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Like many top MBA programs this year, London Business School (LBS) has elected to make no changes to its application essay prompts. Except for some slight variations in phrasing and allowed word count, the school has been posing these same questions since 2015, so we presume they have proved effective in providing the additional information about the school’s candidates that the admissions committee seeks. Although LBS strictly requires only one essay—one that largely constitutes a traditional personal statement—you may want to seriously consider submitting the optional essay as well if you feel that doing so will facilitate a fairer or more thorough evaluation of your candidacy. In our analysis, we offer our advice on crafting your approach, whether you ultimately decide to craft just one submission for LBS or two.

Question  1: What are your post-MBA goals and how will your prior experience and the London Business School programme contribute towards these? (500 words)

As we have noted, LBS’s required essay covers several basic elements of a traditional personal statement. You will need to show that you have a long-term vision for yourself and your career and that you have a clear plan for how to get there via the LBS MBA program. The basic assumptions, of course, are that business school is the next logical and necessary step in your progress and that you need to pursue your degree at LBS in particular, because the school provides specific experiences, knowledge, skills, exposure, and/or other elements that are necessary for you to attain your aspirations and thrive in your chosen career. Ideally, you have already researched the program thoroughly to discover these important resources and areas of fit, but if not, do not skip this important step and/or refer only to basic offerings most business schools have. Your essay must be LBS specific. Demonstrating your authentic interest in the program by giving concrete examples and drawing clear connections between what the school offers, what you need, and who you are is key to crafting a compelling essay response here.

Because 500 words is not a lot, avoid going into excessive detail about your past, though you will need to offer enough information to provide context and support for your stated goals. Given this essay’s significant overlap with a standard personal statement, we encourage you to download your free copy of the mbaMission Personal Statement Guide. In this complimentary guide, we present a much more detailed discussion of how to approach and craft this kind of essay, along with multiple illustrative examples.

Question 2 (Optional): Is there any other information you believe the Admissions Committee should know about you and your application to London Business School? (500 words)

Applicants typically use the optional essay to explain confusing or problematic elements of their candidacy—a poor grade or GPA, a low GMAT or GRE score, a gap in work experience, etc.—and LBS’s can certainly be used this way. If you feel you need to clarify an aspect of your profile, first check the other parts of the school’s application, which already includes several opportunities to address certain issues (such as academic performance and disciplinary instances). If you can discuss your concern elsewhere instead, do so, and avoid using this essay to simply repeat any information provided via that avenue. If you have a problem to address that is not mentioned in the LBS application, we suggest downloading a copy of the mbaMission Optional Essays Guide, which is also available for free, and in which we offer detailed advice on deciding whether to take advantage of the optional essay and, if so, how to do so to effectively mitigate any concerning elements of your application.

If you do not feel that your candidacy includes any elements that need further clarification, however, you might use this essay to instead offer a more rounded, positive representation of yourself—but be thoughtful about this opportunity. Do not just copy and paste an existing essay you wrote for a different school here and hope for the best. Take a step back and carefully consider what the admissions committee already knows about you from the other parts of your application, including, of course, your required essay. Then, do your utmost to develop and convey a narrative that is truly crucial to understanding your character. Because this question is so open-ended, your options are somewhat limitless. You will need to honestly check your instincts and ask yourself whether you are simply tacking something extra onto your application with this essay or whether you are offering something that is truly additive and would be helpful for the school to know to fully and fairly evaluate you. Be mindful and respectful of the admissions committee’s time, and remember that each additional file you submit requires more resources on behalf of the admissions office, so whatever you write must be truly worthwhile and clearly reveal that you made good use of this opportunity to provide further insight into your candidacy.

Business schools outside the United States are increasingly popular among MBA hopefuls, and we at mbaMission are proud to offer our latest publications: International Program Guides. In these snapshots we discuss core curriculums, elective courses, locations, school facilities, rankings, and more. Click here to download your free copy of the London Business School Program Guide.

The Next Step—Mastering Your LBS Interview: Many MBA candidates find admissions interviews stressful and intimidating, but mastering this important element of the application process is definitely possible—the key is informed preparation. And, on your way to this high level of preparation, we offer our free Interview Guides to spur you along! Download your free copy of the London Business School Interview Guide today.

Although Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business initially announced the modifications it had made to its application essays in a June 17 blog post, the school has continued to tweak its prompts, so we are updating our analysis to reflect the latest iterations. At the time of this posting, some slight discrepancies still exist in the presentation of the essay questions on Fuqua’s website and in its actual application, so for our analysis, we have elected to use the questions as they appear in the application. In the aforementioned blog post, Assistant Dean of Admissions Allison Jamison comments on how the COVID-19 pandemic has complicated the admissions process, then states, “During this time, we learned the importance of keeping things simple.” As a result, we believe, the admissions committee has truncated its essays and short-answer demands for this season, likely to the relief of the school’s 2020–2021 candidates. Rather than two short-answer essay questions, applicants must respond to only one, and the maximum length for the program’s community engagement essay has been cut from two pages to just 300 words. Fortunately (in our opinion), the school has elected to maintain its distinctive “25 random things” prompt, which we love for the freedom it gives applicants to get creative and paint a well-rounded picture of themselves. Plus, Jamison notes that the admissions committee enjoys reading these essays the most. Our full essay analysis follows. 

Short Answer Question: Short answer questions will allow for 500 characters only – the equivalent of about 100 words.

What are your post-MBA career goals? Share with us your first-choice career plan and your alternate plan. 

With this question, Fuqua is essentially asking for a standard element of a traditional personal statement—one’s short-term career aspirations—with the addition of one rather nonstandard component—the suggestion of an alternative path. Candidates often feel they must be totally unequivocal in their career goals to impress the admissions committee, but in this case, Fuqua is directly instructing applicants to speculate on and articulate multiple options. The school knows that sometimes the best-laid plans do not play out as expected or may even yield unintended results, and it wants to know that you are prepared to switch gears and recommit to a different path, if necessary—and that you are fully capable of doing so. The key in answering this question is showing that your backup goal is just as connected to your skills, interests, and ambitions as your original plan and does not come “out of left field,” so to speak. For example, you would probably have a difficult time convincing the admissions committee that your short-term goal is to work in technology consulting while your alternate goal would be to work in human resources, because these industries, for the most part, require entirely different skills and personalities. Just be mindful that both goals you present must be plausible and achievable.

As we have noted, this question concerns one of the core topics covered in a typical personal statement, so we encourage you to download your free copy of the mbaMission Personal Statement Guide, which helps applicants write this style of essay for any school. This complimentary guide offers detailed advice on approaching and framing these subjects, along with multiple illustrative examples. Be sure to download your complimentary copy today.

Essay 1: The ‘Team Fuqua’ spirit and community is one of the things that sets the MBA experience apart, and it is a concept that extends beyond the student body to include faculty, staff, and administration. Please share with us “25 Random Things” about you. The Admissions Committee wants to get to know YOU – beyond the professional and academic achievements listed in your resume and transcript. Share with us important life experiences, your hobbies, achievements, fun facts, or anything that helps us understand what makes you who you are.

Please do not copy the essay question in the document you upload with your application, and limit your response to 2 pages (750 words maximum). Present your response in list form, numbered 1 to 25. Some points may be brief, while others may be longer.

Be prepared to have fun creating this list for your Fuqua application! Before you start scribbling down random things, though, stop and take some time to thoroughly brainstorm. You cannot simply draft a list of “typical” accomplishments—remember, the school is asking for a random list, and keep in mind that your reader should learn more about you as an individual with each item presented. Make sure that every new story or tidbit of information you share gives the admissions committee a different window into your personality, into what really makes you tick and makes you you. Most important is that you own all the points on your list—that your final list could apply to no one but you. For example, a statement such as “I love the movie Goodfellas and have watched it multiple times” could easily be made by many applicants—therefore, it could not be considered truly yours. However, if you were to instead write, “At least once a year, my friends and I get together to watch our favorite movie, Goodfellas, all wearing dark suits, eating fresh pasta with homemade sauce, and reciting the dialogue line-for-line,” you would present an experience that is unquestionably yours, because few—if any—other candidates would be likely to say this exact same thing.

Although Fuqua does not want you to rehash your professional and academic accomplishments in this list, and you should certainly avoid repeating facts that already appear elsewhere in your application, you can of course still touch on significant moments that occurred in these spheres. Use detail and a narrative style (keeping things brief!) to give these elements life and ensure that they are personal. For example, rather than saying that you “won a creative thinking award for implementing an innovative training solution,” you might write that you “once won an award for instructing trainees to flip their desks upside down and face what was previously the back of the room—thereby creating an exercise to introduce new hires to the concept and value of new perspectives.”

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Like many of the top MBA programs appear to be doing this season, the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) has opted to make no changes to the wording of its application essay prompts—or to its short-answer questions—though it has minimized the space in which its candidates can respond to them. Applicants are now given a 1,050-word total allowance for its required essays (down from 1,150). Although how candidates wish to divide this total between the two is left to them to decide, the school does offer a recommendation of 650 words for the first and 400 for the second. The length allowance for the GSB’s first optional question has been cropped from 1,500 characters to 1,200, but applicants are still invited to share up to three of their most significant accomplishments and experiences. The admissions committee states on the GSB site, “We often find effective essays that are written in fewer words,” so we suspect these word-count cuts might be to ensure that candidates’ submissions are even more streamlined this year than in previous seasons. Our full analysis follows of the school’s two required MBA essay questions as well as its optional prompts. 

Essay A: What matters most to you, and why?  

For this essay, we would like you to reflect deeply and write from the heart. Once you’ve identified what matters most to you, help us understand why. You might consider, for example, what makes this so important to you? What people, insights, or experiences have shaped your perspectives?

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. The GSB itself notes on its essay page, “There is no ‘right answer’ to these questions—the best answer is the one that is truest for you.”

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. 

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Two years ago, the admissions committee at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business completely reworked its MBA application essay questions, but for this season and the last, the school has done only a little fine-tuning. Ostensibly, this indicates that the variety and presentation of the prompts are generating the kind of input the admissions department wants in evaluating its candidates. Applicants must respond to five prompts and do so within a 700-word limit (or 705, if you want to get specific). As a whole, the essays cover candidates’ personal, educational, and career objectives while touching on aspects of Darden’s particular character and ethos—notably, its learning teams, vast international reach, and diversity. Applicants who feel they have still more they need to impart to the admissions committee can take advantage of the school’s 250-word optional essay as well. In this analysis, we offer our best essay advice for the school’s 2020–2021 questions.

Leadership: Darden strives to identify and cultivate responsible leaders who follow their purpose. Please provide an example of a situation in which you have made a meaningful impact. (200 words) 

Darden’s first essay prompt is an interesting hybrid of two questions it posed two seasons ago, one about leadership style and the other about impact. This current presentation cleverly touches on both, the assumption likely being that when you brought about the meaningful result in question, you did so while in an official leadership position or at least when acting in a leadership capacity. Therefore, by describing what you achieved and how you did so, you will naturally also reveal information about your leadership style.

At mbaMission, we love when admissions committees request examples, because they invite essays that use a narrative structure, and we believe such essays tend to be not only more revelatory but also more interesting to read (always good when trying to make an impression on someone who reads literally thousands of essays each year!). To illustrate, you might start by launching directly into your story: “Although I had never led a committee that spanned three departments before, I found myself….” In a Discover Darden blog post, an admissions representative advises, “Our basic advice is to show, don’t tell. Examples are always best,” then cautions, “but do not be so broad as to preclude self-reflection and meaningful insight.” 

Because Darden wants to know about your “impact,” you will have to clearly show the results of your actions, but the admissions committee also wants to understand that the decisions you made and steps you took clearly paid off and that a project, company, organization, individual, or product experienced some kind of change as a result. In other words, in addition to explaining what was achieved and why it was significant, you must illustrate the values, thought process, and initiatives that made it possible. Also, make note of the words “responsible” and “purpose” in this prompt and keep them in mind as you brainstorm ideas for this mini essay. Qualities related to these concepts would be good ones to highlight if they are truly part of your authentic story. 

Diversity: Diversity and inclusion are critical to our mission and they work best when they are an integral and celebrated part of our community. Read the University of Virginia’s Commitment to Diversity. Share a time in which you engaged with a perspective, identity, community, or experience that was different from your own and how it impacted your worldview. (200 words) 

In business school—as in life in general—you will encounter people who think differently from you, operate according to different values, and react differently to the same stimuli. And success in an endeavor often involves considering and incorporating others’ input and standpoints. Via this essay, Darden hopes to learn how you view, approach, and react to such differences. Once enrolled in the school’s MBA program, you will be surrounded every day by people who are unlike you in a multitude of ways, and you will need to work in tandem with and alongside these individuals when analyzing case studies, completing group projects, and participating in other activities both inside and outside the classroom. The school is clearly seeking evidence that you are capable of listening, reflecting, learning, and growing and that you are open and receptive to things beyond your usual frame of reference. And by asking you to share a time when a novel “perspective, identity, community, or experience” changed you in some fundamental way, Darden is requesting actual evidence of this open-mindedness in action. 

To craft an effective essay response, consider using a narrative approach to describe a kind of “before and after” situation or “lightbulb moment” in which your takeaways from the experience influenced your subsequent thoughts, values, and/or actions. Perhaps you were exposed to something completely new that resonated with you and thereafter became a fundamental part of your mores or a routine practice in your life. Or maybe an experience challenged one of your existing beliefs and altered your opinion or stance in a significant way. Keep in mind, however, that the admissions committee is much more interested in your willingness and capacity to learn and grow than in the specific kind of change you experienced.

Learning Team: Tell us what you would want your learning team to know about you – personal, professional, or both? (100 words) 

Before you start writing, do some background work on what a learning team is, its purpose, and how it functions. At Darden, learning teams are carefully selected groups of five to six students, assembled with the intent of creating an eclectic mix of personalities and backgrounds. This group meets in the evenings, Sunday through Thursday, to tackle the next day’s case work together (and if you are not familiar with the case method, now is the time to do your homework on it as well!). Learning teams are a core element of the Darden experience, in part because some cases are so voluminous that students must take a divide-and-conquer approach and teach one another the material. In short, learning teams are intense and complex, requiring strong teamwork skills and contributions but capable of providing support and camaraderie as students work their way through Darden’s notoriously challenging first year. 

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Last month, in a joint mbaMission–Manhattan Prep webinar featuring admissions directors from five top business schools, we were informed that the Yale School of Management (SOM) does not expect to make any changes to its application essay prompts this year. So in hopes of helping any candidates who wish to get started on their essays sooner rather than later (and we always encourage starting as early as your schedule will permit), we are posting our advice on how to approach the school’s questions now. If by chance the admissions committee elects to change the questions after all, we will revisit and update this post accordingly.

The Yale School of Management (SOM), like Harvard Business School, takes a bit of a “go big or go home” approach with its sole application essay prompt in that it gives applicants just one shot to make their desired impression on the admissions committee. The Yale SOM query is less open-ended, however, and requires candidates to focus on a significant past commitment and its underlying reasons and value. The  essay is limited to just 500 words, so you will need to be clear, direct, and rather succinct in your response, without much preamble or extraneous text. Read on for our full analysis.

Describe the biggest commitment you have ever made. (500 words maximum)

In a Yale SOM blog post about the school’s essay prompt when it was originally introduced (in 2016), Assistant Dean for Admissions Bruce DelMonico noted that the “seemingly simple and straightforward question” was composed with assistance from one of the program’s organizational behavior professors. Yale’s admissions committee clearly takes the application essay seriously and is thoughtful about the types of behaviors it wants to see in the school’s students. In an online Q&A session with several leading admissions officers we hosted in 2018, Bruce declared himself “agnostic” about whether applicants should discuss a personal commitment or a professional one, noting that he wants to gauge the level to which candidates commit themselves, rather than the context of the engagement: “We don’t have a preference for professional or personal accomplishments. . . . We are not making value judgments about what that commitment is, but it is more about how you approach that commitment, how you have demonstrated that commitment, and what sorts of behaviors underlie that commitment.”

You may initially think this prompt is rather narrow in scope, allowing you space to relate the story of just a single professional or community project and nothing more. Although you can certainly discuss your dedication to a particular project or cause, 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 admissions committee. For example, you might present 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 use the example of personal liberty as a theme, you could show how you take control of your academic and professional paths, adhering steadfastly to your values and 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.

If you elect to focus on a single anecdote, the commitment you claim must be truly inordinate. Being particularly proud of an accomplishment is not enough to make it an effective topic for this essay. You need to demonstrate your constancy and dedication in the face of challenges or resistance, revealing that your connection to the experience was hard won. Strive to show that you have been resolute in following a sometimes difficult path and have doggedly stayed on course, citing clear examples to illustrate your steadfastness. Nothing commonplace will work here—you must make your reader truly understand your journey and leave them more impressed by your effort than the outcome.

Within its application, the Yale SOM also poses the following question:

How did you arrive at these career interests? How have you or how will you position yourself to pursue them? (250 words maximum)

Although this is not presented by the school as an official essay question, its length (at 250 words) and topic lead us to feel a little guidance might be helpful with this submission. Here, the admissions committee is essentially asking for context for your professional aspirations, which typically involves some level of information about your work history, and wants to learn how you expect to use the Yale SOM experience and degree to move your forward on your path to achieving your goals.

Keep in mind that the admissions committee will already have your resume on hand to review, and this should provide the basic information as far as your previous positions/titles, responsibilities, and accomplishments. What the school is looking for here is the more personal side of the story—what has motivated you along the way and is motivating you still, prodding you to pursue an MBA as part of your efforts to continue on your chosen professional path. In an application tips blog post, Kate Botelho, associate director of admissions at the Yale SOM, offers this advice when considering your response: “You may want to think about the answers to questions such as ‘How did these interests develop?’ ‘What kind of exposure have you had to them?’ ‘What steps have you already taken to explore these interests?’ ‘What enables you to pursue them successfully?’”

Given that this prompt essentially covers some of the elements found in a typical traditional personal statement essay, we encourage you to download a free copy of the mbaMission Personal Statement Guide, which offers in-depth advice on how to address these sorts of topics and provides examples.

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