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Last year, INSEAD made just the slightest of changes to its essay approach and questions, but this year, it has made none at all. Candidates must respond to four short career-focused queries and provide three motivation essays that together total 1,200 words. Applicants are also tasked with completing a video component for which they answer four questions as four separate one-minute video recordings. Given the sheer number of prompts, tasks, and questions involved, some applicants may find INSEAD’s essay gauntlet a bit intimidating, if not outright punishing. Read on for our full analysis of the school’s questions, which we hope will make the process a little easier to manage.
Job Description 1: Briefly summarise your current (or most recent) job, including the nature of work, major responsibilities, and where relevant, employees under your supervision, size of budget, clients/products and results achieved. (short answer)
Job Description 2: What would be your next step in terms of position if you were to remain in the same company? (short answer)
Job Description 3: Please give a full description of your career since graduating from university. Describe your career path with the rationale behind your choices. (short answer)
Job Description 4: Discuss your short and long term career aspirations with an MBA from INSEAD. (short answer)
For the school’s job-related short-answer questions (essentially mini essays), we encourage you to start by very carefully parsing exactly what data the school requests for each. Together, these four prompts cover many of the elements seen in a traditional personal statement essay, including info about one’s career to date, interest in the school, and professional goals. However, the topics are clearly separated among individual submissions rather than covered in a cohesive single essay, and INSEAD also asks applicants to comment on their expected progression within their current firm were they to remain there rather than entering business school.
The first prompt requires that you outline roughly six different aspects of your current or most recent position. Be sure that you address each of the elements the school lists, and do not skip any just because you would rather write more about some than others. You may also want to consider providing a very brief description of your company or industry, if the nature of either might not be readily clear to an admissions reader. For the second question, your response should be fairly straightforward. If your firm has a clearly defined management hierarchy in which one position leads directly to a higher one—and you would be interested in adhering to that system—you simply need to explain this and perhaps offer a short description of the new responsibilities your next position would entail. If your company does not have such an arrangement or you would want to move in a different direction, simply explain what your preferred next role would be and the duties involved.
The third prompt is rather self-explanatory with respect to detailing the various stages of your career to date, but do not be remiss in responding to the “rationale” and “choices” aspects of the query. The school wants to know that your progression has not been passive, with your simply accepting the next good thing to come along, but rather that you have made thoughtful decisions with clear motivations and intentions behind them. For the fourth question, you will need to present your professional goals within the context of an INSEAD MBA education. Do your research on the school to identify specific resources it offers that relate directly to the skills and experiences you need to be successful in your career, thereby illustrating how INSEAD would help you achieve your aims. Above all, be sure to show determination and direction—that you are focused firmly on your intended end points and will not be easily deterred.
For all your job description responses, avoid using any acronyms or abbreviations that would not be easily recognizable to most people. Using shortcuts (in the form of abbreviations/acronyms) and skipping basic contextual information could make your answers less understandable and therefore less compelling and useful to an admissions reader, so do yourself a favor by more completely depicting your situation. Also, consider framing your responses to these rather straightforward queries in a narrative format to make them more interesting to the admissions reader, rather than simply outlining the basic information. Strive to incorporate a sense of your personality and individuality into your submissions.
As we have noted, these questions cover many elements of a traditional personal statement, so we encourage you to download a free copy of our mbaMission Personal Statement Guide. In this complimentary publication, we provide a detailed discussion of how to approach such queries and craft effective responses, along with multiple illustrative examples.
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