Essays That Worked for Business Schools 40 Essays from Successful Applications to the Nation's Top Business Schools

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AN INTERVIEW with an ADMISSIONS OFFICER Although different schools attach different levels of importance to the application essays, and although each school may be looking for a slightly different type of student, admissions officers have surprisingly similar desires. They want brevity. They want sincerity. They want mature enthusiasm. And a little humorwhen it's truly humorousdoesn't hurt. But as we perused the application questions and tried to compose our own answers, we found ourselves asking a number of questions. How "business-like" should we be? How much can we joke around? Can we relax and be the readers' chum, or should we treat them like clients? Should we tell them what they want to hear, or should we be totally honest, even at the risk of being boring? We asked these and other questions to dozens of admissions officers at almost every major business school in the country. The following is a condensed version of those interviews: What's the difference between application essays for business school and the essays we wrote to get into college? The main difference is the way the author presents himself. What we ask of a college graduate is much more difficult than what colleges ask of a high school senior. And it should be. We don't want applicants to simply give a self-absorbed description of themselves, like they did for their college application. Rather, we want them to describe the world they see around them, and their place in it. An analogy we like to use around here is that with the essay, a student fashions a lens for us to view the world. From looking at the quality of that lens, we hope to judge the quality of its maker. When we finish an essay, we expect to have learned something about the applicant and an industry or management or business. If an applicant has worked in a steel plant, for example, it should be interesting to see his understanding of the problems in the indus- try. What kind of management problems has he observed, and how would he change things? You can't expect that type of analysis from undergraduates. We also expect more maturity for business school. That's partly a function of agewe're often dealing with people in their late 20's or 30'sbut it's also an issue of direction. Undergraduates are coming to school to explore. It's hard to justify giving one of a few MBA spots to someone who is not pretty committed to a business career. Do you want a description of a person or just his accomplishments? We want an essay that brings the whole set of numbers into a coherent form. We want inconsistencies explained, and we want to see diverse activities as different facets of a single personality. We'd like to be able to say, "Oh, he did that, yeah, that makes sense. That fits with what we have." Both the performer and his track record should be discussed, so that we can know the person underneath all the accomplishments, and also how those activities affected that person. An applicant could discuss, for example, how his jobs at a computer firm and at a wholesale food distributor will help him make grocery stores more efficient. Or how working in a defense firm led him to see the need for military procurement reforms. Are there any hackneyed topics that applicants should avoid? I would be lying if I said we dive enthusiastically into the drama of every investment banker's grueling program, but most of our questions are very personalized and no two people have exactly the same experience. Since we ask fairly specific questions, most answers are in the same vein, but we still get a good mix of ideas. The similarity in topics is not what makes essays dulland most of them cert