*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2016-2017 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season.
The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College has made a few tweaks to its admissions essays this season. The admissions committee has put a small “spin” on the conventional essay where students are to outline their career goals and explaining their need for a Tuck MBA specifically. Now, you will be asked to explain how you envision yourself as a “wise leader,” which we will discuss in our analysis. For its second required essay, the school has long been asking applicants to discuss leadership, but this year, it has pivoted away from that topic to focus on diversity instead. Thereafter, you have the opportunity to craft an optional essay to mitigate any weaknesses in your candidacy, if any such issues exist. We believe that with these options, applicants should be able to present a well-rounded picture of themselves to the admissions committee. Now we will delve more deeply into each of the individual prompts…
Essay 1: Tuck educates wise leaders who better the world of business. What are your short- and long-term goals? How will a Tuck MBA enable you to become a wise leader with globalimpact? (500-700 words) (Note: This is the revised version of Essay 1 posted on July 11, 2016.)
As noted, this is a classic personal statement with a slight spin – wherein you will need to explain how you will be a “wise leader with global impact.” In writing this essay, you should give context for your goals, thoroughly explain them and then discuss how Tuck will facilitate said goals. It is in this “facilitation” piece that you will have an opportunity to reveal not only that you have a plan to use specific Tuck resources, but that you also have expectations for these resources and their impact on you. So, it will not be enough to explain that you intend to engage with a club or a class, but you need to have a clear understanding of what you will get out of an experience and how it will contribute to your growth (wisdom) and your ability to have your broad impact. We expect that the impact piece will stifle many an applicant, but you don’t need to explicitly state that you will change the world as we know it. Instead, you need to own your future experiences and show that your goals — while not necessarily earth shattering — are meaningful to you and consequential for others.
*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2016-2017 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season.
This year, the Yale School of Management (SOM) is as sparing as ever with its application essays… or shall we say essay. Yet again, the school poses just one prompt, and with a 500-word limit, you do not have a lot of room to make an impression on the admissions committee. Assistant Dean and Director of Admissions Bruce DelMonico noted in a Yale SOM blog post that “much thought went into this seemingly simple and straightforward question” and that it was composed with assistance from one of the business school’s organizational behavior professors. To us, this implies that the admissions committee has invested some truly purposeful effort into constructing an essay query that will reveal something specific from and about its applicants. Let us explore how you can maximize your opportunity to shine with this new prompt…
Describe the biggest commitment you have ever made. (500 words maximum)
You may be thinking that this prompt is rather narrow in scope, allowing you space to share the story of just a single professional or community project and nothing more. Well, you can certainly discuss your dedication to a particular project or cause, but you are definitely not restricted to this approach. Consider this: you can also be committed to an idea (e.g., personal liberty) or a value (e.g., creating opportunity for others), and approaching your essay from this angle instead could enable you to share much more of and about yourself with the SOM admissions committee. For example, you might relate a few anecdotes that on the surface seem unrelated—drawing from different parts of your life—but that all support and illustrate how you are guided by a particular value. Or, to return to the example of personal liberty as a theme, you could show how you take control of your academic and professional paths, eschewing any advice that is inconsistent with your vision. Whatever you choose to feature as the focus of your commitment, your actions and decisions, manifest via a variety of experiences, must allow you to own it as a genuine part of who you are as an individual. Identifying a theme that you think no one else will ever use is not your goal here; presenting authentic anecdotes that powerfully support your selected theme is what is important.
*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2016-2017 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season.
By today’s standards, the essay questions for the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania are remarkably vast. The school presents candidates with two mandatory essays and, if needed, an optional essay that applicants can use to address any extenuating circumstances. Wharton provides applicants with a fairly extensive opportunity to tell their whole story, which is quite rare these days. So take advantage of it! Brainstorm thoroughly before you start writing, and carefully consider how to optimize your best anecdotes to showcase yourself in full.
Required Essay 1: What do you hope to gain professionally from the Wharton MBA? (500 words)
In many ways, this prompt is asking for a typical MBA personal statement. In a mere 500 words, you must discuss your career goals—giving very brief context for why they are realistic for you—and then reveal how Wharton will help you pursue these goals by demonstrating a thorough understanding of what the school offers and a well-thought-out game plan for immersing yourself in the Wharton experience. To effectively do this, you must first familiarize yourself with the school’s various resources and pinpoint those that truly pertain to you and the direction in which you hope to go. Simply presenting a list of classes that you think sound interesting is not sufficient. Likewise, avoid vague statements about how great the school is. Focus on showing a clear connection between your aspirations, what you need to achieve them, and what Wharton in particular offers that will enable you to fulfill those needs.
A subtle tweak to this essay prompt that distinguishes it from last year’s is that Wharton asks applicants to address only the professional aspect—no longer both the professional and personal aspect—of their business school aspirations. This will allow you to share your career-related stories and goals much more fully, which means you can and should use the other essays to discuss non-work aspects of your life and thereby provide a more complete and well-rounded picture of yourself for the admissions committee.
When you select an MBA program, you are not just choosing your learning environment but are also committing to becoming part of a community. Each Thursday, we offer a window into life “beyond the MBA classroom” at a top business school.
MBA Games is a collection of events that take place throughout the academic year and culminate in a weekend of competition each spring among MBA students from a dozen or more North American business schools. The purpose of MBA Games is to support Special Olympics North Carolina, which students do by volunteering for events each month with athletes from the organization (e.g., tailgating, skating, bowling) and by participating in various fundraising events (e.g., sports tournaments, organized races, parties) and auctions. The MBA Games site proclaims that since the event’s founding in 1989, it has helped raise more than $2M for Special Olympics North Carolina.
Each year, Fuqua students host a fundraising auction for the MBA Games—which is reportedly Fuqua’s largest annual philanthropy event. One alumnus recalled how he bid on and won the opportunity to sumo wrestle one of the core professors, with both of them wearing humongous padded suits. The auction takes place during a Fuqua Friday in mid-February. Students and professors bid on dozens of items donated by corporate sponsors and members of the Fuqua community. Donations in the past have been as varied as dinners/lunches with several professors and Duke University President Richard Brodhead, a VIP table at the Black Eyed Peas concert afterparty, a three-night golf vacation on South Carolina’s Kiawah Island, a UNC/Duke beer-pong table, and a one-on-one basketball game with former NBA player Pat Garrity. The auction has both a silent component and a live, called component.
*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2016-2017 admissions cycle. Click here to view our collection of essay analyses for the current admissions season.
As we have seen for the past several years, the University of Virginia’s Darden School has released a single essay question for its application. However, the school has typically added a few—much shorter—prompts a little later in the season, so you will need to keep an eye out for those, in case Darden takes that approach again this year. In the meantime, focus your efforts on the program’s primary essay question, which prods applicants to share a career-related story about receiving some consequential feedback. At first glance, we assume that with this prompt, Darden’s admissions committee is hoping to gain insight into applicants’ professional experience and attitudes as well as their capacity for self-assessment and their openness to other viewpoints. You have only 500 words with which to convey all this, though, so you will need to be simultaneously thorough and concise. Our analysis should assist you in achieving this.
Essay 1: Describe the most important professional feedback you have received and how you responded to it. (500 words maximum)
Darden definitely wants to know more than just what others may think of your professional capabilities. The admissions committee also wants evidence that you are capable of reflecting, learning, and growing. If you are not able to do this, the school might assume that you simply do not have the necessary qualities to become a standout manager. To craft an effective essay response to this query, focus on describing a “before and after” situation in which the suggestion or input you received served as an inflection point that triggered a dramatic change in you. If you start your essay by simply leading with the feedback you received, you will kill any mystery in your story. Instead, consider relating a narrative that involves a lot of momentum in one direction that is suddenly derailed when you are disarmed by someone else’s input—input that leads to clear and tactical change.
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*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2016-2017 admissions cycle. 
*Please note: You are viewing an essay analysis from the 2016-2017 admissions cycle. 
