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For this application season, Northwestern Kellogg has elected to keep its same essay questions. The first deals with a leadership experience that resulted in some form of ongoing merit, while the second focuses on applicants’ guiding principles. Interestingly, both of Kellogg’s essays center on “value(s)” but in very different ways, according to two separate definitions of the term. As such, Kellogg’s questions seem to address two key aspects of business today, and candidates will need to demonstrate their awareness of both and potential to fulfill them. For more guidance on how to interpret and approach the school’s essay and video prompts for 2020–2021, read on.

Required Essay 1: Kellogg’s purpose is to educate, equip, and inspire brave leaders who create lasting value. Provide a recent example where you have demonstrated leadership and created value. What challenges did you face, and what did you learn? (450 words) 

This is a fairly straightforward essay prompt, and we recommend responding in an equally straightforward manner. Launch directly into the story of your leadership experience, and detail the specific actions you took in directing others to achieve some kind of enduring result. The key here is to show that you shared a valuable experience with colleagues, extracted the most from your team members, and attained a desired outcome. Although we often note that not all great leadership stories necessarily have to end in success, Kellogg’s request for evidence of “lasting value” certainly implies that the school wants to hear about a situation that had a positive resolution. You will need to convey not only your role in spearheading a group to achieve what you did but also how that achievement has persisted.

Note that Kellogg does not specify that the experience you share must be related to your workplace or career. Leadership does not need to have an official title attached to it, and it can be expressed in a community service or even family life setting just as much as in a workplace, so explore all the different areas of your life for possible stories. We recommend using a narrative approach to present your story, but be sure to also share the thought process and motivation(s) behind your actions. This way, the admissions committee will take away a clear picture not only of what you accomplished but also of the aspects of your character that inspired you and helped enable your success.

That said, the school acknowledges within the prompt that even endeavors that have a positive result are rarely smooth sailing from beginning to end—hence the question about challenges faced. A mistake applicants often make in writing this kind of essay is presenting a strong narrative in which they are incredible leaders, and then near the end, making a brief (and typically disjointed) reference to a hardship or conflict encountered along the way, meant to fulfill the “challenges” element of the essay query. To be effective and believable, your ups and downs must be woven intrinsically into your narrative, rather than simply acknowledged at the end. Clearly explaining how you approached and prevailed over the challenge at hand is crucial, so go beyond simply describing the roadblock itself and ensure that you detail your response and the inner workings of your decision making at that point.

Lastly, do not forget or neglect to explain what you learned from the experience—Kellogg specifically asks you to do so! And keep in mind that for your takeaways to be “meaningful,” they have to be profoundly connected to your narrative. The admissions reader should be able to easily understand the connection between the situation you describe and your subsequent learnings.

Required Essay 2: Values are what guide you in your life and work. What values are important to you and how have they influenced you? (450 words)

Kellogg offers another very straightforward essay question here, so not a lot of interpretation is needed. On its FAQ page, the admissions committee states that it is “interested in learning about your values,” so a frank query on the topic only makes sense. Kellogg wants to know how your values influence your decisions and actions, and in particular, which ones tend to guide you most often or intensely. Simply stating that you embrace certain values is easy, so the admissions committee is understandably asking for illustrations of this phenomenon to better gauge this for itself. Having an idea of how you tend to incorporate your core beliefs into your life will help the school better envision how you might fit into its classrooms and the business world after you graduate.

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Once again, Columbia Business School (CBS) is offering applicants a combination of old and new essay questions. Its short-answer goal statement remains unchanged, as has its first essay prompt—which is also about candidates’ career aspirations. Likewise, the school’s second essay question still asks applicants to discuss why they want an MBA from CBS in particular. For the third essay, though, candidates no longer have to frame their values within the context of an admired leader but are instead tasked with revealing key elements of their personalities and lives through the selection of a cherished book, movie, or song. Our more detailed analysis of the program’s 2020–2021 questions follows.

Short Answer Question: What is your immediate post-MBA professional goal? (Maximum 50 Characters)

CBS applicants accustomed to Twitter’s 280-character allowance may find CBS’s 50-character limit here more than a little challenging—especially considering that it includes spaces! To get a sense of how brief your opportunity really is, note that the school’s prompt is itself exactly 50 characters. With such a limit, this can hardly be considered a true essay, but you will of course need to approach it with the same level of thought and focus you give all your other written responses for CBS. During a Q&A mbaMission conducted with several top admissions officers, Assistant Dean of Admissions Amanda Carlson commented,

That 50 characters really helps people to just break it down very simply for themselves and simply for us . . . . Pursuing business education, it’s a huge investment in time, in money, in effort, in energy, and I think this 50-character exercise is as much for the candidate as it is for our team, and we want to know that people are serious, they’re focused, and they’re ready for this kind of adventure.

So, this prompt is a no-nonsense request for information that is all about getting to the point and telling the admissions committee what it needs to know—that you have a clear and achievable goal. In the past, the school has provided a few sample responses, including “Work in business development for a media company” and “Join a strategy consulting firm,” illustrating that conveying the requested information in such a tight space is definitely doable and that you do not need to worry too much about grammatical issues (in other words, you do not need to start your statement with “I want to” or something similar). We like to offer the statement “Reveal true goals, not what you think CBS wants” as both our own example of keeping things concise and our advice on how to approach and fulfill this request. 

Think about what you really want to do with your career in the short term and state this aspiration directly. Keep in mind that the rest of your application will need to provide evidence that your stated goal aligns with your existing skills and profound interests, especially once they have been augmented by an MBA education. This will show that your professed goal is achievable and lend credibility to your statement. If you can do this in 50 characters (not words!), you will have done what you need to answer the school’s question quite well.

Essay #1: Through your resume and recommendations, we have a clear sense of your professional path to date. What are your career goals over the next 3-5 years and what, in your imagination, would be your long-term dream job? (500 words)

CBS starts this essay question by more or less telling you not to recap your career to date, so we strongly recommend that you do so (and briefly, at that) only if context is absolutely needed for your stated goals to be understood and/or believable—perhaps if you are making a fairly remarkable career change. Pay particular attention to the phrases “dream job” and “in your imagination” with respect to the long-term portion of the question. The school is prompting you to be creative and perhaps even to challenge or push yourself to think big. CBS wants individuals who do not just follow prescribed paths according to someone else’s blueprint but who are aspirational and more inclined to forge their own way. This is not to suggest that if you have a more traditional plan in mind that you are in trouble or at risk of losing the admissions committee’s attention, but you may need to take a little extra time to consider your ambitions from the perspective of “what if?” and delve more deeply into what you hope to achieve to find the more personal and inspiring elements of your goals. Showing creativity and individualism here can only be helpful.

Although this is not a request for a textbook personal statement essay, your response will certainly involve some elements of the topics covered in such a submission, such as short- and long-term goals. The mbaMission Personal Statement Guide offers advice on brainstorming and crafting such essays along with multiple illustrative examples and so may be helpful in preparing your CBS response to this prompt. You can download your free copy here.

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The admissions committee at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan has made some adjustments to its essay prompts for this season, though the changes primarily affect how much space candidates have to respond rather than the nature of the information they are asked to provide. Ross seems to be taking a very no-nonsense, just-the-facts approach to their application essays (even the scope of the optional essay has been narrowed). For the school’s short answers, the individual prompts are actually the same, but they have been sorted into two groups, rather than three, and applicants now need to submit only two short essays of 100 words each. Ross’s 200-word (down from 300) career essay again asks applicants to share and explain their short-term professional aspirations, thereby showing that they have a plan in mind and have given serious thought to why they need a Ross MBA to achieve their goal. Our full analysis of the program’s 2020–2021 essay prompts follows.

Part 1: Short Answers (choose one from each group; 100 words each)

Group 1

I want people to know that I:
I made a difference when I:
I was aware that I was different when:

Group 2

I was/am out of my comfort zone when:*
I was humbled when:
I was challenged when:

*Both wordings of this prompt appear on the Michigan Ross website (“I was out of my comfort zone when” and “I am out of my comfort zone when”). We were able to confirm with the admissions office that candidates may respond to either version, as they wish.

When Ross’s short-answer prompts were first introduced, Soojin Kwon, the managing director of full-time MBA admissions, explained in a blog post, “[We want to] get to know more about you than we would in a traditional essay where you’d talk at length about one topic.” She stressed this idea again last year, and in a recent post, elaborated further by stating, “The most interesting and insightful responses to these prompts remain when applicants share personal examples that allow us to learn more about who you are as a person, and what unique experiences and insights you would bring to the MBA class.” Clearly, the admissions committee hopes these mini essays will reveal distinctive facets of applicants’ personalities in a straightforward manner, unencumbered by extraneous text. Given the mere 100-word maximum for each, you might be tempted to just jump in and start writing, but thinking strategically about who you are as an applicant is critical here. 

We encourage you to first consider very carefully which option of each group feels most authentic to and revelatory of who you are as an individual. Then, thoroughly and thoughtfully brainstorm to identify your strongest possible responses. You want to be able to “own” your answer—as we like to say—meaning that no other applicant could write the same thing as you do. Using the second prompt of the first group as an example (“I made a difference when I…”), writing something like “gave back to my community by volunteering with the local homeless shelter” would be far too general a response and could likely be stated by multiple applicants. Instead, something much more specific like “dedicated every Saturday morning for three years to helping cook and serve breakfast at the local homeless shelter, where I also instituted a bulk-shopping plan that saved hundreds of dollars each year on supplies” would stand out for its originality and paint a clearer picture of the candidate who wrote it with respect to their values, dedication, and fiscal creativity. In addition, using a narrative approach is a good way to paint a dynamic picture of how you conduct yourself and to engage your reader with a compelling story that has a clear beginning, middle, and end. If you choose to simply discuss a trait without a narrative, you could risk sounding as though you are bragging, and this would be a wasted opportunity for the admissions reader to get to know you in more depth.

When you are done writing, take a look at your responses and see if they are complementary of one another. If they seem repetitive or focus on the same general idea, story, or area of your life, you will likely want to rewrite one. Your goal is to have each response reveal something new and interesting about you. Another factor to consider is everything the admissions committee will already know about you from the other portions of your application; you do not want to miss this chance to paint a well-rounded picture of yourself by repeating information available elsewhere in your profile. 

So, to recap, strive to make sure your responses (1) genuinely reflect who you are as a candidate and are as specific to you alone as possible; (2) present a narrative that allows the reader to walk in your shoes, so to speak; (3) are complementary of each other, with each one revealing something different about you; and (4) do not discuss a part of your profile that is already well explained or represented in a different part of your application.

​Part 2: Career Goal Essay (200 words)

Michigan Ross is a place where people from all backgrounds with different career goals can thrive. What is your short-term career goal and why?

With just 200 words, you do not have any space to waste here, so focus on presenting your answer as directly and thoroughly as possible—and give the admissions committee what it wants! For further clarification, in the aforementioned blog post, Kwon wrote, “We found that the best responses to this essay were clear and succinct. The ones that were less successful tended to be less focused or focused too much on the ‘what’ and not enough on the ‘why.’ For the AdCom, the ‘why’ is the most impactful and differentiating aspect of each essay to me.”

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On Thursday, May 21, mbaMission joined forces with Manhattan Prep to host an online Q&A session with admissions directors from five leading business schools: Columbia Business School (CBS), the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, the Yale School of Management, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management. During the discussion, each of the directors announced that application deadlines and essay questions will remain virtually unchanged for the coming (2020–2021) admissions season. Yale, Darden, MIT, and Kellogg leadership explained that they are content with the essay prompts from the past year and anticipate no major changes, encouraging applicants to get started. However, the assistant dean of admissions at CBS stated that she expected her school’s essays to be similar but noted that she may change the school’s third essay, encouraging applicants to get started on the first two. 

We recommend that you watch the full recording of the webinar below or on our YouTube channel to get the inside scoop on everything the admissions directors shared.

Although essays and deadlines dominated the early part of the session, the admissions officers inevitably discussed hot topics including deferrals, fall 2020 matriculation, and the expectations for online GMAT GRE testing. Here are a few highlights and revelations:

• In response to the question, “What will the fall term look like?,” there was a consensus among the admissions directors that both in-person and hybrid options will be offered in an effort to provide flexibility to those who will not be able to attend classes in person.
• Accepted candidates who may wish to defer their matriculation to the following year (2021–2022) were reminded that each institution will make deferral decisions on a case-by-case basis and were encouraged to contact the Admissions Office for more information on the various options in place for them.
• A popular question from the event’s participants addressed the waiving of GMAT/GRE testing requirements during the current Round 3 Extended cycle and whether next year’s applicants can expect this waiver to remain in place. In short, the directors explained that though each institution will offer flexible options for test takers (such as taking the exam from home), there are no definite plans to continue waiving the testing requirements, as test centers are expected to reopen with time.

Each and every one of our panelists sounded an optimistic tone, encouraging strong candidates to continue to apply. Our thanks go out to these experienced officers who led a very exciting and insightful discussion! 

If you have any questions about your MBA candidacy in Round 3 or the upcoming application season, be sure to sign up for a free 30-minute consultation to get personalized advice from one of mbaMission’s admissions experts!

In an unexpected (to us, anyway) move, the admissions committee at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has elected to change its essay prompts for the upcoming application season after all, though the adjustment is nuanced and, in our opinion, works in candidates’ favor. Taken together, the school’s prompts still essentially ask applicants to describe a kind of give-and-take with respect to their engagement with its MBA program. Question 1 asks what Wharton can do for you, and question 2 focuses on what you can do for Wharton. Your greatest assets in approaching both essays will be your knowledge of the school and the level of detail you infuse into your essays. Be knowledgeable, be authentic, and be thorough, and you should be well positioned to submit persuasive essays. Read on for more guidance on each question individually.

Essay 1: What do you hope to gain professionally from the Wharton MBA? (500 words)

In a mere 500 words, you must discuss your career goals—giving very brief context for why they are realistic for you—and illustrate 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 availing yourself of these offerings. To effectively do this and write a reasoned, nuanced essay, you must first familiarize yourself with Wharton’s various resources and pinpoint those that truly pertain to you and the direction in which you hope to head. Go the extra mile in learning about the school—connect with multiple students and alumni, attend admissions events in your area, and especially, visit the campus (if at all possible). This will provide the kind of in-depth insight that will show the admissions committee you are really serious about Wharton and are confident you belong there. Simply presenting a list of classes and clubs you think sound interesting will not suffice, and absolutely avoid vague, pandering statements about how great the school is. You must reveal clear connections between your aspirations, what you need to achieve them (e.g., skills, experience[s], connections, exposure), and what Wharton in particular can provide that will enable you to fill those gaps.

Note that Wharton asks you to address only the professional aspect—not the professional and personal aspect—of your business school goals. This means you should focus solely on sharing your career-related stories and ambitions here and then use the other essay(s) to discuss non-work aspects of your life, thereby providing a more complete and well-rounded picture of yourself for the admissions committee.

In many ways, this prompt is asking for a typical MBA personal statement. We therefore encourage you to download your free copy of the mbaMission Personal Statement Guide. This complimentary guide offers detailed advice on approaching and framing these subjects, along with multiple illustrative examples. Be sure to claim your copy today.

Essay 2: Taking into consideration your background – personal, professional, and/or academic – how do you plan to make specific, meaningful contributions to the Wharton community? (400 words)  

Although this prompt is clearly worded differently from the one Wharton posed last season, at its heart, the question is meant to elicit largely the same kind of information. By disconnecting your anticipated contribution from a specific “impactful experience or accomplishment” and what you learned from it, the school has significantly broadened the scope of material from which you can pull. This makes sense, given that in a recent blog post, Director of Admissions Blair Mannix explained, “Our main goal is to get to know you the best that we can, and the change to our second prompt was largely motivated by that desire.” The question’s increased breadth also allows you to provide a more rounded impression of yourself because you can discuss more than one aspect of or story from your life. However, the word count remains fairly restrictive, so you would need to be concise in doing so, without sacrificing effectiveness or thoroughness. 

We recommend using approximately one-half of your allowed word count to describe your chosen experience or quality, so that you will have sufficient space in which to then explain how it will enable you to contribute to the Wharton community in a meaningful way. Do your best to “show,” or really spell out, your story—rather than just flatly presenting or stating it—to give the admissions reader some perspective and context. You will then need to demonstrate both self-awareness and a thorough understanding of the Wharton MBA experience by drawing connections between this aspect of your background and what you can subsequently bring the school as a member of its community. For example, a past project may have given you some valuable insights and skills you could now pass on to your classmates in a related class or club. Or maybe a personal challenge gave you an interesting new perspective on commitment, determination, or other valuable quality. What is most important in this essay is conveying how you envision applying the knowledge or quality you can offer as a student in the Wharton program. 

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