As you craft and refine your narratives for your application essays, you will need to be thoughtful about how you are engaging the admissions reader. Keep in mind that admissions officers read thousands of essays each year, and the person who reads yours might have read several other candidates’ files already that day! So if the introduction to your essay is not immediately compelling, you might lose their interest right away. Your opening lines really need to count! Your goal with your essay opening is to quicklygrab the admissions reader’s attention and then maintain it. You can accomplish this in a few different ways, using one of the following approaches: the launch, the anecdote, the inversion, or the quote.
Many MBA applicants believe that their professional past needs to have followed a perfect trajectory, with them having gone seamlessly from job to job, from promotion to promotion. The reality, however, can be quite different. Candidates sometimes get laid off and are unable to find a new job for several months. Sometimes, an illness or other personal reason forces them to take time off. The COVID-19 era certainly precipitated its share of workplace disruptions, as has recent upheaval in the tech industry.
So, if you have a gap on your MBA resume, is all hope for your future lost?
Building a strong network is one of the most discussed benefits of attending business school—and one of the least understood in practice. MBA programs regularly emphasize the strength of their alumni communities and professional networks, but many applicants and students still struggle with a practical question: How do you actually use those networks to generate meaningful conversations, referrals, and career opportunities?
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania asks applicants to provide two short essays concerning their career goals, plus a longer essay, whose focus is on how the applicant’s background will enable them to contribute to the Wharton community. By discussing your professional aspirations as well as your experiences and values, you have the opportunity to provide the admissions committee with a well-rounded impression of yourself, in addition to illustrating your fit with the school.
In our analysis that follows, we provide more in-depth guidance on each of Wharton’s 2026–2027 essay questions. You should also note a major change to its general application that was made last year: Wharton now asks for only one recommendation and will send the form, which includes two standard recommendation questions, to the recommender whose name you enter. This will surely be good news for your recommenders, who no longer need to answer Wharton-specific questions!
Harvard Business School (HBS) offers an excellent MBA program. This is largely a given, and we are not questioning that. However, what we will call into question is whether HBS (or any other school, for that matter) is right for you. Every year, we get a few calls from confused MBA aspirants who say, “I visited HBS, and I am not sure if there is a fit,” as if that indicates some sort of problem. Indeed, and this may be shocking to some, HBS is not for everyone—particularly those who do not relate well to case-based learning, those who want a lot of flexibility in their first-year curriculum, and those who would prefer a small class size (HBS’s Class of 2026 has 930 students, while the same class at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, for example, has just 295).
A first-of-its-kind, on-demand MBA application experience that delivers a personalized curriculum for you and leverages interactive tools to guide you through the entire MBA application process.
