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*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2017-2018 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season. 

One look at the first application essay question for the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, this year may make applicants think the program has finally embraced the less-is-more movement in essays that so many other top schools have been joining lately. And to be fair, the total number of words allowed for Berkeley-Haas’s essays this season has gone down, but not by all that much—dropping from 1,000 to 806—so candidates still have a comparatively good amount of space in which to present a well-rounded impression of themselves to the school. Although the prompts have changed in wording, the kind of information the school wants to elicit seems largely the same. As always, you want your essays as a whole to encompass a range of stories and qualities that complement each other so as to provide an accurate representation of who you are today, the student you expect to be in business school, and the professional you will be for the rest of your career. What follows is our full analysis of Berkeley-Haas’s updated essay questions…

Essay #1: Tell us a six-word story that reflects a memorable experience in your life-to-date. Elaborate on why it is meaningful to you. (250 words maximum)

Tip: A successful six-word story will pique the reader’s interest in the forthcoming explanation. Together, the story and explanation will share a specific and personal experience that helps the reader get to know you better, giving insight into your character, values, or how you would uniquely contribute to the Berkeley-Haas community. View sample six-word stories and video tips from the admissions committee.

Before you start hyperventilating, let us reassure you that you absolutely can convey a meaningful and compelling story in just six words. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Ernest Hemingway’s famous “six-word novel,” which reads, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” In fact, entire Reddit, Pinterest, and Tumblr pages are dedicated to these succinct narratives, and several publications and Web sites have regular contests to see who can craft the best six-word tales. So, Berkeley-Haas may not be the first to come up with the idea, but it does appear to be the first business school to make it a part of its application!

In addition to presenting several examples for applicants on its team Web page, the Berkeley Haas admissions committee offers two key pieces of advice for this essay in a video application tip: using contractions (e.g., it’s, can’t, won’t, didn’t) is totally acceptable, and perfect grammar is not necessary. These are both important space savers. Thankfully, the school also gives you a 250-word essay in which to further elaborate on your mini story, so you can expound on some elements of the narrative that may not be immediately understood, but take care to not use that portion of this essay response to simply retell your story in more detail.

Start by thinking carefully about how you want to present yourself as an applicant and an individual, and consider what you might say in your other essays for the program, to ensure that each piece you submit is complementary of the others and offers something different about you. You might consider this first essay the “colorful” essay and the others more “serious.” In this one, you have a special opportunity to provide a window into your life experience and personality. Your six-word story should captivate and intrigue the admissions reader, leaving him or her wanting to learn more. (Almost by definition, the reader will be enveloped in mystery!) Then, the second, 250-word portion of the essay should unravel any mystery, illuminate your character, and clarify the significance of the core narrative in who you are today, thereby giving the admissions committee a critical sense of understanding.

Essay #2: Respond to one of the following prompts: (250 words maximum)

Tip: Responses can draw from professional or personal experiences. Through your response, the admissions committee hopes to gain insight into your achievements, involvement, and leadership footprint.

• Describe a significant obstacle you have encountered and how it has impacted you.

If you choose to respond to this prompt, you will need to ensure that your essay conveys a sense of change, and to best demonstrate change, you must depict a clear “before and after” scenario. So, start by identifying a time when something stood between you and a goal you wanted to reach, or when something (likely unexpected) derailed your forward progress in an important area of your life. Consider incidents from your career, personal life, and community activities to find the one you feel is most compelling and reveals the most about you. For example, perhaps you faced a budget shortfall on a critical work project, clashed with a sibling over how to manage a parent’s health, or had a volunteer event you organized be jeopardized by budget or weather issues.

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Thanks to its proximity to the Tech Coast, the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), offers significant opportunities for students with an eye toward innovative business. An emphasis on innovation and business pioneering is built directly into what Merage calls its “visionary curriculum,” supplementing conventional business disciplines with three core, cross-disciplinary areas: strategic innovation, information technology, and analytical decision making.

In addition, several of Merage’s special course offerings and programs showcase the school’s commitment to putting students in contact with the rapidly shifting face of business. For example, students can customize their MBA experience by completing one of the three available certificates: Digital Transformation, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Real Estate and Urban Development. Through the school’s “Applied Consulting” course, students have the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with current business practices by working directly with locally based global companies for a ten-week period. Merage students can also participate each year in the university-wide New Venture Competition (formerly the Business Plan Competition), whose winners collectively claim a total of more than $100K in prizes and funding for their proposed start-up ventures.

*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2017-2018 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season. 

Like several of the other top MBA programs that have released their essay questions for this year, the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) has remained faithful to the prompts it presented last season. But with a total maximum word count allowance of 1,150, the school gives its applicants a little more room in which to express themselves. Although the Stanford GSB is an institution well known for generating and encouraging  innovators, the school uses its application essays not to ask candidates to share their imaginative new ideas but rather to look inward and examine their motivations and values. These are your opportunities to demonstrate the parts of your personality and profile that are not readily conveyed through transcripts, scores, and lists of professional accomplishments. Here we present our advice on how you might do so effectively…

Essay A: What matters most to you, and why? (School-suggested word count of 750)

For this essay, we would like you to:

• Do some deep self-examination, so you can genuinely illustrate who you are and how you came to be the person you are.

• Share the insights, experiences, and lessons that shaped your perspectives, rather than focusing merely on what you’ve done or accomplished.

• Write from the heart, and illustrate how a person, situation, or event has influenced you.
• Focus on the “why” rather than the “what.”

When candidates ask us, “What should I write for what matters most to me?,” we offer some pretty simple guidance: start brainstorming for this essay by asking yourself that very question. What does matter most to you? This might seem like obvious advice, of course, but many applicants get flustered by the question, believing that an actual “right” answer exists that they must provide to satisfy the admissions committee. As a result, they never pause to actually consider their sincere responses, which are typically the most compelling.

We therefore encourage you to contemplate this question in depth and push yourself to explore the psychological and philosophical motivations behind your goals and achievements—behind who you are today. We cannot emphasize this enough: do not make a snap decision about the content of this essay. Once you have identified what you believe is an appropriate theme, discuss your idea(s) with those with whom you are closest and whose input you respect. Doing so can help validate deeply personal and authentic themes, leading to an essay that truly stands out.

Once you have fully examined your options and identified your main themes, do not simply provide a handful of supporting anecdotes—or worse, recycle the stories you used in a similar essay for another school. A strong essay response to this question will involve a true exploration of the themes you have chosen and reveal a thorough analysis of decisions, motives, and successes/failures, with a constant emphasis on how you conduct yourself. If you are merely telling stories and trying to tie in your preconceived conclusions, you are probably forcing a theme on your reader rather than genuinely analyzing your experiences, and any experienced admissions reader will see right through this. In short, be sure to fully consider and identify your most authentic answer(s), outline your essay accordingly, and then infuse your writing with your personality, thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

Stanford encourages you to give special attention to why the subject you have chosen to write about is the most important to you. This “why” element should be clear in your essay—it should be implied by what you are discussing and sharing. If you need to explicitly declare, “And what matters most to me is…,” your essay is not making a strong enough point on its own. A well-constructed essay that is infused with your values and motivation and that clearly conveys why you made certain decisions should effectively and implicitly reveal the “why” behind your chosen topic—and will almost always make a stronger point.

One final note is that you can write about a popular theme as long as you truly own the experience. However, the odds are very low that you could write on a theme that the Stanford GSB’s admissions committee has never read about before. You can discuss whatever you truly care about in your essay, but you absolutely must support your topic with a wealth of experience that shows how you have uniquely lived it. Therefore, for example, you cannot successfully write about “making a difference” if you have volunteered only occasionally, but if you have truly had a significant impact on someone’s life, then the topic is no longer a cliché—it is true to who you genuinely are. So, focus less on trying to choose the “right” subject for your essay and more on identifying one that is personal and authentic to you. If you write powerfully about your topic and connect it directly to your experiences and values, your essay should be a winner.

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*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2017-2018 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season. 

Last year, one of our observations about the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan’s main essay question was that the 400-word limit did not offer a lot of room to expound on the topic. Thankfully, applicants also had a second essay (albeit also quite short, at just 250 words) in which to address their professional aspirations. This season, Michigan Ross has tightened the reins even more, asking applicants to provide 100-word responses (or shorter) to three “complete the sentence” prompts and to write a 300-word-maximum essay answering three career-related questions that actually encompass four topics. The scope of the main essay prompt has also been drastically narrowed, from a discussion of a personal event or attribute of which the applicant was proud to a rather prescribed rundown of the candidate’s career goals and plans to attain them.

This clear shift from a more touchy-feely focus to an inarguably pragmatic one seems to indicate a desire on the part of Admissions Director Soojin Kwon and her team to get straight to the heart of what makes the school’s applicants tick, without a lot of extraneous fluff (or any, for that matter). With more than a decade of experience as the head of admissions at Michigan Ross, Kwon undoubtedly has a handle on what to look for in candidates, and this new approach was likely engineered to elicit this information more efficiently. In a recent blog post, Kwon stated that the impetus behind the changes was a desire to “get to know more about you than we would in a traditional essay where you’d talk at length about one topic.” Our advice on how to ensure you deliver what the admissions committee wants follows…

Select one prompt from each group. Respond to your selected prompts using 100 words or fewer (<100 words each; 300 words total).

Group 1

I want people to know that I:

I turned an idea into action when I:

I made a difference when I:

Group 2

I showed my resilience when I:

I was humbled when:

I am out of my comfort zone when:

Group 3

I was aware that I am different when:

I find it challenging when people:

A valuable thing I have taught someone is:

Although these prompts are presented as short-answer questions on the Michigan Ross application, they are unquestionably mini essays, with each one offering you approximately four to five sentences in which to present your selected story. We recommend starting by reading through all the options for the three groups and considering each one thoroughly in turn. Do not simply pick the first three that catch your eye—you may have a much more compelling answer possible for a prompt you might not initially be drawn to, so you could do yourself a disservice by dismissing any out of hand, without proper contemplation. Naturally, you will be able to think of a fitting response to certain prompts much more easily than to others, but again, do not let this be the primary reason behind your final choice of which ones to complete. Take time to devise an answer—however meager in some cases—to each one, and then step back and look at all your options.

Hearken back to Kwon’s statement about wanting to “get to know more about you” and think about which response in each group feels most authentic to and revelatory of who you are as an individual. You want to be able to “own” your answer—as we like to say—meaning that no other applicant could write the same thing you do. Using the second prompt of the first group as an example (“I turned an idea into action when I…”), writing something like “dabble with different ideas and test hypotheses in my efforts to make an impact” would be far too general a response and could easily be stated by a large number of applicants. Instead, something much more specific like “knew no one wanted to launch yet another charity walk, but I was confident that a charity pie-eating contest would draw an enthusiastic market” would stand out for its originality and paint a clearer picture of the candidate who wrote it.

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In this new blog series, our mbaMission Career Coaches offer invaluable advice and industry-related news to help you actively manage your career. Topics include building your network, learning from mistakes and setbacks, perfecting your written communication, and mastering even the toughest interviews. To schedule a free half-hour consultation with one of our mbaMission Career Coaches, click here.

As you prepare to start your MBA program, we at mbaMission wanted to share our advice about how to arrive on campus ready for recruiting.   

This summer, consider doing the following:

• Figure out what you want. What is your career vision? What industry, function, and corporate culture appeal to you? What motivates you? What skills/experiences do you bring to an employer? What are your Plan A and Plan B? For more guidance, check out some of our previous blogs on setting a career vision and assessing your career goals.
• Research and identify potential target firms. Understand the skills and experiences desired for your target industries or functions. Check out our free Career Primers. Identify six to ten target companies in your industry of interest. Talk to people in your network who work in your target areas. Read industry publications.
• Think about your story. How can you talk about your interest in a specific industry or function in a compelling way? What personal or professional experiences have made you want to pursue your target role? Know which of your previous experiences will be most compelling to your target audience. Are there any gaps in your candidacy?
• Update your resume and LinkedIn profile. Find out if your school has a required resume template, and if so, put your resume into that format. Update your LinkedIn profile to indicate you will soon be an MBA student. In addition, update your network about your plans to return to school.
• Save any documents you used when writing business school applications; you will need them later. Articulating your career goals and identifying stories to tell in behavior-based interviews will help you when networking and interviewing for internships.
• Relax, travel, or spend time with family and friends. You are about to embark on an intense experience. A lot of amazing academic, extracurricular, and recruiting opportunities will be waiting for you on campus; be rested so you can take advantage of them.

But do not worry if you are not 100% certain about your goals, your target firms, or your story before arriving on campus. That said, the more self-assessment and industry research you do beforehand, the more efficient you will be with your time, and the more you can leverage your school’s resources.

Once you are on campus, we suggest doing the following:

• Get to know the career office. Pay attention to any and all communications from your school’s career management office, and attend any introductory sessions it offers. Understand the recruiting process (e.g., timing, source of offers) for your target roles and the resources available to you.
• Join relevant professional clubs. This is a great way to learn more about your target industries, meet second-year students who just completed their internships, and engage with employers.  
• Talk with your classmates. Your peers have had robust and impressive careers before arriving at business school. They are happy to share their experiences.
• Learn about extracurricular activities. In addition to participating in professional clubs that align with your career interests, check out other ways you can build skills and demonstrate leadership.
• Build a job search plan. Using the information gathered from the career office and your peers, write down weekly goals for your job search and set aside time to achieve those goals. Hold yourself accountable.

Have you been admitted to business school? If so, do you want to get a head start on defining your career goals? Do you need help preparing for job interviews or learning how to effectively network with your target employers? Or maybe you want to be a top performer in your current role but are unsure how to maximize your potential. Let an mbaMission Career Coach help via a free 30-minute consultation!