompt, this question is the adcom’s attempt to see what makes you interesting and unique. They want to know what you will bring to the table and how your background and experience will contribute to the Booth community. What makes you, you?

1. Speak to your global experience.

Booth cares about its candidates having global experiences. The school is built on the foundation of bringing a global perspective to its diverse student base. What's more, there are two additional campuses in London and Hong Kong. So when considering which stories to highlight in your essays, I recommend weaving a global thread throughout. This will show the admissions team what you'll add to the school as a student as well as how you'll succeed in the world post-graduation.

2. Paint a picture of a Boothie.

Essays are like self-portraits, and the stories you tell are what will determine whether you look like the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo. Chicago Booth has a reputation for economic genius and Nobel Laureates. So show the admissions team how you fit into this culture by demonstrating a well-rounded blend of leadership and analytical ability. It's easier to highlight one over the other, but those who can show a balanced mix will find success.

3. Reference Booth’s mission, professors, or classes.

The more you can show your excitement about Booth to be genuine and authentic, the more successful you'll be. I'm not recommending the “fake it 'til you make it” approach, but essays that can reference Booth's mission statement, specific hot classes or professors will have a very distinct feel about them. These aspects of your essay will separate you one level above the majority of applicants who project a more superficial interest.

Ryan W. , Booth Part-Time MBA, Salesforce APM

Booth Sample Essay

Type : Why MBA/Why This School

Deferred MBA – Booth

Prompt: How will the Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals?

I want to start a geothermal company that will help lead the energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy—by targeting existing oil wells as sites for geothermal plants. Oil fields are close to electric grids and have high nearby subsurface temperatures, making them ideal sites for geothermal plants. By building geothermal infrastructure nearby, my company will produce cleaner, cheaper energy, making it more profitable for operators to switch from oil to geothermal. As oil companies decommission their wells, I’ll negotiate for their land rights, so I can use their existing wells for new geothermal vents. I want my company to prove the case for economically viable, carbon neutral energy production.

After getting an MBA I want to start a geothermal company which will help me lead the energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. I plan to target developed oil fields in Texas, where, in many places, producing wells are flowing enough hot fluid to generate clean energy. Using this geothermal heat, the carbon footprint of oil and gas extraction will decrease as fewer fossil fuels are utilized to power surrounding infrastructure. As the wells approach their economic life, I will negotiate the lease from various operators, saving them millions in plug and abandonment costs, and retrofit the wells for direct geothermal energy production via closed loop binary fluid systems, bringing emissions to zero. To accomplish this goal, I need to shore up my knowledge of energy economics and entrepreneurial finance, develop a strong sense of leadership, and build a network of like-minded individuals that will help me lead the transition and I believe I can get those things at Chicago Booth.

My immediate career goal is to develop my first co-production site in Shelby County, Texas at the Blanton well site, which produces abnormally heated fluid from the flanks of an active salt dome. Before investing in capital expenditures, developing a strong sense of energy economics and broader markets is necessary to verify financial feasibility. University of Chicago, through the Graduate-Student-At-Large: Business program, is already allowing me to accomplish this goal with my enrollment in “Microeconomics” with Professor Andrew Mcclellan. His instruction helped me understand the impact taxes and subsidies have on market equilibrium, an important aspect of renewable energy as green energy tax incentives continue to change on a yearly basis. As my company continues to grow, having a strong finance and accounting foundation is imperative to building and sustaining a healthy company. Electives such as “Accounting for Entrepreneurship: From Start-Up through IPO” will provide the skills I need to be successful by following the life-cycle of a business that originates as a start-up, and covers topics such as building an initial accounting infrastructure. I understand that execution of the business is as important as developing the idea and proof of concept, and Booth is the best place for me to develop financial fluency.

Leading the energy transition will require a strong sense of leadership. Not only will I need to lead those I get to work with over my career, but to lead the energy transition, and reverse the impact fossil fuels have had thus far, I must have the emotional intelligence to inspire others to join me in my journey. The “Interpersonal Dynamics” course at Booth will allow me to develop my communication skills and better understand the emotions and perceptions of my colleagues. These skills, synthesized with leadership development acquired in “Leadership Practicum” will prepare me to act as a relational leader, who understands the needs of others. As a relational leader I hope to foster an environment which promotes happiness, and maximizes efficiency, not only to make our efforts in changing the world more successful, but to excite other people to join our cause.

To find the greatest chance of success in leading the energy transition, I will need a network of like-minded individuals who can provide a diversity of thought. Chicago Booth provides the opportunity to develop that network through different community experiences. The Energy Club’s “Energy Forward” conference, which designates time to topics in oil and gas and renewable energy will allow me to hear from industry leaders, build meaningful relationships with peers and contribute my sector experience to the public forum as I learn from those around me. Opportunities through the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Group such as “SeedCon” will help me connect with successful entrepreneurs and early-stage investors whose ideas and funding might change the course of my venture’s trajectory. Even in the GSALB program I have had the opportunity to connect with other students in various sectors, including the energy industry. I hope to continue to strengthen those connections and continue building new ones with matriculation into the full-time program.

Columbia Business School

2023-2024 application deadlines.

Early Decision: September 10, 2024

• Decision Notification By: December 20, 2024

Merit Fellowship: January 7, 2025

• Decision Notification By: March 26, 2025

Regular Decision: April 1, 2025

• Decision Notification By: May 15, 2025

Deferred: Mid-April (not yet released for the new cycle)

Columbia Essay Prompts

What is your immediate post-MBA professional goal? (50 characters maximum)

For this question, be succinct and answer the prompt directly. You don’t have much space to answer and want to make every letter count. Show that you understand how a CBS MBA will affect your career trajectory.

(NEW!) The Phillips Pathway for Inclusive Leadership (PPIL) is a co-curricular program designed to provide students with the skills and strategies needed to develop as inclusive leaders. Through various resources and programming, the goal is for students to explore and reflect during their educational journey on the following five inclusive leadership skills: Mitigating Bias and Prejudice; Managing Intercultural Dialogue; Addressing Systemic Inequity; Understanding Identity and Perspective Taking; and Creating an Inclusive Environment.

Describe a time or situation when you had the need to utilize one of more of these five skills, and tell us the actions you took and the outcome. (250 words)

Kellogg is looking for applicants to demonstrate their understanding of and experience with inclusive leadership skills through a specific example. Although the question involves PPIL, you don’t necessarily have to know a ton about the program or even want to join it to answer the question effectively. The prompt asks you to describe a time or situation when you had to use one or more of the five inclusive leadership skills in action. Showcase how you have applied these skills in a real-life scenario and the outcomes of you actions.

We believe Columbia Business School is a special place. CBS proudly fosters a collaborative learning environment through curricular experiences like our clusters and learning teams, co-curricular initiatives like the Phillips Pathway for Inclusive Leadership, which aims to equip students with the skills and strategies necessary to lead in an inclusive and ethical manner, and career mentorship opportunities like our Executives-in-Residence program.

Why do you feel Columbia Business School is a good fit for you academically, culturally, and professionally? (300 words)

In asking this question, CBS wants to know why you think Columbia could be uniquely positioned to help you in your career. Do not start writing this essay until you have a clear idea of what makes Columbia different.

1. Essay #1

CBS dedicates a significant portion of the application to understanding your goals. A few pointers: 1) Your short-term goal should be attainable….something you can realistically achieve based on your past experience. 2) Think big when it comes to long-term goals. In asking for your “dream job” rather than your “long-term goal,” CBS invites you to share your passions. 3) Use the ample word count to weave a narrative that connects your past to your future and offers examples of impact, leadership, and interests.

2. Essay #3

Columbia’s fit essay is a crucial part of the application. CBS is notorious for managing yield. They are more likely to accept you if they think you will accept them. The best way to show that you are invested in CBS is to show that you understand its value proposition. This means doing your research; going beyond the surface; and finding a personal, unique take on their offerings. Sure, Columbia’s NYC location is a huge plus for anyone in finance. But how will you specifically leverage the location to advance your goals? The same could be said about the family business program, the retail offerings, or the value investing program. Here’s my recommendation: ask yourself whether ten other candidates could write the same thing. If so, it’s not unique enough.

- Pamela J. , CBS MBA, Pro Admissions Coach

For tips on Essay #2 (PPIL), please read: NEW MBA Essay Prompt for Columbia Business School (2023-2024)

Columbia Sample Essay

Traditional MBA – CBS

Prompt: Tell us about your favorite book, movie, or song and why it resonates with you.

I know every single line to the eighty-eight-minute, 1988 movie, Mulan, by heart – and not just because I played Mulan in my middle school’s production – but because of how she herself inspires me with her resilience. Mulan always forges ahead to do what she believes in, despite any restrictions that come her way. Living in a society that thought women should be seen and not heard, Mulan did not allow gender inequalities and social pressures to keep her from doing what she believed in – fighting for her family.

Her resilience taught me to persevere in the midst of challenges I have faced, be it in the workplace, or my own home. The Emperor in the movie said: “The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.” Remembering this quote and Mulan’s strength has seen me through some tough moments: when I spent every free moment outside of work going home to handle the arrangements and support my mother when my father passed, to when I joined the recruiting team on top of demanding client work to increase the diversity of the candidate pipeline, to when I continued to persuade the leadership at my firm to establish the DEI function despite pushback and many no’s to make sure others had a voice.

Mulan inspired my core value to persevere in tough situations throughout my life. I would not be enjoying the benefits from successes I have achieved without having channeled my own inner “Mulan.”

Round 1: September 30, 2024

• Decisions Released: December 12, 2024

Round 2: January 14, 2025

• Decisions Released: April 4, 2025

Round 3: April 7, 2025

• Decisions Released: May 15, 2025

Deferred Round 1: TBA for 2024-2025 cycle

Deferred Round 2: TBA for 2024-2025 cycle

MIT Sloan Essay Prompt

Cover Letter:

MIT Sloan seeks students whose personal characteristics demonstrate that they will make the most of the incredible opportunities at MIT, both academic and non-academic. We are on a quest to find those whose presence will enhance the experience of other students. We seek thoughtful leaders with exceptional intellectual abilities and the drive and determination to put their stamp on the world. We welcome people who are independent, authentic, and fearlessly creative — true doers. We want people who can redefine solutions to conventional problems, and strive to preempt unconventional dilemmas with cutting-edge ideas. We demand integrity and respect passion.

Taking the above into consideration, please submit a cover letter seeking a place in the MIT Sloan MBA program. Your letter should conform to a standard business correspondence, include one or more professional examples that illustrate why you meet the desired criteria above, and be addressed to the Admissions Committee (300 words or fewer, excluding address and salutation).

The word count for this cover letter is very limited so again, for this prompt, make sure that all the information you’re including is directly relevant and necessary. Pay close attention to the wording of the prompt; Sloan points out that it wants applicants who will take advantage of the academic and non-academic opportunities at Sloan and benefit the other students. They want people who will be innovators and problem-solve the world’s biggest problems with creative solutions. How can you show this in your cover letter?

Video Statement:

Introduce yourself to your future classmates. Here’s your chance to put a face with a name, let your personality shine through, be conversational, be yourself. We can’t wait to meet you!

The video portion is a chance for you to show off your personality in a way that’s difficult to do in a written response. Prepare for it as you would an interview. Have a plan for what you will talk about and practice multiple times. You want to come off as confident and a good presenter. Don’t talk about your professional accomplishments or anything else that can be found in another part of your application; instead, focus on your interests, passions, and who you are as an individual. It is short, so definitely think about how you can best use the time you have.

Optional Short Answer Question:

How has the world you come from shaped who you are today? For example, your family, culture, community, all help to shape aspects of your identity, please use this opportunity if you would like to share more about your background. (250 words)

1. Focus on your past success

Unlike other schools with open-ended essay prompts, Sloan “believes that your past is the best predictor of future success.” They aren’t looking for you to pontificate on future goals or passions. They are looking for you to demonstrate that you’ve accomplished great things in the past (with the assumption that you’ll continue to do so!). Use your cover letter and video statement to elaborate on successes, achievements, and impacts. Treat the video statement as an essay.

The video statement can seem scary at first. Really, it’s just another essay that you speak into a camera! Treat it just as you would any other essay: type out a rough draft, get feedback, and iterate. Aim for ~175 words, which should be just enough for a 1-minute video.

2. Focus on the Sloan values

It’s good if Sloan admissions say, “Wow, this person is impressive.” It’s GREAT if Sloan admissions say “Wow, this person is the perfect fit for Sloan!” How do you get them to say the latter? You make sure that everything in your cover letter and video statement ties back to the values that Sloan finds important.

3. Have fun with the video statement!

MIT Sloan received over 7,000 applications in 2021. Want to stand out from the crowd? While staying within their recommended guidelines, record your video in a unique location or use a prop. The admissions staff who reviews your video will thank you!

- Tanner J. , Sloan MBA, VC and Tech Strategy, Engineering

Sloan Sample Cover Letter

Phone Number | Email Address

April 1, 2019

MIT Sloan School of Management Global Programs

1 Main Street E90-9th Floor

Cambridge, MA 02142

To The Assistant Deans of Admissions, Rod Garcia and Dawna Levenson:

Thank you for the opportunity to apply to the MIT Sloan School of Management’s MBA Early Admission Program. My name is XXXX XXXX and I recently graduated from the University of Washington with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. I had the opportunity to study the intersection of business and technology while also learning how to break down and analyze problems.

Outside of my formal education, I had the opportunity of launching a tech startup company called YYYY. YYYY is a company that ZZZZ. I was heavily involved in designing the product experience, managing a team of interns, and leading the go-to-market strategy. This experience taught me so much about persistence and commitment to a team I believed in.

In addition to my experience as an entrepreneur, I also had the opportunity to work as a product management intern at Microsoft. During this internship, I collaborated with the UX designer and software engineers to create a new experience for Microsoft customers. I personally conducted dozens of prototype usability tests with enterprise customers, summarized findings, and led the product strategy for a team of six.

My startup opportunity coupled with my internship experiences at Cisco and Microsoft solidified my passion for technology. I’ve realized that my deepest aspiration is to build technology that helps others capture their full potential. I am confident that MIT Sloan is the best place to pursue an MBA because of their focus on leadership development, innovation and inventing the future. I have no doubt that the classes, resources, and people found at MIT Sloan will lay a solid foundation for me to realize my aspiration to build technology that will help others capture their full potential.

Best regards, XXXX XXXX

Collecting Feedback and Polishing

One of the best—and worst—things about essay writing is that you are never done. Even if you catch every single spelling and grammar error, there is always more you can do to tweak the story, change up your formatting, perfect every sentence, or improve each word choice. The trick is finding as many opportunities to improve as you can.

Do all you can to read, reread, and reread your essay again to see where you can make it better. Give yourself enough time to take breaks between revisions so you can review it with fresh eyes. Alternate reading it in your mind and out loud. Imagine reading the essay from the adcom’s perspective. Does everything make sense? Is it moving? Being able to come back to your own essay and see it with fresh eyes is a difficult skill to master.

This is where collecting external feedback comes in. We highly recommend asking for help reviewing your essay. You will have read your story so many times that you may miss things, and it is always necessary to make sure others reading your essay understand what you’re trying to illustrate.

Most people know to ask for help with proofreading, or catching spelling and grammar errors. While this certainly is important, it is even more important that you ask for feedback on how well your essay answers the prompt, how moving it is to read, and how well it works as a cohesive story.

Try to get outside your comfort zone and let people from various areas of your life read your essay. Ask for feedback from close family, good friends, people from school, and/or work colleagues. A mentor or coach is also a great person to ask. At Leland, we’ve got lots of MBA admissions consultants who specialize in essays, many of whom are expert writers and attended top business schools. See them all here .

Thank everyone who gives you feedback, even if it seems negative. Don’t be afraid to make changes based on their suggestions. You might even want to start over with a new idea. However, feel free to take feedback with a grain of salt. If you get negative feedback about something that really matters to you, and you think it is important to your essay, then keep it. Remember, this is your essay for your future.

You may find it helpful to talk through ideas with people during all stages of your writing process, so don’t put off asking for feedback because you’re not sure your essay is done yet.

We also encourage you to talk with other successful candidates and read through their essays.

Common Essay Pitfalls

We’ve seen dozens of essays, between our own and our clients’, and even the best applicants often make similar mistakes. Before, and as you begin writing your own essays, check this list of common pitfalls and make sure you don’t fall for them:

• Try to cover too much - The adcom is much more likely to remember how they felt while reading your story than all the facts, anecdotes, or stories you share. Going deep on a few stories may be much more powerful than covering everything.
• Talk too much about accomplishments - These essays are meant to help the adcoms get to know you on a more personal level, so if all you do is talk about how amazing you are, they will be turned off. Make sure to be humble, and if you talk about an accomplishment, check with others to make sure it doesn’t come across as boastful
• Force a theme when it doesn’t fit your story - Applicants often choose a theme and try to push it so hard even when it just doesn’t seem to fit. If you find yourself having to repeatedly explain why stories fit your theme, then consider picking another theme and/or new stories.
• Regurgitate your resume - Walking through your resume in your essay is incredibly dull for the reader and not the intention of the essay portion. Reiterating your professional experience will come across as incredibly boring, and it won’t add any value to your application. You can talk about the things on your resume, but rather than go through everything, pick one or a few experiences that really matter to you to write about in-depth.
• Cover stories that are discussed in other parts of the application -In other words, don’t regurgitate another part of your application! Each piece of the application should bring something unique and essential to the table. Let other parts of the application do their jobs and focus your essay on what really matters.
• Write stories that are too professional - It’s fine to talk about how your life lessons have affected you professionally, but that shouldn’t be your entire story. Nothing makes someone feel more robotic than not talking about anything except work.
• Try to guess what the adcom wants to hear - Be authentic. Be authentic. Be authentic. Adcoms know when you are BS’ing them. Don’t copy someone else’s story or guess what leadership traits you think the adcom wants to see. There is something amazing and special about each of us; you just need to find it. The adcom will like that unique part of you! (And if they don’t, you don’t want to be there anyway).
• Not going deep enough -Many of the questions (e.g., “What matters most?”) ask you to dig deep, and it’s not an easy task. When getting ready to answer those tough prompts, be prepared to think about it, talk about it, and write about it for several weeks before even being able to articulate what it might be for you. That’s okay, just make sure you don’t cut that time short.
• Recycling too much - It may be possible to recycle some content and big ideas between your applications to different schools, but if you do that, each essay must read as though you wrote each one for each school individually. Count on doing much more original writing than copying and pasting.

Bottom Line

Spend a lot of time brainstorming, writing, and revising your application essay(s). Do not procrastinate or underestimate them; it is extremely important you take the time necessary for them to all come together. Be personal and open with the admissions team so they can really get to know you personally. At the end of the day, authenticity is the most important thing you can convey through your essays.

Where Can I Start?

Hiring an admissions coach can make all the difference between putting together an average application vs. a competitive application. We have a network of 150+ coaches on our platform and are here to help you find one to meet your budget, background, and goals. Below are some of our top recs, but you can find all of them here . We have someone for everyone.

For more free resources, guides, and coach-written articles, visit our MBA Library . We are constantly updating it with the most current information to help you as you research and apply for business school.

Here are a few specific articles that can help get you started on your applications:

• A Comprehensive MBA Application Timeline–With Chart
• How to Craft the Ultimate MBA Resume–With Examples
• How to Get the Perfect MBA Recommendation Letter–With Examples

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Leland coaches have helped thousands of people achieve their goals. A dedicated mentor can make all the difference.

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New Harvard MBA Essay Set for the Class of 2027

In addition to the HBS deadlines , the new Harvard MBA essay set for the 2024-25 admissions season has been confirmed! After many years of asking the same open-ended prompt, Harvard Business School has introduced three new essays for this application cycle. Per the HBS Direct from the Director blog:

• We have refreshed the  criteria  on which we evaluate candidates. We are looking for applicants who are business-minded, leadership-focused, and growth-oriented. Remember, you don’t have to have a traditional business background to apply to HBS.
• In this year’s application, we will ask you to respond to three short essays aligned with our criteria. This is your opportunity to discuss meaningful or formative experiences that are important to you that you haven’t had a chance to fully explore elsewhere in your application.

The New Harvard MBA Essay Set

Applicants to the MBA Class of 2027 (matriculating fall 2025) need to respond to these three essay prompts:

Business-Minded Essay : Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

Leadership-Focused Essay : What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)

Growth-Oriented Essay : Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

HBS goes into greater detail regarding each of these criteria this way:

Business-Minded

We are looking for individuals who are passionate about using business as a force for good – who strive to improve and transform companies, industries, and the world. We are seeking those who are eager to solve today’s biggest problems and shape the future through creative and integrated thinking. Being business-minded is about the interest to help organizations succeed, whether in the private, public, or non-profit sector. This business inclination can be found in individuals with a variety of professional and educational experiences, not just those who come from traditional business backgrounds.

In Your Application : We will look for evidence of your interpersonal skills, quantitative abilities, and the ways in which you plan to create impact through business in the future.

Leadership-Focused

We are looking for individuals who aspire to lead others toward making a difference in the world, and those who recognize that to build and sustain successful organizations, they must develop and nurture diverse teams. Leadership takes many forms in many contexts – you do not have to have a formal leadership role to make a difference. We deliberately create a class that includes different kinds of leaders, from the front-line manager to the startup founder to the behind-the-scenes thought leader.

In Your Application : Your leadership impact may be most evident in extracurriculars, community initiatives, or your professional work.

Growth-Oriented

We are looking for individuals who desire to broaden their perspectives through creative problem solving, active listening, and lively discussion. At HBS you will be surrounded by future leaders from around the world who will make you think more expansively about what impact you might have. Our case and field-based learning methods depend on the active participation of curious students who are excited to listen and learn from faculty and classmates, as well as contribute their own ideas and perspectives.

In Your Application : We will look for the ways in which you have grown, developed, and how you engage with the world around you.

We’ll be out with our targeted tips for the new Harvard MBA essay set soon! Don’t hesitate to contact us to learn how Stacy Blackman Consulting can help with your Harvard MBA application.

We offer multiple services to meet your MBA application needs, from our  All-In Partnership  to hourly help reviewing your MBA resume.  Contact SBC today for a  free 15-minute advising session  to talk strategy with a Principal SBC consultant.

Here’s a snapshot of the caliber of expertise on our SBC team .

HBS Admissions Board at Harvard Business School HBS MBA

HBS Admissions Board at Harvard Business School Kellogg MBA

Director HBS Admissions at Harvard Business School MBA, the Wharton School

HBS Admissions Board at Harvard Business School

Director HBS Admissions at Harvard Business School HBS MBA

Admissions Officer at Stanford's Graduate School of Business (GSB) MBA, Stanford's Graduate School of Business (GSB)

Asst Director MBA Admissions at Stanford's Graduate School of Business (GSB) Director MBA Admissions at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business

MBA, Stanford's Graduate School of Business (GSB) Minority Admissions, the GSB Diversity Programs, the GSB

Associate Director MBA Admissions at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania

Associate Director MBA Admissions and Marketing at the Wharton MBA’s Lauder Institute

Director, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania Professional Writer

Assistant Director MBA Admissions at Columbia Business School (CBS) NYU Admissions

Assistant Director MBA Admissions at Columbia Business School (CBS) M.S.Ed, Higher Education, U of Pennsylvania

Associate Director MBA Admissions at Columbia Business School (CBS)

Ashley is a former MBA Admissions Board Member for Harvard Business School (HBS), where she interviewed and evaluated thousands of business school applicants for over a six year tenure.  Ashley  holds an MBA from HBS. During her HBS years,  Ashley  was the Sports Editor for the Harbus and a member of the B-School Blades Ice Hockey Team. After HBS, she worked in Marketing at the Gillette Company on Male and Female shaving ...

Kerry is a former member of the Admissions Board at Harvard Business School (HBS). During her 5+ year tenure at HBS, she read and evaluated hundreds of applications and interviewed MBA candidates from a wide range of backgrounds across the globe. She also led marketing and outreach efforts focused on increasing diversity and inclusion, ran the Summer Venture in Management Program (SVMP), and launched the 2+2 Program during her time in Admissions. Kerry holds a B.A. from Bates College and  ...

A former associate director of admissions at Harvard Business School, Pauline served on the HBS MBA Admissions Board full-time for four years. She evaluated and interviewed HBS applicants, both on-campus and globally.  Pauline's career has included sales and marketing management roles with Coca-Cola, Gillette, Procter & Gamble, and IBM.  For over 10 years, Pauline has expertly guided MBA applicants, and her clients h ...

Geri is a former member of the Admissions Board at Harvard Business School (HBS).  In her 7 year tenure in HBS Admissions, she read and evaluated hundreds of applications and interviewed MBA candidates from a diverse set of academic, geographic, and employment backgrounds.  Geri also traveled globally representing the school at outreach events in order to raise awareness for women and international students.  In additio ...

Laura comes from the MBA Admissions Board at Harvard Business School (HBS) and is an HBS MBA alumnus. In her HBS Admissions role, she evaluated and interviewed hundreds of business school candidates, including internationals, women, military and other applicant pools, for five years.  Prior to her time as a student at HBS, Laura began her career in advertising and marketing in Chicago at Leo Burnett where she worked on th ...

Andrea served as the Associate Director of MBA Admissions at Harvard Business School (HBS) for over five years.  In this role, she provided strategic direction for student yield-management activities and also served as a full member of the admissions committee. In 2007, Andrea launched the new 2+2 Program at Harvard Business School – a program targeted at college junior applicants to Harvard Business School.  Andrea has also served as a Career Coach for Harvard Business School for both cu ...

Jennifer served as Admissions Officer at the Stanford (GSB) for five years. She holds an MBA from Stanford (GSB) and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Jennifer has over 15 years experience in guiding applicants through the increasingly competitive admissions process into top MBA programs. Having read thousands and thousands of essays and applications while at Stanford (GSB) Admiss ...

Erin served in key roles in MBA Admissions--as Director at Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and Assistant Director at Stanford's Graduate School of Business (GSB). Erin served on the admissions committee at each school and has read thousands of applications in her career. At Haas, she served for seven years in roles that encompassed evaluation, outreach, and diversity and inclusion. During her tenure in Admissions at GSB, she was responsible for candidate evaluation, applicant outreach, ...

Susie comes from the Admissions Office of the Stanford Graduate School of Business where she reviewed and evaluated hundreds of prospective students’ applications.  She holds an MBA from Stanford’s GSB and a BA from Stanford in Economics. Prior to advising MBA applicants, Susie held a variety of roles over a 15-year period in capital markets, finance, and real estate, including as partner in one of the nation’s most innovative finance and real estate investment organizations. In that r ...

Dione holds an MBA degree from Stanford Business School (GSB) and a BA degree from Stanford University, where she double majored in Economics and Communication with concentrations in journalism and sociology. Dione has served as an Admissions reader and member of the Minority Admissions Advisory Committee at Stanford.   Dione is an accomplished and respected advocate and thought leader on education and diversity. She is ...

Anthony served as the Associate Director of MBA Admissions at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he dedicated over 10 years of expertise. During his time as a Wharton Admissions Officer, he read and reviewed thousands of applications and helped bring in a class of 800+ students a year.   Anthony has traveled both domestically and internationally to recruit a ...

Meghan served as the Associate Director of Admissions and Marketing at the Wharton MBA’s Lauder Institute, a joint degree program combining the Wharton MBA with an MA in International Studies. In her role on the Wharton MBA admissions committee, Meghan advised domestic and international applicants; conducted interviews and information sessions domestically and overseas in Asia, Central and South America, and Europe; and evaluated applicants for admission to the program. Meghan also managed ...

Amy comes from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where she was Associate Director. Amy devoted 12 years at the Wharton School, working closely with MBA students and supporting the admissions team.  During her tenure at Wharton, Amy served as a trusted adviser to prospective applicants as well as admitted and matriculated students.  She conducted admissions chats with applicants early in the admissions ...

Ally brings six years of admissions experience to the SBC team, most recently as an Assistant Director of Admission for the full-time MBA program at Columbia Business School (CBS).  During her time at Columbia, Ally was responsible for reviewing applications, planning recruitment events, and interviewing candidates for both the full-time MBA program and the Executive MBA program. She traveled both internationally and dome ...

Erin has over seven years of experience working across major institutions, including University of Pennsylvania, Columbia Business School, and NYU's Stern School of Business. At Columbia Business School, Erin was an Assistant Director of Admissions where she evaluated applications for both the full time and executive MBA programs, sat on the admissions and merit scholarship committees and advised applicants on which program might be the best fit for them based on their work experience and pro ...

Emma comes from the MBA Admissions Office at Columbia Business School (CBS), where she was Associate Director.  Emma conducted dozens of interviews each cycle for the MBA and EMBA programs, as well as coordinating the alumni ambassador interview program. She read and evaluated hundreds of applications each cycle, delivered information sessions to audiences across the globe, and advised countless waitlisted applicants.

SBC’s star-studded consultant team is unparalleled. Our clients benefit from current intelligence that we receive from the former MBA Admissions Officers from Harvard HBS, Wharton and every elite business program in the US and Europe.  These MBA Admissions Officers have chosen to work exclusively with SBC.

Just two of the many superstars on the SBC team: Meet Anthony , who served as the Associate Director of MBA Admissions at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he dedicated over 10 years of expertise.

Meet Andrea , who served as the Associate Director of MBA Admissions Marketing at Harvard Business School (HBS) for over five years.

Tap into this inside knowledge for your MBA applications by requesting a consultation .

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Harvard MBA Essay Examples

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A soldier who served on the front lines in Afghanistan. A process engineer challenged by a long series of early failures. And a female consultant whose passion became healthcare.

Three MBA applicants to Harvard Business School last year. Three students in the newest crop of MBA students at Harvard this fall. All of them answered the question now being asked of 2017-2018 applicants to Harvard:  As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program?

The school provides minimal guidance for applicants trying to make an impression. “There is no word limit for this question,” advises HBS admissions. “We think you know what guidance we’re going to give here. Don’t over think, overcraft and overwrite. Just answer the question in clear language that those of us who don’t know your world can understand.”

Each of the three applicants above wrote a clear and compelling essay in their applications, essays that Poets&Quants is reprinting with permission from the MBA Essay Guide Summer 2017 Edition recently published by The Harbus , the MBA student newspaper at Harvard Business School. The guide contains 39 essays written by successful candidates who are now starting the MBA program at HBS. Proceeds from the sale of the guidebook go to benefit the non-profit foundation that supports The Harbus .

With application deadlines rapidly approaching at Harvard Business School and many other prestige MBA programs, these successful essays will, no doubt, give current candidates a bit of guidance. More importantly, the essays that follow are most likely to provide comfort, that there is no formula or singular way to craft a successful answer.

THREE SUCCESSFUL ESSAYS. THREE VERY DIFFERENT APPROACHES.

The latest edition of the MBA Essay Guide from The Harbus costs $61.49

In his 1,130-word essay, the U.S. Army applicant ties together his experiences of leading soldiers on the front line in Afghanistan together with staff postings in Army operations and logistics to paint a portrait of a dedicated and people-oriented leader.

Inspired by a selfless act from her nine-year-old mentee, this management consultant decided to challenge herself to make an impact in healthcare. In a 937-word essay, she uses a particularly difficult turnaround situation which she was put in charge of as exemplifying her strongest skills: building relationships and uniting people around a common goal.

In a 1,358-essay, a process engineer opens up to a long series of failures in his early life. By showing both vulnerability and honesty, he is able to transform this list of fruitless endeavors into a credible “badge of honor,” evidence of his resilience, determination and strength of character. It quickly becomes apparent that what appeared to be failures in the first half, actually proved to be successes or openings for new opportunities, given enough time and perseverance.

ONE APPLICANT DID 25 DRAFTS BEFORE COMING UP WITH ONE SHE LIKED ENOUGH TO SUBMIT

Behind every MBA application is a person and a story, and in this trio of representative essays the approaches taken by each candidate is as different as the essays they submitted to the admissions committee at HBS.

The engineer went through took eight drafts over two months. “I thought about what personal traits I wanted to share with the ADCOM and identified stories from my past that identified those traits,” he explains. “After two or three drafts, I’d figured out the right narrative and kept refining it, taking as much as a week to finalize each draft. My best advice is to be honest, start early, and have someone who knows what the ADCOMS are looking for to read through a couple of your drafts and give you pointers.”

The consultant estimates that she went through 25 drafts to get to her final version. “I think the most important thing with the essay is to iterate,” she advises. “Because the question is so open-ended, it is important to reflect as much as possible and give yourself the time (in my case two months) to go on the journey necessary to realize what you care most about communicating and how to do so in the most effective way. I also cannot overstate the importance of finding someone who will give you honest feedback.

(See on the following pages the complete and full MBA essays submitted to Harvard Business School)

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Successful Business School Essays | 2024

With an increasingly competitive MBA admissions process, it's important to understand what makes an applicant stand out. Admissions consultants share their clients' accepted MBA application essays and analyze what makes them work.

Samuel's Essay

MBA Whisperer® offers bespoke test preparation and MBA admissions consulting services, enabling accomplished professionals to “dream their impossible dream.” It was founded by Travis Morgan , a former television journalist, MBA alumnus & admissions interviewer, and Director of Admissions Consulting for the world's largest privately-held test prep and admissions consulting company at the time. Travis brings his unique brand of enthusiasm and energy paired with 17 years of test preparation and admissions consulting insights to elevate each client’s experience.

New 2024-2025 Harvard Business School Essay Prompts

For the first time in over a decade, Harvard Business School significantly changed its admissions essays and criteria in its 2024-2025 application. Under the leadership of new Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid, Rupal Gadhia, the school has also reframed the criteria on which the Admissions Board evaluates candidates. For many years, the criteria had been: 1) a habit of leadership, 2) analytical aptitude and appetite, and 3) engaged community citizenship. The 2024-2025 admissions essays align with the school’s new criteria : 1) business-minded, 2) leadership-focused, and 3) growth-oriented.

The new 2024-2025 Harvard Business School essay prompts are as follows:

1. Business-Minded Essay: Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

2. Leadership-Focused Essay: What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)

3. Growth-Oriented Essay: Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

While the essay prompts and evaluation criteria have been adjusted, the characteristics of a successful Harvard Business School candidate have not fundamentally changed. Rather, the essay prompts and refined criteria now signal with greater clarity what the HBS Admissions Board really looks for in candidates. The important question as an applicant is how you can show them that you have what it takes! We at MBA Whisperer believe that analyzing previous essays from successful candidates remains a valuable tool to identify the key elements of a successful Harvard Business School essay.

Successful Harvard Business School Essay

Essay prompt: As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School program? [no word limit]

When I was eight, my oldest brother went to prison for armed robbery of a vehicle as part of a gang on the Southside of Chicago. My family had experienced a lot during our time in Chicago, but that was the straw that broke the camel’s back—pushing my parents to move our family in search of a community that would offer their six black boys a better life. My family packed up what little we had and moved away from the familiarity of family and friends to Georgia.

Even as a young boy, I was able to recognize the immediate difference in my community.

Even as a young boy, I was able to recognize the immediate difference in my community. We had moved from a majority black, low-income city to a majority white city with deep southern roots. On the surface, my transition seemed seamless, but on the inside, I was conflicted. I felt like a misfit stuck between two very different communities. And because I had two communities, it felt like I didn’t have any at all. At least none that I could call my own.

Over the next decade, my parents pushed my brothers and me hard to make sure we didn’t follow the path our older brother took. By the end of high school, I was in the top five percent of my class, had one of the best 800-meter track times in the country, and was on my way to becoming the first college graduate in my family.

But no matter how hard I worked, I still felt like a misfit. In an effort to fit in, I got involved with the wrong crowd. I started drinking and doing drugs. Then one day, things took a turn for the worst. I was pulled over and searched by a police officer. He found the drugs I had with me. I remember thinking, “my life is over.” Only it wasn’t. As the officer held the drugs in his hand, he looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Trust me, you don’t want to go this way. Get off this stuff before it ruins your life. Now get out of here.”

That moment was a major wake-up call, and I realized that I needed to make immediate changes in my life.

Two months later I met the Latter-day Saint missionaries. I could see myself in them—they were young and awkward and seemed like they didn’t quite fit in. However, they had one major difference from me. They were driven by a strong purpose, and I wanted what they had. I decided to take a step in the right direction and was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

One year later I was serving a volunteer mission in Manchester, England. For two years I sought to help others find what I had found—a sense of community matched with a strong purpose. This consistent period of service helped me come to the realization that helping others find community and purpose was what mattered most to me, and that that belief would be my “North Star” for the remainder of my life.

Upon returning home from my mission, however, the pressures and demands of life hit me with full force, and I once again became consumed with my own goals. Within a few years, I had become one of the fastest 800 meter runners in NCAA history and had taken home an international gold medal while representing team USA. I had signed a professional contract, had set the World Record in the Road 800 meter race, and had won the bronze medal at the USA Indoor Championships with one of the fastest 600 meter times of all-time. Yet, I felt empty and unhappy.

It was then that I, for the second time in my life, learned what mattered most to me. Only this time, I also learned why. This time, I was able to recognize how much help I had been given in my life. My parents helped me by moving in search of a better community. The police officer helped me by giving me a second chance. The missionaries helped me by teaching me the importance of purpose. My coaches and professors helped me by encouraging me to shoot for the stars. I suddenly realized that my hard work and determination didn’t make me who I was—my community did.

That moment of realization and reflection was powerful. So powerful, in fact, that I quit track and field that day to pursue opportunities that would allow me to be a more influential mentor. It wasn’t just about helping others find community and purpose; it was about walking the path with them. I had been given just that, and I felt a responsibility to give back. Since retiring as a professional runner, I have sought opportunities that will mold me into an influential mentor.

On this quest, I decided to join the consulting industry and get involved in social impact cases focused on the Black and Hispanic communities. Advising clients on some of the unique challenges these communities face has felt significant, but now I am ready to make an impact in a more hands-on, “on the ground” way. I want to use the search fund model to acquire and operate a small business in a low-income, predominantly black city. In that capacity, I want to leverage the influence the business will give me to bolster the community. Specifically, I want to work with local non-profits, community organizers, and social workers to set up a network of mentors for youth and young adults who are lacking community.

But in order to do that, I need help. I need to learn how to acquire and operate a small business from experts like [HBS Professor] and [HBS Professor]. I need to understand how to better connect with and learn from others by participating in the case method with the most diverse set of students in academia. I need to find like-minded individuals who are willing to help me form a network of mentors to bolster communities. These are some of the many experiences I need and can gain from Harvard. I have attended multiple HBS information sessions and have spoken to several alumni. These interactions have been starkly different from the interactions with other schools. HBS students aren’t going to business school just for a break or to make more money. They are going to business school so that they can gain the skills and network needed to “make a difference in the world.”

This is the kind of community I want to learn from and contribute to. Harvard is my number one choice—there is simply no other community like it in the world.

Professional Review by MBA Whisperer

The Four Ingredients of a Perfect HBS Essay

Samuel’s essay demonstrates what MBA Whisperer calls the Four Ingredients of a Perfect HBS Essay:

1. Offers a glimpse of the world through your eyes

2. Imbues strong leadership, impact and ambition with a deeper purpose

3. Demonstrates intellectual curiosity

4. Brings a “quiet confidence” with humility and vulnerability

HBS Essay Ingredient #1: Show what makes you uniquely you

As former HBS admissions director Dee Leopold once wrote, getting into Harvard Business School isn’t an “essay writing competition.” MBA admissions officers don’t admit essays—they admit applicants. Samuel’s essay offers us a compelling glimpse of the world through his eyes using the unique elements of his (admittedly stellar) profile: a challenging childhood, an accomplished student-athlete, and two religious/purpose-driven awakenings. In this 1,100+ word essay, he dedicates almost no real estate to his consulting career, his least-differentiating factor. Rather, he showcases a glimpse of the world through his eyes that no one sitting next to him in the HBS classroom can bring.

Think about what key experiences have made you uniquely you. I would recommend selecting a different experience across your academic, professional, extracurricular, and/or community involvement for each of your three HBS 2024-25 essay questions.

Samuel demonstrates his work ethic and ambition through his athletic achievements, and then ties his personal and professional experiences to his future ambitions.

HBS Essay Ingredient #2: Leadership, Ambition & Purpose

HBS isn’t looking for the next class of middle-managers; they genuinely want to “educate leaders who make a difference in the world.” Samuel demonstrates his work ethic and ambition through his athletic achievements, and then ties his personal and professional experiences to his future ambitions. You will have 500 characters elsewhere in the application to outline your career goals, and be honest! It’s okay to have “traditional” goals like consulting, banking, PE, etc. But as you write your Business-Minded essay, be bold and ambitious as you connect your career goals to a deeper purpose.

HBS Essay Ingredient #3: Intellectual Curiosity

I’m glad to see that HBS replaced the “analytical aptitude and appetite” evaluation criterion with “growth oriented”—i.e. candidates who are eager to learn and improve. Your academic potential will largely be assessed via your undergraduate institution, coursework, GPA, test scores, etc. Even though Samuel didn’t attend an Ivy League institution, and his GMAT score is below the school’s average, his ability to weave together his seemingly disconnected experiences into a unified theme demonstrates thoughtful reasoning skills.

However, I would have encouraged Samuel to include some “nuggets of knowledge” to showcase his depth of understanding regarding his industry, career goals, or other societal trends; even a simple statistic about the value of mentorship in underrepresented communities could show intellectual curiosity. Since this ingredient in his essay is light, if he were an MBA Whisperer client, I would encourage him to ask his recommenders to highlight experiences that showcase his analytical skills.

HBS Essay Ingredient #4: Quiet confidence, humility, and vulnerability

This may sound strange, but at MBA Whisperer, I tell my clients that the essays are not where you sell yourself to the Admissions Board. There’s always a temptation to try to scream, “Look at me! Look at me! I promise I’m qualified! Pleeeeease let me into your school!” Other elements of your application—most notably your resume and enthusiastic letters of recommendation—do the selling for you.

Do you notice Samuel’s tone? He brings a quiet confidence that shows he’s already qualified to attend the program. Yes, he touches on some adversity, and yes, he briefly highlights accomplishments, but in a remarkably humble tone. By acknowledging that life’s path isn’t always a perfectly straight line, he demonstrates humility, vulnerability, and growth-mindedness.

Final note: The 2024-25 HBS essay prompts are too specific and word counts too short for you to rattle off a list of reasons why you want to go to HBS. This is likely by design—Harvard doesn’t need you to tell them why they’re great. Stick to the four ingredients, use short, impactful “mini-stories” to give the Admissions Board a glimpse of the world through your eyes, and drop the mic!

By Travis Morgan, Founder of MBA Whisperer

Hailey's Essay

MBA Ivy is one of the leading MBA admission consulting firms in Manhattan, specializing in helping MBA and EMBA applicants gain admissions to the most competitive Top 10 business schools in the US and abroad. Helmed by a former Harvard admissions interviewer + Harvard graduate, the firm has made a name for itself among finance, business, and Wall St professionals in the investment banking community and beyond.

Boosting an exceptionally high acceptance rate to schools like HBS, Wharton, Columbia and MIT Sloan, the firm personally vets each client to make sure they're truly competitive at the level they're targeting. Schedule your free consultation today at: www.MBAIvy.com

Growing up as a competitive dancer, I sought to deeply understand my teammates’ personalities in order to improve communication, build comradery, and perform our best onstage. I enjoyed learning about the specific choreography pieces that spoke to them and including those components in our routine, enabling each person to find joy in their performance. Although I’m no longer choreographing, I’ve continued to emphasize the importance of strong communication channels in my professional endeavors. Until my grandfather’s passing, I thought my professional passions were rooted in retail’s digital disruption. I was fascinated with how technology improved the holistic retail experience. However, as my grandfather battled dementia, I witnessed the information asymmetries that plague the U.S. healthcare system. Due to a data miscommunication amongst his physicians, he endured an erroneous resuscitation, which resulted in a great deal of preventable pain and his subsequent passing.

The jarring realization that an industry worth 18% of our GDP was so technologically behind shifted my professional focus towards addressing the communication inadequacies besieging healthcare.

The jarring realization that an industry worth 18% of our GDP was so technologically behind shifted my professional focus towards addressing the communication inadequacies besieging healthcare. Many doctors aren’t given the data they need and are often rushed to the next patient, fostering an error-prone environment that pushes for the quickest, rather than the best, care. After observing my grandfather’s complications, it became my mission to challenge the information and communication inaccuracies of the U.S. healthcare system, refusing to believe that an industry worth so much could let patients down so frequently. Thousands of patients die annually from preventable errors and nearly 5% of diagnoses are incorrect altogether. As hospitals purchase independent medical practices and leverage more at-home services, the need for streamlined communication will only increase.

In order to help tackle the communications issues that providers face, I aim to work as a VP of Product at a leading hospital system. I will focus on making information more actionable by developing products that better integrate data from patient health records. Leading my consulting team through the launch of a Medicare business, I discovered a niche curiosity for the challenges providers face when communicating internally; unfortunately, the status quo is adversely affecting patients. As our team designed a hospital discharge workflow, we observed doctors transitioning responsibilities to the discharge team, who sometimes didn’t have the right information to discharge patients. Concerningly, patients often left the hospital without the best care plan or equipment to promote a healthy recovery. We saw how providers are stretched thin, burned out, and left without the right tools and data to provide high-quality care.

Additionally, hospitals’ antiquated processes, such as lack of technology adoption and excessive regulatory restrictions, hinder rapid transfer of information, often impeding the smaller, innovative companies who want to not only send information quickly, but make it more actionable. Recalling my grandfather’s experience, I knew this issue wasn’t restricted to just insurance. The internal communication problems affected doctors’ offices, hospitals, and other facets of the industry. An opportunity remains to disrupt the provider’s experience by bridging this communication gap. I want to streamline provider workflows by developing better internal communication products that leverage patient health records. I will draw upon my experience in healthcare technology roles to enable more efficient product implementation, especially as it pertains to increasing the speed and accuracy of effective information transfer. My time at this company has allowed me to grasp a deeper understanding of the industry, enabling me to see that this communication problem is systemic and affects other stakeholders in the U.S. healthcare ecosystem.

Furthermore, I continue to witness the issues that startups endure given the slow implementation rate that legacy organizations face, specifically hospitals. Confronted with this issue early on, I led the team through a strategic pivot of our business model. I executed the cost-benefit analysis that moved our focus away from hospitals and towards independent medical practices, which also experience various information asymmetries due to their smaller size and budgets. While this has proven beneficial for our growth, I question how often this happens with smaller players in the industry and what hospitals, providers, and most importantly, patients, are missing out on as a result. My experience has shown me that I want to bridge this information and communication gap at a broader scale by working with a hospital system that has bought independent medical practices and has started to enhance their at-home services. I seek to prepare myself to be an executive in the space, one that leads with passion and fortitude to tackle the industry’s greatest communication challenges in a way that appeals to business, provider, and consumer stakeholders. In transitioning to a product management role at a hospital, I will use the skills learned in my consulting and operational roles to drive change in an environment that hasn’t, until fairly recently, been on the cutting edge of technology.

However, I understand that developing certain technical skill sets will be imperative in order to deeply understand the intricacies of the healthcare system and drive decisions alongside minds from business, clinical, technological, and political backgrounds. I will immerse myself in areas that challenge my perspectives with regard to formulating strategy, analyzing unstructured data, and managing technological and operational change in order to best position myself to lead within my organization and further my healthcare career. A HBS MBA will give me the technical skills required to analyze prior market decisions to inform future strategies and challenge this convoluted healthcare system alongside innovative thinkers. While my grandfather’s experience is in the past, I’m committed to reducing miscommunication errors within hospitals and increasing information sharing amongst providers to alleviate these issues for other patients. Drawing upon my learnings as a young dancer, I’ll enable my teams to develop products that bridge the communication gap and put joy back into care delivery for the provider. I will continuously seek to be at the forefront of healthcare innovation where I can launch products that invert the communication status quo of an archaic model – one that no longer meets the needs of the 21st century provider or patient.

Professional Review by MBA Ivy

Though disjointed in the beginning with the applicant's almost non-sequitur discussion of dance team and choreography in what feels like a very forced example to highlight her background in "teamwork" (i.e. it would have been better to instead discuss a more professional work example), this essay does however quickly shift to a very solid and meaningful discussion of the problems and issues within the US healthcare system, alongside the applicant's passion for addressing the serious problem of inadequate technology and data organization within the current system and her desire to create change.

Drawing from her own background in healthcare technology and using examples that describe this background in a level of detail admissions will understand, the result is a very strong personal essay that shows admissions her awareness of the existing problems in this niche that she wishes to solve, as well as the "how" and "why" of how her interest originated and is very much rooted in her own personal values and motivation.

As the essay further progresses, the applicant then elaborates on how she intends to execute this proposed focus in both her MBA study and her career moving forward -- again, not just speaking abstractly, but utilizing her strong, relevant, past experience and examples in the field to build solid connections to her desired future work: seeking to bridge the data and communication gaps she's identified with her own past expertise. Overall, a very solid essay, outside of the beginning few sentences, which still managed to get her in.

How to Adjust for the Newly Released HBS Prompts:

HBS doesn't just have new prompts, they are now expanding the personal statement into three separate essays that seek to discover how you are 1. Business-minded, 2. Leadership-focused, and 3. Growth-oriented. The most important point here is to not repeat yourself as you work your way through these essays and expand on each point. Each essay should discuss different examples and experience from your background and, when taken as a whole in terms of your overall personal narrative, show you as a very multi-faceted and interesting MBA applicant who is very well qualified to succeed.

Emma's Essay

Embark MBA is a boutique MBA Admissions consulting firm founded by former M7 Adcom. My superpower is helping applicants craft materials that sound and feel like them. Since 2017, I’ve helped hundreds of MBA-hopefuls - 97% have succeeded, with 59% receiving scholarships (an average of $143k). I achieve this by simplifying the application process, providing individualized and tailored advice, and spending time to deeply understand you.

“See those letters up there? They’re over six feet tall,” she whispered, grinning. Standing below Michelangelo’s dome inside St. Peter’s at the Vatican, my mother pointed at the lapis-lazuli letters in the mosaic hundreds of feet above us. After confirming the letters’ size relative to a man standing on the platform above, their significance was clear and my passion for art, its geometric precision, and its import in the world had been ignited. While my interest in art history has only grown since that moment 14 years ago, I’ve also discovered passions for the arts more broadly, business, and the environment. Experiences stemming from these interests have led me to integrate art and analytics, build adaptability, and grow and exercise a passion for positive impact.

Art + Analytics: From Evensong to EBITDA

In addition to an early interest in Renaissance art, studying ballet for 12 years inspired a passion for classical music and, subsequently, a love of singing that continues today. While the formulaic precision of classical music intrigues me, singing is even more captivating to me. From joining a church choir in third grade to completing a European tour with a high school group to taking lessons at the Peabody Institute, singing has allowed me to share arguably-underappreciated genres of music with the community. Most recently, after moving to Texas last summer, I tried out for and joined the adult choir at a local church. I’m very excited to continue my pursuit of music while co-leading our 2020 tour to New York.

Receiving 'top bucket' performance ratings and being selected for an Associate promotion felt like affirmations of the value of blending art and business.

While I indulged my passion for singing through voice minor lessons at Johns Hopkins, by studying art history and business courses, I further cultivated my interest in art and analytics. Additionally, interviewing a student investment group for a JH News-Letter article significantly expanded my opportunity paradigm of the intersection of art and analytics. Just as art history demands a combination of aesthetic appreciation and well-researched logic, finance presented fascinating ways to leverage research in solving business challenges. While proactively moving up the financial knowledge curve helped me secure internships with [Asset Management Firm] and [Investment Firm], recruiting for investment banking roles as an art history student at a “non-target” school posed significant challenges. After countless cold emails and informal conversations, I received and accepted an offer with [Investment Bank] in Milwaukee. Upon arrival, I strove to build a rigorous analytical base while applying the dual art-plus-analytics lens from my humanities background, thereby earning the respect and trust of my originally-skeptical colleagues. Receiving “top bucket” performance ratings and being selected for an Associate promotion felt like affirmations of the value of blending art and business.

A Quest to Become U-Haul’s Top Customer

Transitioning from art to investment banking represented one big leap – studying in Italy and moving to four different cities in the span of four years helped me further appreciate the importance of adaptability. While I’d studied Italian at Hopkins, living with a host mom who spoke minimal English in Florence challenged me to rapidly improve Italian language proficiency while adjusting to a new culture. Similarly, living in Baltimore, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Dallas has stretched my horizons. Having grown up in quiet Connecticut, living in Baltimore during college offered exposure to a more urban environment, but that transition did little to prepare me for the Midwest. In fact, Milwaukee’s exceptionally-friendly people and bone-chilling winters sometimes felt as foreign as elements of studying abroad.

After spending three years with [Investment Bank] in Milwaukee and Chicago – a period during which I absorbed many new perspectives and proactively flung myself into new communities – I accepted a private equity role in Dallas with confidence, knowing I’d adapt to the scorching summer heat and abundance of barbeque joints just as I’d adapted to polar vortices living along Lake Michigan. While often stressful and initially lonely, these transnational moves have exposed me to diverse viewpoints, allowed me to interact with people of varied experiences, and helped me become comfortable integrating into new environments.

A Tale of Two Passions: Education and the Environment

Beyond exposure to city life, living in Baltimore helped me understand the need for a stronger U.S. education system and gave me an outlet to drive positive impact. In serving as an Organizer with a school-affiliated tutoring program supporting elementary school students, I guided progress across pairs of tutors and students while connecting Hopkins with the Baltimore community. Transitioning from one-on-one tutoring to leading tutor-student pairs enabled me to learn how to motivate others. Sharing success stories of helping students advance across multiple reading levels, for example, generated renewed commitment from high-achieving undergraduates with limited time, and connecting tutors with one another empowered them to refresh their knowledge of teaching tools. It was extremely rewarding to develop relationships with students, their families, and tutors, and to witness demonstrable student progress that often led to transformative opportunities in middle school and beyond.

At [Private Equity Firm], I’ve continued fostering a passion for creating positive change, albeit for a broader set of communities. Having grown up in a family that, ever-conscious of the Earth’s finite resources, recycled enthusiastically and regularly held “shortest shower” competitions to conserve water, I believe the business community can and should do good via an environmentally-conscious approach to growth. As a personally-passionate champion of environmental sustainability initiatives, I was thrilled with the opportunity to guide an air pollution control company within Insight’s portfolio. Through this experience, I’ve helped lead the portfolio company’s expansion into aftermarket services, a recurring revenue stream that will boost Insight’s financial return but, more critically, will enable customers to maintain their aging anti-pollution systems, reducing airborne toxins and converting waste into usable materials.

Looking forward, I hope to funnel my love for blending art and analytics, appreciation for adaptability, and commitment to positive impact toward transforming how we engage with our planet. Post-MBA, I aspire to join an environmentally-focused investing firm that considers financial, social and environmental metrics. I hope to strengthen the critical skills of efficiently synthesizing complex scenarios, listening intently to and comfortably sharing ideas, and thinking from the perspective of a leader at Harvard. Longer-term, my career mission involves leveraging these skills to lead an investment firm that benefits the planet while achieving attractive financial returns. Specifically, I aim to create environmental solutions through investing and supporting technologies and companies that reduce waste, plastic consumption, ocean pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Art and music provided me with early connections to our shared world history – it’s critical to pioneer new ways of interacting with our world that will enable the continuation of art, music, and other noble endeavors for millennia to come.

Professional Review by Embark MBA

I felt like I was sitting down over a cup of coffee with her. I could hear her voice - she's clever, thoughtful, introspective.

Let’s start with the topic at hand - What more would you like us to know? The beauty and challenge of this topic (and others like it - I’m looking at you, Stanford’s “What Matters Most” essay!) is to tell the reader who you are and why. For the majority of the essay, Emma did this well! I felt like I was sitting down over a cup of coffee with her. I could hear her voice - she’s clever, thoughtful, introspective. From the six-feet tall lapis-lazuli mosaic letters, to the polar vortices of Lake Michigan, to the “shortest shower” competitions, I could picture, sense, and imagine the scenarios she placed for the reader. Her essay invites you to want to know her more. As a former Admissions Committee Member who read thousands of essays a year, this is a rare feat - I applaud her!

What would I have done differently? The intro reads as mismatched to the rest of the essay. Her intro introduces the idea of art opening her aperture of the world, concluding with additional passions for arts, business, and the environment and THEN overlaying on “integrating arts more broadly, build adaptability, and grow and exercise a passion for positive impact”. Whew! That’s a lot for 1 essay! Had this essay more precisely either A) threaded a singular art theme to all 3 vignettes (she does so in the first, not the other two) or B) positioned the intro as her having 3 passions - art, analytics, and the environment - this would have read as a more united, fluid essay. Again, this essay is warm and inviting, but suffers from the common pitfall of tackling too many topics.

What do I mean? Her first paragraph details her exploration of art through singing and art history and how she found similar appreciation for analytics - love it. What I don’t love is weaving in the perceived challenges of recruiting for an investment banking internship and winning over her ‘originally-skeptical colleagues’. Positioning herself as disadvantaged and the magnification of how she was maybe looked down upon takes away from what I’d rather read - her perception of beauty shared between art and numbers. It’s unnecessary detail that pulls me away from knowing her.

The second vignette is set to show how she’s built adaptability by moving from studying art to her investment banking roles and subsequent moves. This paragraph has some lovely detail - AND I would have chosen to either detail how art was at the core of her travels + put the more in line with “appreciation” for adaptability as what we read in other vignettes. She describes her moves mostly as being required to adapt (“stressful and lonely”) vs. maybe a sense of adventure, which those two adjectives betray.

The third vignette is the weakest for me - education and the environment. Again, while there’s beautiful detail, she’s chosen 2 large topics. I would have chosen just 1 as this paragraph is too ambitious. Further, detailing her accomplishments in tutoring is the one place in the essay that begins to read as if any one could have written it.

For most applicants, it does not make sense to state your goals within this particular essay, unless the content of the essay ties into your goals. HBS already has a separate goals essay, therefore the content repeated here could be repeated. I don’t know if that’s the case for Emma. That said, it seems like Emma is reflecting on the “why” behind her goals, which she may not have had room for elsewhere. In that case, this is perfectly fine although I would have guided her to tie her experiences / goals more succinctly and instead devoted more content to the essay's main body.

Emma is clearly a strong candidate with a warm, inviting tone to her essay - no wonder she was invited to interview! I am tough on essays - when I read, I try to imagine what I would have thought as Adcom. My advice for anyone drafting is to narrow topics while ensuring that every paragraph sounds uniquely like you.

Olivia's Essay

Created by Maria Wich-Vila, a Harvard Business School alumna with over 20 years of admissions-advice experience, ApplicantLab is a self-guided online program that puts expert admissions consulting tools in your hands: “world-class advice, at a fraction of the price”. Top admissions consultants of Maria’s caliber routinely charge $450+ for merely one hour of guidance; in contrast, ApplicantLab costs only $349 for one full year of access to the entire system.

When launched, ApplicantLab won the “Audience Favorite” vote at the regional HBS New Venture Pitch Competition – a roomful of MBA grads immediately grasped its value, and delighted users ever since have used it to bolster their applications (and have written rave reviews).

ApplicantLab walks you through every step you need to craft your strongest application possible, including in-depth analysis and guidance for your resume, recommendations, interviews, and of course, the essays. Each year, Maria attends a conference for elite admissions consultants, where she speaks with admissions officers from over 25 top programs to get the latest scoop. As the daughter of two public school teachers, Maria knows how to synthesize her knowledge into impactful lessons, and has built the tool to work well for different learning styles (ie, a linear deep-dive path, or a “speed run” / “in a hurry?” version).

Sixty feet up, I swung from Corona Arch in Utah’s canyonlands and weighed my options. Midpoint in my descent my long braid caught in the rope and threaded through my rappelling gear. I stopped my downward momentum in time to prevent injury, but my hair was wound and wedged tightly. Climbing up a few feet to create slack, I worked to pull my hair free, but it was impossibly tangled. With limited resources, tethered by only sixty feet of rope, I needed a solution. I called to my canyoneering companions below to pull the rope taut so I could use both hands. Then I swung my small pack off one shoulder and dug through it to find the serrated switchblade intended for cutting rope, not hair.

As a supply chain consultant, I often face challenges that require quick and resourceful response as while climbing Corona. For example, I was assigned to a project where the team I joined was behind schedule. In just four weeks we were expected to present client executives with answers to a long list of complex questions. Like using my rope knife, I confronted the client’s needs with assertive resolve, redirecting my team’s initial plan. I led us to use advanced analytics tools, personally coaching two team members from Korea and India. My creative approach to our problem accelerated data cleansing and analysis iterations, allowing us to exceed expectations ahead of schedule. Our work resulted in a strong client relationship with requests for additional work proposals worth millions of revenue dollars.

I took a creative educational path, happy to be an autodidact, and graduated from high school at fifteen years old.

This tenacity and skill for creative problem-solving was developed early in my life. I took a creative educational path, happy to be an autodidact, and graduated from high school at fifteen years old. Not old enough for a driver’s license and rather young to go away to college, I rode my bike to work and class at nearby University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), despite the 110-degree heat. Mom said it built character. I strategically chose credits that transferred a year later to my school of choice: Brigham Young University (BYU).

I was determined to have a foreign experience but lacked funds for a traditional study abroad. I found a nonprofit program to sponsor me as an English teacher in Russia. While there I didn’t live in university housing with English-speaking students but instead with a Russian family in a poor, rural area. I spent that invaluable semester teaching English to grade-school children. By refusing to succumb to limitations, I made my dream for international travel a reality.

I was different from peers in college because of my age and in Russia because of my nationality. Through this difference, I learned to appreciate and optimize diversity while asserting my authenticity. For me, authenticity means accepting myself and others, expressing my thoughts honestly and clearly, learning from my mistakes, and taking actions consistent with my values. I work to be authentic.

For example, during my first college internship I was the only female on a fifteen-person team. My job was to establish operations with a newly contracted school district, organizing transportation for special needs students. Despite age and gender, I connected with co-workers and did my job so well that when my employer learned I was too young to rent a car — something they took for granted I could do because they failed to notice my age and something essential to my accomplishing my work — they accommodated me by providing prepaid cards for taxi rides and pairing me with another team member as needed. I proved such an asset to my employer that they offered me a full-time position at the end of my internship, which I declined in favor of returning to BYU. They extended offers over the years. Although I turned these down, I did recommend several friends whom they hired. This experience of being myself even though I was different from the group and even from the employers’ expectations, reinforced my commitment to authentic representation in every aspect of my life.

While at BYU, my commitment to authenticity helped me cultivate a collaborative dynamic within my supply chain team. We competed at several 24-hour case competitions, which can induce the same anxiety as dangling sixty feet above the ground with my hair caught in a carabiner. Our collaborative culture, centered on open discussion, helped us work under pressure to develop winning solutions. We were awarded first place at the BYU supply chain case competition, first place at the Mountain-West competition, and fourth place at the national level. While at BYU I also served as the supply chain program’s Executive VP of External Relations, fostering connections between students and professionals. Harnessing my ability to connect with others I built a network that directly linked three of my classmates to full-time jobs, and many underclassmen to internship offers. My dedication to building collaborative teams and meaningful connections has served me and is a core value of my personal and professional life.

During my three and a half years with [Professional Services Firm], I’ve worked on sixteen projects with thirteen different clients, many of whom are global and Fortune 500 companies. In addition to my core client work, I sought opportunities for organized community service upon joining [the firm], which further developed my collaborative skills and power for creative problem-solving. Discovering a nascent pro-bono consulting program for local nonprofits, I noticed an upcoming project for a global startup accelerator based in Boston. [Their] mission to provide equity-free funding to impact-focused startups resonated with my values, so I joined [the firm’s] project team.

Unlike carefully structured teams for standard client projects, my pro-bono team was a coalition of willing, passionate people donating night and weekend hours. A few weeks in, our project manager became too busy with core client work to continue. Due to my strong relationships with teammates they asked me to fill the leadership role. We had just completed the strategic assessment and I recognized that to deliver real value we needed to provide [the startup accelerator] something more tangible: they needed a tool to enable their work. My teammates proposed we recommend tools on the market or identify technical requirements for future development. I knew we could do better than simply provide recommendations. Understanding my client’s unique challenges, I built an Excel-based tool to automate workflows and visualize data. After several iterations with my team and the client, the tool offered an intuitive user design and custom data dashboards. [The startup accelerator] received the tool with enthusiasm, then expanded its use to all internal teams. Months later, they reported that the tool helped them secure their largest donation to date.

The project became a hallmark narrative for [the Professional Services Firm’s] bourgeoning pro-bono consulting program. I formally reported our success on several occasions, including at [the firm’s] quarterly northeast partners’ meeting. Interest in my presentations rallied support for the creation of a larger, more formal program which [the firm] coined [Program Name]. I managed our first project during the Boston pilot. [The program] is now in Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—going nation-wide in 2020. My [project] experience proved I can affect positive change. It also validated my desire to exceed creative problem solving by capitalizing on what I call my “maker nature” producing real products that deliver real value.

There is no better vote of confidence in my ability to deliver real value than the recent decision made by [the firm’s] Senior Partners to sponsor me as a Digital Accelerator. This promotion involves a year-long role of weekly protected time intended for training and experimentation with emerging technologies. Additionally, in November I was asked to lead the development of a supply chain analytics platform that will change the way [the firm’s] supply chain teams deliver value to clients. These opportunities are important and exciting to me because I see their potential for me to affect significant positive change.

The case-based learning model and carefully crafted student experiences at HBS are even more exciting to me because they promise exponential opportunity for me to contribute in real ways. I hope to utilize Harvard’s Innovation Lab and field courses in operations, technology, and entrepreneurship. While exploring the student experience, my husband and I were drawn to the Partner Club and community culture at HBS. We believe this will support my efforts to develop relationships with classmates, faculty, and alumni. Earning an MBA at Harvard will be an ongoing adventure as arduous, breathtaking and awe-inspiring as rock-climbing in Utah’s canyonlands. I intend to face academic and professional challenges at HBS with the same tenacity, creativity, and authenticity as I do rappelling because my life depends upon it.

Professional Review by ApplicantLab

So, let me start by saying that I’ll usually discourage you from reading “sample essays” – in part, because sometimes candidates themselves are so impressive that the essay was not the deciding factor in their acceptance (they might have gotten in despite their essay), and also because there’s a risk that you might (even sub-consciously!) adopt someone else’s “voice” or style: sub-optimal in a process where authenticity is paramount.

We can start by acknowledging that this candidate is fundamentally VERY strong – they have a very compelling story, appear to work in a “feeder” role (consulting), and clearly show a years-long “habit of leadership” (a defining characteristic HBS file readers look for).

One thing I like is that the writer states the challenges overcome in a fairly matter-of-fact (not melodramatic) way, explaining how these obstacles shaped them.

The strongest parts of this essay are those where the candidate effectively reveals some information I would not otherwise know – e.g. their early graduation from high school and subsequent tenacity going to college / Russia. One thing I like is that the writer states the challenges overcome in a fairly matter-of-fact (not melodramatic) way, explaining how these obstacles shaped them.

It was also a good idea to point out their lasting impact – e.g., how their success in the pro-bono consulting project led to the firm expanding the initiative. This is yet another detail I might not have otherwise known, and as such, is a terrific use of the essay space.

That having been said, the essay could have been optimized in a few ways. First of all, please realize that the file reader will be reading NOT ONLY your essays, but also your resume, recommendations, and the many little text boxes within the application form as well (awards; extra-curricular activities; and most importantly, your work accomplishments and challenges). So, e.g., the paragraph about the college supply chain competition – most of that information was probably already covered elsewhere? To make your essay as strong as possible, think about strategically using the rest of the application, and reserving the essay(s) for otherwise-unknown details!

Also, for HBS specifically, there is no need to talk about why you want to go there. Harvard has historically had the highest “yield rate” (roughly 90%) of any business school. They know their case method is terrific, they know their community rocks, etc. Providing a laundry list of their offerings isn’t necessary.

Finally, there are two stylistic choices here that could have been improved. First, the repeated rappelling / knife references were distracting due to being too forced / ham-fisted. There is no need to force your essay(s) around a central theme (unless you’re specifically asked to). Secondly, the author makes (understandable) usage of buzzwords and trendy business phrases such as “I …appreciate and optimize diversity while asserting my authenticity...learning from my mistakes”. Which, to be clear, are wonderful sentiments! But then no strong, specific evidence is provided of the candidate actually doing those things. The example given of “commitment to authentic representation” was … merely bringing up that they were too young to rent a car? That’s a mere minor logistical hiccup, not a dramatic moment of “asserting authenticity”? In your essays, resist the temptation to overly-dramatize events, include trendy buzzwords, or make claims about yourself without providing parallel evidence.

In sum, this is an impressive candidate with a strong essay (who was probably going to get accepted regardless of the essay!). Trimming of superfluous information (found elsewhere), removal of “Why HBS?”, avoiding the temptation to force a metaphor, and ensuring that parallel structure is adhered to (e.g. don’t bring up “I am a ____ sort of person” without then providing a concrete example), would have brought this essay to an even stronger level.

Carlyn's Essay

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Six pm on a freezing February Saturday in Evanston: after twelve hours of shooting across three locations for our upcoming issue of STITCH, Northwestern University’s student-run fashion magazine, our 15-person team was fading fast. The models shivered in the frosty air, our photographer wrung her hands in despair over the disappearing light, and the make-up team was starving. We had one final shot to complete on our shoestring budget. As STITCH’s Creative and Photo Shoot Director, I needed to rally our discouraged group. I draped warm leather jackets on the models, posed them under a photographer-approved street light, and found a 50% off coupon to order pizza for the team. Two months later, Teen Vogue featured that shot when it named STITCH one of the country’s top 10 college fashion magazines. This experience highlighted the importance of values which I endeavor to consistently practice: advocating for a balance of creativity and business-oriented pragmatism in fashion, taking deep-dive initiatives to create solutions, supporting the growth of others, and establishing common ground to drive impact.

While interning at Proenza Schouler in New York, I realized that both creativity and business are pivotal for success in fashion. After a confusing day left me questioning my dream of working in fashion, I walked to the Metropolitan Museum’s Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibit. As I waited in the two-hour line, I internally debated the topic. I was the company’s sole finance intern and my Parsons-trained peers seemed disinterested in the economics of fashion. If future designers didn’t care about the financials, did an impactful place exist for me? When I entered the exhibit, though, it suddenly made sense. Among the horsehair jackets and antler headdresses, I realized these uniquely beautiful creations couldn’t exist on their own. While Alexander McQueen created runway art that enchanted audiences, the business team behind the brand converted that awe into a commercial powerhouse. From that exhibit, I developed a mission to help fashion brands achieve success by balancing art and business.

Through its gold-standard executive development program, Neiman Marcus has given me amazing opportunities to blend art and analytics. These experiences have taught me the value of proactively tackling problems with an open solution mindset. Having happily rotated through Buying and Marketing, I felt particularly excited to advance into our more quantitative Planning team and lead the financial growth of a $75M Ladies Shoes office. One of our keystone brands, [Brand], was down $700K to last year. Combining through sales data, I discovered that the brand’s historically successful fashion-forward styles no longer resonated with customers. Rather, basic styles constituted our most successful silhouettes and consistently sold out. Leveraging the data as evidence, I pitched a two-part proposal to our VP of Planning and Divisional Director: 1) increase the brand’s budget despite its low productivity and allocate 50% of this increased budget to basic styles—a 1.5 multiplier to the existing basics allocation; 2) utilize the Beauty division’s automated replenishment system to optimize revenue and ensure constant stock of top-selling styles. With our senior leaders on board, we then persuaded cross-functional teams including IT and Allocation to help transform strategy into reality. From this initiative, our keystone brand generated an additional $1.3M in sales and now the replenishment system is employed across our entire division. Without creative problem solving and collaboration across company divisions, this current growth would not have been possible.

Benefiting from amazing mentors in my academic and professional journey, it’s important to me to support the growth of others. I lead training classes for new Assistant Buyers and have directly mentored ten colleagues. While I love discussing the intricacies of product, color, and trend, I also strive to share the analytical fundamentals of buying, planning, and retail math to excite junior teammates about the power of data. So far, eight mentees have earned accelerated promotions. When Neiman Marcus upgraded its outdated system platforms, confused chaos erupted. With no available manuals, I taught myself to navigate the new systems and experimented until I found solutions. The company named me a system “Super-User” allowing me to lead meetings training our 30-person Merchant team on best practices. Our team became experts on the new systems which resulted in an incremental $30M in revenue for the company.

At Alexander Wang and Neiman Marcus, I have witnessed how passions often run high in creatively-geared industries. I’ve learned the importance of identifying common ground and building consensus to enable success and have applied these skills to other areas. I love playing sand volleyball—and you can bet emotions can run as hot as the sand we play on! When I became team captain, we were a patchwork of different levels of expertise, yielding embarrassing losses and frustration among more competitive players. To grow mutual understanding and camaraderie, I partnered tenured players with novices and implemented a democratic playing-time system. While we’re not league champions yet, we made it to the second round of playoffs.

While planning the SPCA of Texas’ Strut Your Mutt fundraiser, two teammates on our PR committee vehemently disagreed on whether to focus promotional efforts on social media or traditional outlets. During a particularly heated meeting, it became apparent that without intervention our team would splinter. I asked the opponents to share pros and cons of their perspectives and actively listen to the alternative approach. Creating space for and identifying commonalities in differing opinions got us to a solution everyone felt invested in: we would use influencers to promote the race on social media and news shows. With the broad exposure, the race successfully raised $275K for animal rescue efforts.

Going forward, I hope to continue melding creativity and business, leading impact by finding common ground, and taking initiative to find creative solutions to successfully scale new luxury designers.

Going forward, I hope to continue melding creativity and business, leading impact by finding common ground, and taking initiative to find creative solutions to successfully scale new luxury designers. The fashion industry is a $1.2 trillion global business and growing every year. With fast fashion and an over-saturation of top designers in the marketplace, customers are looking for unique clothing to differentiate their wardrobe. However, many young brands that could fill this market void struggle to get off the ground due to a problematic funding structure: companies have to pay for everything upfront but aren’t reimbursed until the product sells. I hope to launch a luxury brand accelerator, like those traditionally found in the tech sphere. In exchange for equity, my accelerator would provide new designers an ecosystem in which to strategically assess, grow, and fund their businesses, encouraging the most innovative to expand. I hope to transform the fashion landscape and help designers transport brilliant new concepts from paper sketches to customers’ closets.

Professional Review by Mr. MBA ®, Val Misra

Carlyn takes us on a delightful journey of self-discovery and achievement, one that is brimming with ‘passion’ for data and creativity, shining ‘intellectual curiosity’, and ‘insight’ by displaying vibrant, heartfelt examples of introspection and growth. Her detailed progression from creative university student to finance professional and the many “show, don’t tell” experiences she thoughtfully portrays ‘shows’ us why she is a superior candidate for any coveted MBA program.

Her splendid example of overcoming an obstacle and quick thinking resulting in an award-winning photo and team-building pizza moment are superb for 'show, don't tell'.

As a Northwestern student in Para 1, Carlyn’s vivid account of freezing Evanston, shivering models, and a starving make-up team resound similar campus memories for most college students during challenging assignments. Her splendid example of overcoming an obstacle and quick thinking resulting in an award-winning photo and team-building pizza moment are superb for “show, don’t tell”. She highlights her 2 personal brand themes: creativity and business excellence. Para 2 perfectly illustrates Carlyn’s ‘A-ha’ moment, after questioning her business worth in fashion, her discovery that business and financials serve as the foundation to all fashion art houses. If done correctly, the ‘A-ha’ moment is an excellent means to showcase one’s ‘insight’, self-discovery, self-realization, and wisdom. Great job!

MBA Admissions officers need to see professional achievement, leadership and giving back in candidates and Carlyn details this well in Para 3-4. At Neiman, she showcases her guts, bravery, and leadership to turn around a failing product line, quantifies the work example with financial data (growth, loss, revenue) to show real impact, and provides valuable insight on creativity and collaboration to achieve her goal. Carlyn also highlights the importance of helping others come up as she did. Nicely done!

In Para 5-6, Carlyn chooses to showcase her extracurricular passions for sand volleyball, incorporating her strategic management and teambuilding style with her team, and social impact fundraising initiatives, including her successful management of an inter-person conflict and the quantifiable results of her team’s collective efforts. A+ on her extracurricular and social impact examples!

Finally, MBA Admissions teams desire candidates with clear, well thought out career ambitions. In Para 7, Carlyn details her continuing passion for creativity and business fashion and provides a concrete market opportunity for her future ‘luxury brand accelerator’ solution. It would have benefited Carlyn to briefly specify how an MBA education would help her achieve her future goals- gaps in her knowledge (Entrepreneurship major), professional/social clubs, alumni network, etc.

Siddharth's Essay

Admit Expert is a premium MBA admissions consulting company, helping candidates secure admission to top B-schools across the globe with significant scholarships. Admit Expert has a unique 3 layer system, whereby each candidate is aligned with multiple stakeholders including 3 categories of consultants - A lead consultant (who is top B-school alum with extensive MBA admissions consulting experience), alumni from each B-school the candidate is targeting, and a Quality Assurance Mentor (who can be another consultant or an ex ad-com director of a top B-school).

Last year, I fell in love at first sight. She had big gleaming eyes and would laugh like a child. We started dating in a week, I proposed to her a month later, and in six months, we were married. My parents were praying that we don’t take just six months to have a baby! Some of my instinctive decisions, often outside my comfort zone, have led me to the most rewarding experiences of my life.

Life changed completely, and all of it had happened because my heart told me to believe in someone.

When I left a capital markets job at Deutsche Bank to work for an Indian Member of Parliament (MP), many of my friends thought I was taking an insane risk. I was working at a fraction of the salary to set up his office from scratch. But my gut told me that this could be a unique opportunity to have large-scale impact. In six months, the MP became the Deputy Finance Minister, second in command of the Indian economy, and appointed me as his Chief of Staff. Life changed completely, and all of it had happened because my heart told me to believe in someone.

Dealing with financial products for three years at Deutsche Bank taught me a valuable life lesson – returns come with corresponding risk. And just as investors generate good returns by taking measured risks, we make impact by taking difficult decisions in the face of uncertainty. Over two years ago, I read in the newspapers that the HBS-educated [HBS Alum] had quit his corporate career to work on economic policy and contest parliamentary elections. Inspired and intrigued by how a successful professional could utilize his business acumen to effect better governance, I cold-emailed him and offered help. Within a week, I was in his hometown of Hazaribagh, a poor, rural district in the tribal state of Jharkhand, a region marred by extremism and with abysmal income levels.

This exciting new world was a far cry from my comfortable office. I managed the campaign war-room, from where we ran a low-cost, tech-friendly, and creative campaign. We mobilized our party-workers through a call centre, bypassed conventional media through social media and inexpensive pamphlets, and used analytics and marketing techniques to engage more effectively with the voters. I realized how business skills could be used to solve a political problem. And finally, we managed to get Narendra Modi to Hazaribagh and organized a massive rally for him. Jayant won by a record margin! My decision to break boundaries had moulded me to adapt and thrive in unknown settings. Not only did the Hazaribagh adventure lead me to the Finance Ministry, it also motivated me to help drive pro-poor welfare initiatives, such as universal social security and pharmaceutical crop licensing. The Ministry gave me an insider’s perspective on the functioning of a government, along with a chance to work on some major economic reforms, such as recapitalizing state-owned banks, setting up a sovereign wealth fund, and deepening capital markets. However, my biggest learning was that the power of relationships can often surpass the power of position. While decision-making authority can often be beyond our control, relationships can still make things happen. The complex Indian bureaucracy is hierarchical and resistant to outsiders. It was inspiring but also challenging to work with people twice my age at the Ministry. I would often offer my help to senior bureaucrats and build rapport through informal chats. Strong relationships thus built helped me mediate complicated negotiations between diverse stakeholders.

Over time, I have realized that who we become is largely determined by the decisions we take, the boundaries we break, and the relationships we make. Our time at HBS will give us the grit to cross boundaries and face unfamiliar situations. When we discuss case studies in a class, share our perspectives over coffee, or work together in a club, we will sharpen our instincts to make better decisions. My teenage hero Albus Dumbledore told Harry Potter that it is our choices that show what we truly are. And my mentor, [HBS Alum], often mentions how his HBS experience trained him to make difficult decisions. I am sure that in the next two years, we will help each other in shaping our choices, while forging enduring bonds. When we go back to the world, we will face success and setbacks, satisfaction and sorrow, but this section will always be home. Dear section-mates, I am excited to begin this life-long journey with you!

Professional Review by Admit Expert

Further, he has been able to elucidate these leadership traits by weaving them into a story of his life by narrating instances where these traits are evident.

HBS looks for a habit of leadership, and leadership can be gauged in various ways, including gauging one’s leadership qualities and traits. In this essay, Siddharth has displayed his leadership traits of taking calculated risks by listening to his intuition and going against the flow, courage to come out of his comfort zone, and an ability to forge interpersonal relationships. Further, he has been able to elucidate these leadership traits by weaving them into a story of his life by narrating instances where these traits are evident. Siddharth also displays his passion to join HBS by mentioning the HBS alumni he is inspired by and has interacted with, and narrating what he looks forward to doing, while at HBS. Siddharth also gives the ad-com a glimpse into his leadership style when he dives deeper into his campaign management story, by explaining the actions he took, impact he created, and how he was able to create the impact, thus giving the ad-com a sneak peak into the traits which can help him become a future leader.

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The HBS classrooms and community thrive when we bring together people who can share a variety of experiences and perspectives. We are looking for future leaders who are passionate about business, leadership, and growth.

Here you will find a detailed explanation of our MBA application process and requirements. We look forward to learning about you through your application.

Submit A Written Application

To apply to Harvard Business School, we ask you to assemble and prepare a variety of materials that will help us assess your qualifications. Remember, all materials must be submitted to HBS online by the application deadlines. The following serves as a preview of what you need to prepare.

Candidates must have the equivalent of a US bachelor's degree from an accredited institution (unless you are a college senior applying through our 2+2 Deferred Admissions Process ). Equivalent programs include international three-year bachelor degree programs.

We require uploaded transcripts from all undergraduate and graduate academic institutions that you have attended (full- or part-time).

You may upload an "unofficial" or student copy of your transcript; however, we will request an official copy for verification purposes should you be admitted to HBS.

When the Admissions Board looks at your transcripts, we are looking at the whole picture — not just your GPA. We take into account where you went to school, the courses that you took, and your performance. We understand the structures of different grading systems worldwide. There is no minimum GPA to apply, although our students usually have strong undergraduate records. Undergraduate academics are just one factor the Admissions Board uses to evaluate a candidate.

The Graduate Record Examination (GRE) or Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT, 10th Edition or Focus Edition) is a prerequisite for admission. There is no minimum GRE or GMAT score needed to apply and we do not have a preference toward one test or the other. If you look at our class profile , you can see that we have a range of GMAT and GRE scores in the current first-year class.

When submitting your application, you may report the unofficial GRE or GMAT scores given on the day of the test, or your official score if you have received it. Every applicant must have the testing agency send an official score report directly to HBS. A valid and verified score is needed to be admitted to the program.

Note on the GMAT Focus: Writing is an essential component of the MBA program. Therefore, to be admitted to HBS all students must have an official writing assessment. You can satisfy this with a valid GRE, GMAT 10th Edition, or English language test score. If you only submitted the GMAT Focus, which lacks a writing section, HBS will contact you at the interview stage about taking the separate GMAC Business Writing Assessment. If you wish to take the GMAC Business Writing Assessment before knowing your interview status, you will be able to do so beginning July 2024. Because the written application has opportunities to showcase your writing abilities (e.g. essays, short answers), you will not be at a disadvantage if you do not include the GMAC Business Writing Assessment before you are invited to interview.

Be advised that in order to apply in the 2024-2025 cycle, scores must be dated as follows:

Please note that the HBS code for the GMAT is HRLX892 and the HBS code for the GRE is 4064.

See GRE/GMAT Frequently Asked Questions for more information.

A TOEFL, IELTS, Pearson Test of English (PTE), or Duolingo English Test is required if you did not attend an undergraduate institution where the sole language of instruction is English.

If you completed a graduate degree which was taught in English, it is recommended you submit one of these tests, but it is not required.

HBS only accepts the Internet-based (iBT) version of the TOEFL. Please note that the HBS code for the TOEFL is 3444.

HBS does not have a minimum test score to apply, however, the MBA Admissions Board discourages any candidate with a TOEFL score lower than 109 on the IBT, an IELTS score lower than 7.5, a PTE score lower than 75, or a Duolingo score lower than 145 from applying.

Applicants to the MBA Class of 2027 (matriculating fall 2025) need to respond to these three essay prompts:

Business-Minded Essay : Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

Leadership-Focused Essay : What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)

Growth-Oriented Essay : Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

Joint Degree Essays :

Joint degree applicants for the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Kennedy School must provide an additional essay: How do you expect the joint degree experience to benefit you on both a professional and a personal level? (up to 400 words)

Joint degree applicants for the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences must provide an additional essay: The MS/MBA Engineering Sciences program is focused on entrepreneurship, design, and innovation. Describe your past experiences in these areas and your reasons for pursuing a program with this focus. (recommended length: 500 words). Applicants will also be able to respond to an optional essay.

You will need to have two recommendations submitted online by the application deadlines. It is the applicant's responsibility to ensure that all recommendations are submitted online by the deadline date for the round in which the applicant is applying.

Use your best judgment on who you decide to ask - there is no set formula for who should be your recommenders. We know it is not always possible to have a direct supervisor write your recommendation – we would not want you to jeopardize your current position for the application process. Look at the questions we are asking recommenders to complete. Find people who know you well enough to answer them. This can be a former supervisor, a colleague, or someone you collaborate on an activity outside of work. How well a person knows you should take priority over level of seniority or HBS alumni status.

Recommendations must be completed online. Recommenders will be asked to fill out a personal qualities and skills grid and answer our two additional questions:

How do the candidate's performance, potential, background, or personal qualities compare to those of other well-qualified individuals in similar roles? Please provide specific examples. (300 words)

Please describe the most important piece of constructive feedback you have given the applicant. Please detail the circumstances and the applicant's response. (250 words)

This can be your standard business resume or CV. We do not have specific preferences on how your resume is formatted. Note: The HBS MBA Program is designed for students who have full-time work experience. While it is important for candidates to assess their own readiness to apply, the Admissions Board recommends that applicants have at least two years of full-time work experience (prior to enrolling).

Applicants must pay a $250 nonrefundable application fee* via credit card, which helps cover the costs of reviewing applications. There are two exceptions:

1. Active duty military applicants are exempt from the fee (details will be provided once you begin your application).

2. Applicants who would experience genuine financial hardship from paying the $250 fee may submit a request for a need-based application fee waiver . You can access the waiver request form after you start your application.

* 2+2 Deferred Admissions applicants have a reduced application fee of $100.

After your written application has been submitted and reviewed, you may be invited to interview. Interviews are 30 minutes and are conducted by an MBA Admissions Board member who has reviewed your application. Your interview will be tailored to you and is designed for us to learn more about you in the context of a conversation.

The interview is a positive indicator of interest, but is not a guarantee of admission; it serves as one element among many that are considered as we complete a final review of your candidacy. All interviews are conducted by invitation only, at the discretion of the Admissions Board. If invited, however, you must participate in order to complete the application process.

Interviews may be scheduled on campus, in domestic or international hub cities, or via Zoom. Neither the timing of your interview invitation nor its format, whether in person or via Zoom, implies anything about the status of your application or affects your candidacy.

Post-Interview Reflection

Within 24 hours of the interview, candidates are required to submit a written reflection through our online application system. Detailed instructions will be provided to those applicants who are invited to interview.

MBA Application Tips Video Series

Every HBS MBA student has been where you are right now. In this video series, we hope to help you learn how to break down your application into small, actionable steps so that you can submit a successful application that is true to you and your journey.

Joint Degree Programs

Applications for both Harvard Business School and the partnering Harvard graduate school must be submitted as explained on these overview pages:

• MS/MBA Engineering
• MS/MBA Biotechnology
• MBA / MPA-ID

Special Instructions

Peer Reviewed

GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation

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Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of questionable GPT-fabricated scientific papers found in Google Scholar shows that many are about applied, often controversial topics susceptible to disinformation: the environment, health, and computing. The resulting enhanced potential for malicious manipulation of society’s evidence base, particularly in politically divisive domains, is a growing concern.

Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden

Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Sweden

Division of Environmental Communication, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden

Research Questions

• Where are questionable publications produced with generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) that can be found via Google Scholar published or deposited?
• What are the main characteristics of these publications in relation to predominant subject categories?
• How are these publications spread in the research infrastructure for scholarly communication?
• How is the role of the scholarly communication infrastructure challenged in maintaining public trust in science and evidence through inappropriate use of generative AI?

research note Summary

• A sample of scientific papers with signs of GPT-use found on Google Scholar was retrieved, downloaded, and analyzed using a combination of qualitative coding and descriptive statistics. All papers contained at least one of two common phrases returned by conversational agents that use large language models (LLM) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google Search was then used to determine the extent to which copies of questionable, GPT-fabricated papers were available in various repositories, archives, citation databases, and social media platforms.
• Roughly two-thirds of the retrieved papers were found to have been produced, at least in part, through undisclosed, potentially deceptive use of GPT. The majority (57%) of these questionable papers dealt with policy-relevant subjects (i.e., environment, health, computing), susceptible to influence operations. Most were available in several copies on different domains (e.g., social media, archives, and repositories).
• Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar. However small, this possibility and awareness of it risks undermining the basis for trust in scientific knowledge and poses serious societal risks.

Implications

The use of ChatGPT to generate text for academic papers has raised concerns about research integrity. Discussion of this phenomenon is ongoing in editorials, commentaries, opinion pieces, and on social media (Bom, 2023; Stokel-Walker, 2024; Thorp, 2023). There are now several lists of papers suspected of GPT misuse, and new papers are constantly being added. 1 See for example Academ-AI, https://www.academ-ai.info/ , and Retraction Watch, https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-chatgpt-writing/ . While many legitimate uses of GPT for research and academic writing exist (Huang & Tan, 2023; Kitamura, 2023; Lund et al., 2023), its undeclared use—beyond proofreading—has potentially far-reaching implications for both science and society, but especially for their relationship. It, therefore, seems important to extend the discussion to one of the most accessible and well-known intermediaries between science, but also certain types of misinformation, and the public, namely Google Scholar, also in response to the legitimate concerns that the discussion of generative AI and misinformation needs to be more nuanced and empirically substantiated  (Simon et al., 2023).

Google Scholar, https://scholar.google.com , is an easy-to-use academic search engine. It is available for free, and its index is extensive (Gusenbauer & Haddaway, 2020). It is also often touted as a credible source for academic literature and even recommended in library guides, by media and information literacy initiatives, and fact checkers (Tripodi et al., 2023). However, Google Scholar lacks the transparency and adherence to standards that usually characterize citation databases. Instead, Google Scholar uses automated crawlers, like Google’s web search engine (Martín-Martín et al., 2021), and the inclusion criteria are based on primarily technical standards, allowing any individual author—with or without scientific affiliation—to upload papers to be indexed (Google Scholar Help, n.d.). It has been shown that Google Scholar is susceptible to manipulation through citation exploits (Antkare, 2020) and by providing access to fake scientific papers (Dadkhah et al., 2017). A large part of Google Scholar’s index consists of publications from established scientific journals or other forms of quality-controlled, scholarly literature. However, the index also contains a large amount of gray literature, including student papers, working papers, reports, preprint servers, and academic networking sites, as well as material from so-called “questionable” academic journals, including paper mills. The search interface does not offer the possibility to filter the results meaningfully by material type, publication status, or form of quality control, such as limiting the search to peer-reviewed material.

To understand the occurrence of ChatGPT (co-)authored work in Google Scholar’s index, we scraped it for publications, including one of two common ChatGPT responses (see Appendix A) that we encountered on social media and in media reports (DeGeurin, 2024). The results of our descriptive statistical analyses showed that around 62% did not declare the use of GPTs. Most of these GPT-fabricated papers were found in non-indexed journals and working papers, but some cases included research published in mainstream scientific journals and conference proceedings. 2 Indexed journals mean scholarly journals indexed by abstract and citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science, where the indexation implies journals with high scientific quality. Non-indexed journals are journals that fall outside of this indexation. More than half (57%) of these GPT-fabricated papers concerned policy-relevant subject areas susceptible to influence operations. To avoid increasing the visibility of these publications, we abstained from referencing them in this research note. However, we have made the data available in the Harvard Dataverse repository.

The publications were related to three issue areas—health (14.5%), environment (19.5%) and computing (23%)—with key terms such “healthcare,” “COVID-19,” or “infection”for health-related papers, and “analysis,” “sustainable,” and “global” for environment-related papers. In several cases, the papers had titles that strung together general keywords and buzzwords, thus alluding to very broad and current research. These terms included “biology,” “telehealth,” “climate policy,” “diversity,” and “disrupting,” to name just a few.  While the study’s scope and design did not include a detailed analysis of which parts of the articles included fabricated text, our dataset did contain the surrounding sentences for each occurrence of the suspicious phrases that formed the basis for our search and subsequent selection. Based on that, we can say that the phrases occurred in most sections typically found in scientific publications, including the literature review, methods, conceptual and theoretical frameworks, background, motivation or societal relevance, and even discussion. This was confirmed during the joint coding, where we read and discussed all articles. It became clear that not just the text related to the telltale phrases was created by GPT, but that almost all articles in our sample of questionable articles likely contained traces of GPT-fabricated text everywhere.

Evidence hacking and backfiring effects

Generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) can be used to produce texts that mimic scientific writing. These texts, when made available online—as we demonstrate—leak into the databases of academic search engines and other parts of the research infrastructure for scholarly communication. This development exacerbates problems that were already present with less sophisticated text generators (Antkare, 2020; Cabanac & Labbé, 2021). Yet, the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, together with the way Google Scholar works, has increased the likelihood of lay people (e.g., media, politicians, patients, students) coming across questionable (or even entirely GPT-fabricated) papers and other problematic research findings. Previous research has emphasized that the ability to determine the value and status of scientific publications for lay people is at stake when misleading articles are passed off as reputable (Haider & Åström, 2017) and that systematic literature reviews risk being compromised (Dadkhah et al., 2017). It has also been highlighted that Google Scholar, in particular, can be and has been exploited for manipulating the evidence base for politically charged issues and to fuel conspiracy narratives (Tripodi et al., 2023). Both concerns are likely to be magnified in the future, increasing the risk of what we suggest calling evidence hacking —the strategic and coordinated malicious manipulation of society’s evidence base.

The authority of quality-controlled research as evidence to support legislation, policy, politics, and other forms of decision-making is undermined by the presence of undeclared GPT-fabricated content in publications professing to be scientific. Due to the large number of archives, repositories, mirror sites, and shadow libraries to which they spread, there is a clear risk that GPT-fabricated, questionable papers will reach audiences even after a possible retraction. There are considerable technical difficulties involved in identifying and tracing computer-fabricated papers (Cabanac & Labbé, 2021; Dadkhah et al., 2023; Jones, 2024), not to mention preventing and curbing their spread and uptake.

However, as the rise of the so-called anti-vaxx movement during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing obstruction and denial of climate change show, retracting erroneous publications often fuels conspiracies and increases the following of these movements rather than stopping them. To illustrate this mechanism, climate deniers frequently question established scientific consensus by pointing to other, supposedly scientific, studies that support their claims. Usually, these are poorly executed, not peer-reviewed, based on obsolete data, or even fraudulent (Dunlap & Brulle, 2020). A similar strategy is successful in the alternative epistemic world of the global anti-vaccination movement (Carrion, 2018) and the persistence of flawed and questionable publications in the scientific record already poses significant problems for health research, policy, and lawmakers, and thus for society as a whole (Littell et al., 2024). Considering that a person’s support for “doing your own research” is associated with increased mistrust in scientific institutions (Chinn & Hasell, 2023), it will be of utmost importance to anticipate and consider such backfiring effects already when designing a technical solution, when suggesting industry or legal regulation, and in the planning of educational measures.

Recommendations

Solutions should be based on simultaneous considerations of technical, educational, and regulatory approaches, as well as incentives, including social ones, across the entire research infrastructure. Paying attention to how these approaches and incentives relate to each other can help identify points and mechanisms for disruption. Recognizing fraudulent academic papers must happen alongside understanding how they reach their audiences and what reasons there might be for some of these papers successfully “sticking around.” A possible way to mitigate some of the risks associated with GPT-fabricated scholarly texts finding their way into academic search engine results would be to provide filtering options for facets such as indexed journals, gray literature, peer-review, and similar on the interface of publicly available academic search engines. Furthermore, evaluation tools for indexed journals 3 Such as LiU Journal CheckUp, https://ep.liu.se/JournalCheckup/default.aspx?lang=eng . could be integrated into the graphical user interfaces and the crawlers of these academic search engines. To enable accountability, it is important that the index (database) of such a search engine is populated according to criteria that are transparent, open to scrutiny, and appropriate to the workings of  science and other forms of academic research. Moreover, considering that Google Scholar has no real competitor, there is a strong case for establishing a freely accessible, non-specialized academic search engine that is not run for commercial reasons but for reasons of public interest. Such measures, together with educational initiatives aimed particularly at policymakers, science communicators, journalists, and other media workers, will be crucial to reducing the possibilities for and effects of malicious manipulation or evidence hacking. It is important not to present this as a technical problem that exists only because of AI text generators but to relate it to the wider concerns in which it is embedded. These range from a largely dysfunctional scholarly publishing system (Haider & Åström, 2017) and academia’s “publish or perish” paradigm to Google’s near-monopoly and ideological battles over the control of information and ultimately knowledge. Any intervention is likely to have systemic effects; these effects need to be considered and assessed in advance and, ideally, followed up on.

Our study focused on a selection of papers that were easily recognizable as fraudulent. We used this relatively small sample as a magnifying glass to examine, delineate, and understand a problem that goes beyond the scope of the sample itself, which however points towards larger concerns that require further investigation. The work of ongoing whistleblowing initiatives 4 Such as Academ-AI, https://www.academ-ai.info/ , and Retraction Watch, https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-chatgpt-writing/ . , recent media reports of journal closures (Subbaraman, 2024), or GPT-related changes in word use and writing style (Cabanac et al., 2021; Stokel-Walker, 2024) suggest that we only see the tip of the iceberg. There are already more sophisticated cases (Dadkhah et al., 2023) as well as cases involving fabricated images (Gu et al., 2022). Our analysis shows that questionable and potentially manipulative GPT-fabricated papers permeate the research infrastructure and are likely to become a widespread phenomenon. Our findings underline that the risk of fake scientific papers being used to maliciously manipulate evidence (see Dadkhah et al., 2017) must be taken seriously. Manipulation may involve undeclared automatic summaries of texts, inclusion in literature reviews, explicit scientific claims, or the concealment of errors in studies so that they are difficult to detect in peer review. However, the mere possibility of these things happening is a significant risk in its own right that can be strategically exploited and will have ramifications for trust in and perception of science. Society’s methods of evaluating sources and the foundations of media and information literacy are under threat and public trust in science is at risk of further erosion, with far-reaching consequences for society in dealing with information disorders. To address this multifaceted problem, we first need to understand why it exists and proliferates.

Finding 1: 139 GPT-fabricated, questionable papers were found and listed as regular results on the Google Scholar results page. Non-indexed journals dominate.

Most questionable papers we found were in non-indexed journals or were working papers, but we did also find some in established journals, publications, conferences, and repositories. We found a total of 139 papers with a suspected deceptive use of ChatGPT or similar LLM applications (see Table 1). Out of these, 19 were in indexed journals, 89 were in non-indexed journals, 19 were student papers found in university databases, and 12 were working papers (mostly in preprint databases). Table 1 divides these papers into categories. Health and environment papers made up around 34% (47) of the sample. Of these, 66% were present in non-indexed journals.

Finding 2: GPT-fabricated, questionable papers are disseminated online, permeating the research infrastructure for scholarly communication, often in multiple copies. Applied topics with practical implications dominate.

The 20 papers concerning health-related issues are distributed across 20 unique domains, accounting for 46 URLs. The 27 papers dealing with environmental issues can be found across 26 unique domains, accounting for 56 URLs.  Most of the identified papers exist in multiple copies and have already spread to several archives, repositories, and social media. It would be difficult, or impossible, to remove them from the scientific record.

As apparent from Table 2, GPT-fabricated, questionable papers are seeping into most parts of the online research infrastructure for scholarly communication. Platforms on which identified papers have appeared include ResearchGate, ORCiD, Journal of Population Therapeutics and Clinical Pharmacology (JPTCP), Easychair, Frontiers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (IEEE), and X/Twitter. Thus, even if they are retracted from their original source, it will prove very difficult to track, remove, or even just mark them up on other platforms. Moreover, unless regulated, Google Scholar will enable their continued and most likely unlabeled discoverability.

A word rain visualization (Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala, 2023), which combines word prominences through TF-IDF 5 Term frequency–inverse document frequency , a method for measuring the significance of a word in a document compared to its frequency across all documents in a collection. scores with semantic similarity of the full texts of our sample of GPT-generated articles that fall into the “Environment” and “Health” categories, reflects the two categories in question. However, as can be seen in Figure 1, it also reveals overlap and sub-areas. The y-axis shows word prominences through word positions and font sizes, while the x-axis indicates semantic similarity. In addition to a certain amount of overlap, this reveals sub-areas, which are best described as two distinct events within the word rain. The event on the left bundles terms related to the development and management of health and healthcare with “challenges,” “impact,” and “potential of artificial intelligence”emerging as semantically related terms. Terms related to research infrastructures, environmental, epistemic, and technological concepts are arranged further down in the same event (e.g., “system,” “climate,” “understanding,” “knowledge,” “learning,” “education,” “sustainable”). A second distinct event further to the right bundles terms associated with fish farming and aquatic medicinal plants, highlighting the presence of an aquaculture cluster.  Here, the prominence of groups of terms such as “used,” “model,” “-based,” and “traditional” suggests the presence of applied research on these topics. The two events making up the word rain visualization, are linked by a less dominant but overlapping cluster of terms related to “energy” and “water.”

The bar chart of the terms in the paper subset (see Figure 2) complements the word rain visualization by depicting the most prominent terms in the full texts along the y-axis. Here, word prominences across health and environment papers are arranged descendingly, where values outside parentheses are TF-IDF values (relative frequencies) and values inside parentheses are raw term frequencies (absolute frequencies).

Finding 3: Google Scholar presents results from quality-controlled and non-controlled citation databases on the same interface, providing unfiltered access to GPT-fabricated questionable papers.

Google Scholar’s central position in the publicly accessible scholarly communication infrastructure, as well as its lack of standards, transparency, and accountability in terms of inclusion criteria, has potentially serious implications for public trust in science. This is likely to exacerbate the already-known potential to exploit Google Scholar for evidence hacking (Tripodi et al., 2023) and will have implications for any attempts to retract or remove fraudulent papers from their original publication venues. Any solution must consider the entirety of the research infrastructure for scholarly communication and the interplay of different actors, interests, and incentives.

We searched and scraped Google Scholar using the Python library Scholarly (Cholewiak et al., 2023) for papers that included specific phrases known to be common responses from ChatGPT and similar applications with the same underlying model (GPT3.5 or GPT4): “as of my last knowledge update” and/or “I don’t have access to real-time data” (see Appendix A). This facilitated the identification of papers that likely used generative AI to produce text, resulting in 227 retrieved papers. The papers’ bibliographic information was automatically added to a spreadsheet and downloaded into Zotero. 6 An open-source reference manager, https://zotero.org .

We employed multiple coding (Barbour, 2001) to classify the papers based on their content. First, we jointly assessed whether the paper was suspected of fraudulent use of ChatGPT (or similar) based on how the text was integrated into the papers and whether the paper was presented as original research output or the AI tool’s role was acknowledged. Second, in analyzing the content of the papers, we continued the multiple coding by classifying the fraudulent papers into four categories identified during an initial round of analysis—health, environment, computing, and others—and then determining which subjects were most affected by this issue (see Table 1). Out of the 227 retrieved papers, 88 papers were written with legitimate and/or declared use of GPTs (i.e., false positives, which were excluded from further analysis), and 139 papers were written with undeclared and/or fraudulent use (i.e., true positives, which were included in further analysis). The multiple coding was conducted jointly by all authors of the present article, who collaboratively coded and cross-checked each other’s interpretation of the data simultaneously in a shared spreadsheet file. This was done to single out coding discrepancies and settle coding disagreements, which in turn ensured methodological thoroughness and analytical consensus (see Barbour, 2001). Redoing the category coding later based on our established coding schedule, we achieved an intercoder reliability (Cohen’s kappa) of 0.806 after eradicating obvious differences.

The ranking algorithm of Google Scholar prioritizes highly cited and older publications (Martín-Martín et al., 2016). Therefore, the position of the articles on the search engine results pages was not particularly informative, considering the relatively small number of results in combination with the recency of the publications. Only the query “as of my last knowledge update” had more than two search engine result pages. On those, questionable articles with undeclared use of GPTs were evenly distributed across all result pages (min: 4, max: 9, mode: 8), with the proportion of undeclared use being slightly higher on average on later search result pages.

To understand how the papers making fraudulent use of generative AI were disseminated online, we programmatically searched for the paper titles (with exact string matching) in Google Search from our local IP address (see Appendix B) using the googlesearch – python library(Vikramaditya, 2020). We manually verified each search result to filter out false positives—results that were not related to the paper—and then compiled the most prominent URLs by field. This enabled the identification of other platforms through which the papers had been spread. We did not, however, investigate whether copies had spread into SciHub or other shadow libraries, or if they were referenced in Wikipedia.

We used descriptive statistics to count the prevalence of the number of GPT-fabricated papers across topics and venues and top domains by subject. The pandas software library for the Python programming language (The pandas development team, 2024) was used for this part of the analysis. Based on the multiple coding, paper occurrences were counted in relation to their categories, divided into indexed journals, non-indexed journals, student papers, and working papers. The schemes, subdomains, and subdirectories of the URL strings were filtered out while top-level domains and second-level domains were kept, which led to normalizing domain names. This, in turn, allowed the counting of domain frequencies in the environment and health categories. To distinguish word prominences and meanings in the environment and health-related GPT-fabricated questionable papers, a semantically-aware word cloud visualization was produced through the use of a word rain (Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala, 2023) for full-text versions of the papers. Font size and y-axis positions indicate word prominences through TF-IDF scores for the environment and health papers (also visualized in a separate bar chart with raw term frequencies in parentheses), and words are positioned along the x-axis to reflect semantic similarity (Skeppstedt et al., 2024), with an English Word2vec skip gram model space (Fares et al., 2017). An English stop word list was used, along with a manually produced list including terms such as “https,” “volume,” or “years.”

• Artificial Intelligence
• / Search engines

Cite this Essay

Haider, J., Söderström, K. R., Ekström, B., & Rödl, M. (2024). GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-156

• / Appendix B

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This research has been supported by Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, through the research program Mistra Environmental Communication (Haider, Ekström, Rödl) and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation [2020.0004] (Söderström).

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

The research described in this article was carried out under Swedish legislation. According to the relevant EU and Swedish legislation (2003:460) on the ethical review of research involving humans (“Ethical Review Act”), the research reported on here is not subject to authorization by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (“etikprövningsmyndigheten”) (SRC, 2017).

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All data needed to replicate this study are available at the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WUVD8X

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the article manuscript as well as the editorial group of Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review for their thoughtful feedback and input.