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The Haas School of Business at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, always marches to its own beat with its application essay prompts. The admissions committee has stuck with its format of short essays of 250 words each this year, though the total number of these essays has dropped from five to four, and the first one has a particularly quirky prompt. In addition, the school’s longer, two-part final essay has a reduced maximum word count this year (from 1,000 words to 750). As you prepare to write your Berkeley-Haas essays, recognize that despite the brevity of these pieces, they offer a lot of opportunity to discuss your life experiences. Take the time to brainstorm thoroughly and develop a full understanding of what you want to say—and in which essay you want to say it—before you start writing. Attempt to provide new information and/or a new experience in each essay, and this will help keep the reader engaged and learning about you.

From the admissions committee: “At Berkeley-Haas, our distinctive culture is defined by four key principles — Question the status quo; Confidence without attitude; Students always; and Beyond yourself. We seek candidates from a broad range of cultures, backgrounds, and industries who demonstrate a strong cultural fit with our program and defining principles. Please use the following essays as an opportunity to reflect on and share with us the values, experiences, and accomplishments that have helped shape who you are. (Learn more about Berkeley-Haas’ Defining Principles).”

1. If you could choose one song that expresses who you are, what is it and why? (250 word maximum)

As absurd as this prompt may seem, you will obviously want to take it seriously. Rather than trying to identify what might be an impressive or interesting song in and of itself, stop, think about the various facets of your character and then back into your choice. Ask yourself what defines who you are and then work to find an appropriate song that reflects and reveals these elements—preferably one that you are sincerely connected to or that triggers some kind of strong response in you. To add another level of creativity, consider different versions of the same song and the different singers who have performed or recorded it. (For example, the famed song “New York, New York” has been recorded by a number of artists over the years and in different languages—not that we are suggesting this song!) If the lyrics of a particular song seem to match well with your personality, you may also be able to identify a version of that song with a certain style, tempo or featured instrument, and these elements can further illustrate your personality. There is no “right” song in the eyes of the admissions committee. Your task is to find one that serves as an avenue for discussing your character and to clearly explain how and why it does so, using examples.

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Johnson at Cornell University has made some changes to its application essay questions this year, most notably making its unique and often befuddling “table of contents” essay prompt one of three options rather than a required, standalone one. Cornell is actually bucking the trend set by other programs this season and has increased its total word count from 1,000 to 1,100. Still, 1,100 words for three essays is not a lot, so you will need to think quite carefully about what you want to say to the admissions committee before you start typing.

Part I: Career Choice Essay (300 word maximum)

How would you characterize your career since college?

Cornell provides the following advice for this essay: “This is not your job description or complete history of your work since graduating (we already ask for that in the online portion and can see this on your resume). You need to choose the most important elements that show your initiative, contribution, leadership and results achieved.” Although additional guidance from the school is always welcome, what does this advice really mean? It means that the school does not want you to provide just a list of accomplishments and would prefer a more narrative description of your career thus far. The admissions committee wants to understand how you have accomplished what you have accomplished in your career and how and why you have made certain choices along the way.

If you are deep into your career at this point, you should not feel that you have to address every single position you have held since college in this essay. And if you are just starting your career, you are not at a disadvantage—just write about how you have managed your career to date. In fact, “career management” is really at the core of this essay. You would be best served by taking a look back and assessing the way in which you have managed yourself, how you have created opportunities, overcome setbacks, made choices and transitions, won small mandates, etc. You need to tell the story of your career and your evolution, showing that you have discovered purpose and leading to your decision to pursue an MBA. That written, you do not need to explicitly write about how you are now prepared to earn your MBA. If this point flows naturally and briefly from your narrative, that is acceptable, but given that you have only 300 words for this entire essay, you should not dedicate a significant chunk of this total to detailing your need for an MBA. At the same time, note that many candidates make the mistake of ending their essay with a single trite sentence like “And all of this has led me to my MBA.” Avoid such an ending at all costs.

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The MIT Sloan School of Management has tweaked all of its essay questions this year and has dropped one question entirely, going with what appears to be a trend this application season toward giving business school candidates less opportunity to provide qualitative information about themselves. Many applicants will be disappointed to see that Sloan’s quirky “cover letter” essay prompt remains. We will start our analysis there…

Cover Letter (up to 500 words)

Please prepare a cover letter seeking a place in the MIT Sloan MBA program. Your letter should describe your accomplishments, address any extenuating circumstances that may apply to your application, and conform to standard business correspondence. Your letter should be addressed to Mr. Rod Garcia, Senior Director of Admissions.

You will note that unlike most schools, Sloan does not ask its applicants to discuss either future goals or “why Sloan.” This is not an oversight! In keeping with its conviction that past behavior is the best predictor of future success, Sloan wants candidates to emphasize their past actions and thought processes in their essays, rather than their long-term aspirations. In fact, in an interview with Fifteen, the MIT Sloan newspaper, Director of MBA Admissions Rod Garcia explained that the “admissions committee does not explicitly ask applicants for their future goals to prevent candidates from telling stories that they think the admissions committee wants to hear.” Garcia added, “That’s why we don’t ask the ‘Why Now?,’ ‘Why MBA?,’ and ‘Why Sloan?’ type of questions that every other business school asks because these questions are leading questions, i.e. they lead the interviewees to tell the interviewer what the interviewer wants to hear. So, to go around this trickery, we ask candidates to talk to us about past examples instead.”

Our advice?  Mention your goals only briefly.  Instead of discussing the goals themselves in great detail, focus more on explaining how, based on your past, you reached the conclusion that you need an MBA.  That answer explains “why you are seeking a spot” at MIT.  Similarly, when explaining “why Sloan”, keep your statement(s) brief, relevant and specific.

Now that we have discussed what you should not do, let us discuss what you should do. The admissions committee asks that you describe your accomplishments, thereby providing an open-ended opportunity for you to tell a more complete story about yourself. The school’s other two essay prompts, by contrast, are rather narrow and require you to focus on a single instance. Here, you can delve into experiences and themes in your life that define who you are and how you have made an impact on others. We do believe that you should include at least one professional accomplishment, but you can also discuss personal and extracurricular accomplishments to provide a more well-rounded presentation of what you have to offer. However, be sure that you discuss all of your chosen stories thematically and that you do not just offer a boring career summary or a repetition of your resume.

If you have any extenuating circumstances in your candidacy, you should use this opportunity to address them, but certainly do not devote the entire 500 words allotted to explaining, for example, why your GMAT score is lower than expected. Instead, you should briefly (very briefly) mention the issue and then assert that you have strengths in other areas and are confident that you can perform in Sloan’s rigorous academic environment. Whatever you do, do not dwell on your “extenuating circumstances,” make excuses for them or let them overwhelm your accomplishments in this essay.

Although Sloan’s cover letter differs in some ways from a typical Personal Statement, some fundamentals still apply. We therefore suggest that you consult our mbaMission Personal Statement Guide—which we offer free of charge —before writing this essay for Sloan. Please feel free to download your copy today.

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Writing can be challenging for many business school applicants, and some have particular difficulty changing their essay structure from one essay to the next. For example, a candidate might choose to use a quote at the beginning of an essay to create a sense of urgency:

“This cannot be fixed. This cannot be fixed!” I stared blankly at the broken machinery and knew that the next few hours would be crucial….

Using this kind of attention-grabbing technique can be acceptable under certain circumstances, but a candidate should never use the same technique twice (and definitely not three times!) in one application. By starting more than one essay the same way, the writer is effectively sending the reader the message that he/she understands a gimmick but does not truly know how to tell a compelling story in his/her own way. This is also a quick way to lose the admissions reader’s interest! So be sure to vary your approach with each new essay within a single application. We work with our candidates to ensure that their ideas are presented in fresh and different ways, to captivate the admissions committee with each introduction and, indeed, each essay.

In our “What I Learned at…” series, MBAs discuss the tools and skills their business schools provided as they launched their careers.

Paul Watson is the co-founder and COO of Ledbury, a producer of high-quality menswear created in response to a simple problem: the difficulty of finding a great-fitting shirt. In the final part of this four-part series, Paul reflects on how the diversity of his classmates at Said helped shape his business and how these fellow graduates continue to be a part of Ledbury today.

I have mentioned in my earlier posts the various projects and classes that made the Said Business School so valuable to my business education, but the piece that really pulled it all together for me was the group of students I studied with and those that were attending other programs at the university.

My class at Oxford was an eclectic group of international students representing countries from all continents and with a plethora of various professional backgrounds. These diverse backgrounds made for a great learning environment when we worked together in small groups on case studies, on our Strategic Consulting Project and just out at the pub for a beer after class.

This diverse group of classmates also came to be integral in the creation and founding of Ledbury. In the early days of polishing the business plan, we relied on the counsel and perspective of many of our classmates. As we continued to refine the Ledbury proposition and moved toward fundraising, a number of our classmates took part or connected us with potential investors. To this day, we continue to work closely with many of our former Oxford Said Business School classmates as Ledbury faces new challenges related to growth, financing and discovering new sales channels.

In addition to our business school classmates, we had opportunities through our college affiliations to interact with many other students at the university. This interaction with the university at large was a great way to round out the classes and projects at Said and interact with a broader base of backgrounds and skill sets. From athletics to debate societies, we were able to undertake a number of extracurricular activities that added to the overall experience of business school.

I look back at my time at Said Business School with a fondness for the lessons learned and the relationships I made. These lessons and networks continue to play an integral role in the growth of Ledbury.