We at mbaMission know of a man now in his 80s who graduated from a virtually unknown Canadian undergraduate school in 1963 and who, with no work experience at all, applied to Harvard Business School (HBS), Wharton, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), earning acceptance at all three (though the GSB deferred his entry for one year so he could gain a little more experience first). He ultimately studied at HBS and now runs a small grain-trading business. You could not meet a nicer man, and although he is certainly wise in many respects, one thing he knows nothing about is MBA admissions. “I attended so long ago, things must have changed since then,” he says. “I did not have any work experience at all. I had studied four years of commerce, and that was it!”
For roughly a hundred years, employees had a deal with work. You showed up, you sat in a specific spot for eight to ten hours a day, you did what the person above you said, and in exchange, you received a paycheck. But over the past several years, that deal did not just crack, it shattered. Between the explosion of AI, the return-to-office debate, and the rise of a generation of talent that refuses to be treated like a line item on a spreadsheet, leaders are being forced to answer a new question: How do we get our culture back?
According to BCG Managing Director and Senior Partner Debbie Lovich, that is entirely the wrong question.
Rather than framing its required application essay as a traditional “essay,” the MIT Sloan School of Management requests that applicants submit a “cover letter,” including even the standard formal correspondence elements of an address and opening salutation. Writing cover letters will undoubtedly be a large part of students’ career development efforts at Sloan, after all, so why not start now? Candidates must also submit two brief video “essays.” The first is a one-minute self-introduction video in which they are expected to convey their personality. For the second, applicants will be given an open-ended question and must respond extemporaneously within 60 seconds. MBA programs generally use these kinds of videos to evaluate candidates’ communication skills, grace under pressure, and potential to contribute to classroom discussions, as well as to gain insight into who the applicants are as living, breathing people, rather than one-dimensional aggregates of words and numbers in a folder. And finally, Sloan asks candidates to submit a short essay on how their past has influenced the person they are today. While somewhat unorthodox, the school’s “essays” allow applicants to deliver a balanced view of their professional and personal profiles, with a good amount of leeway for creativity. Read on for our full analysis of MIT Sloan’s application prompts for 2026–2027.
The admissions committee at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business provides its applicants with the opportunity to paint a well-rounded picture of themselves, but they must do so with significant brevity. For each of the program’s four prompts, candidates are limited to just 300 characters—not words. And this includes spaces! Because this equates to slightly more than three lines of text, Booth clearly wants you to be concise while packing as much pertinent information as possible into each response. You will need to make every single word count. Thus, we will follow that lead and get right to the point: Read on for our analysis of the four short-answer prompts and of Booth’s optional essay question.
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business is one of the top MBA programs in the world, holding a spot among the elite M7 and boasting several Nobel laureates among its faculty. Yet despite Booth’s strong reputation, many applicants are surprised when they learn about all its MBA program has to offer.
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