Ranked the best business school in Italy and one of the best in Europe, SDA Bocconi is a top choice for internationally-minded professionals looking to advance their careers.
However, with a strong finance program and one of the world’s best luxury management programs, getting into Bocconi is no easy task.
That’s why we’ve prepared this guide to help you use your Bocconi admissions essays to stand out. We’ve rounded up our best tips and links to Bocconi MBA sample essays to ensure you give your Bocconi application your best shot.
1. Who is Bocconi looking for?
Source: @sda_bocconi on Instagram
“At SDA Bocconi, we look for motivated and goal-oriented applicants who aspire to get as much as possible out of the program. Each year our aim is to build a dynamic cohort, so we look for candidates who have something unique to contribute. New ideas, perspectives, and energy.” Bocconi Admissions
Every year, Bocconi searches the globe (38 countries are represented in the Class of 2024) for outstanding professionals who are given the honor of joining its cohort of around 100 students. With a strong emphasis on diversity, there is no “typical” Bocconi student, yet the average admitted student does have an average of 6 years of work experience and 29 years of age.
Bocconi is looking for candidates who are “driven by a willingness to grow as a manager and as a person by investing in new opportunities, responsibilities and ethical values.”
If this sounds like a community in which you’d be right at home, you’ll first have to prove you’ve got what it takes by successfully answering Bocconi’s admissions essay questions.
2. How should I answer the Bocconi essay questions?
Writing any admissions essay is a tough task. However, with the right tips, you’ll be well on your way to crafting essays that get you admitted to SDA Bocconi’s MBA program.
2.1. Essay 1 Tips
What interests and occupations do you pursue in your free time? (280 words)
Here, we suggest choosing a few different activities you currently participate in (or have meaningfully participated in previously).
These can be a range of activities, from hobbies to community service to sports, etc. If you can, try to choose activities that reinforce you’re a globally-minded, team-oriented person and use this space to highlight new elements of your profile that you did not discuss elsewhere.
No matter what you choose, you must justify how each activity has enriched you.
You don’t have to get overly dramatic here and state that soccer saved your life (if it did, though, write about that!), but make sure to show a mature, thoughtful analysis of how this activity has led you to grow as a person.
2.2. Essay 2 Tips
What do you think you gained from your university studies? Conversely, what important things do you think your studies lacked? (280 words)
Focusing on self-awareness, this prompt specifically asks you to discuss improvements gained during your university studies and gaps relevant to your professional goals.
As such, first select a few areas you mastered during college. For instance, to evidence your technical skills, you could mention winning a university engineering contest, telling us the story of what happened and the proficiencies you earned and demonstrated during that engagement.
Try to ensure that each respective proficiency or acquired knowledge is grounded in a specific illustration of how they were actively acquired through your own engagement with university resources and life.
Then, after demonstrating what you gained from your studies, identify a couple of gaps where your degree offered limited exposure to relevant skills. For example, you could talk about how university offered a wealth of technical knowledge but little experience in soft skills like conflict mediation. When discussing specifics about what your studies lacked, emphasize their importance – how are they critical to your chosen professional trajectory?
When selecting what you gained during your studies and the things you lacked, make sure your essay flows logically from one point to another. A random collection of unrelated stories or contradictory takeaways will be difficult and confusing to read.
2.3. Essay 3 Tips
Explain the most significant goals you think you have achieved so far and the reasons for their importance in your personal growth. (280 words)
For this essay, you will want to choose 2-3 goals that mark a particular personal development, milestone, or turning point. Each achieved goal should be contextualized with a condensed STAR-formatted story, as communicating their significance depends upon articulating their specific situation and the actions you took to achieve them.
Please remember that this essay calls for goals important to your personal growth. Goals primarily important for your professional advancement should not be used here.
Finally, when detailing your personal growth, draw out specific qualities or a particular mindset rather than a vague sense of personal progression. For example, stating that an achieved goal taught you to view unexpected problems as invigorating challenges rather than catastrophes is a much more textured look at your personal development. Even when focusing on qualities such as resilience or optimism, you should articulate what that specifically means to you.
Need more guidance?
Our MBA Resource Center has dozens of essays that worked to get our clients admitted to help you plan out a winning Bocconi essay. Our library also includes guides for all top global MBA programs, detailed essay brainstorms, interview tips and mocks, CV templates, and recommendation letter guides. Click to join!
2.4. Essay 4 Tips
Describe your strong points, personal and professional, explaining why you see them as such. (280 words)
For this essay, we suggest a few strong points spread over both your personal and professional aspects to provide a broader perspective of who you are. Your strong points should not be a random assortment of positive qualities but connected strengths that form the foundation for your identity.
In this sense, we suggest a robust theme that integrates with and connects to your characteristics in order to produce an interesting, cohesive essay. It will also help you discuss what led you to develop your unique characteristics!
For example, your defined identity as an innovation leader could connect creative thinking, a commitment to diversity, and your unshakeable optimism as facets of your ability to generate out-of-the-box solutions in high-stakes situations by leveraging the different perspectives of your team members.
When describing your strong points, illustrate them with specific examples where your strengths played a decisive role. They should not be inert qualities but dynamic skills that you employ to great effect.
Finally, ensure that your strong points do not clash with the weaknesses you will outline in the next essay. We suggest planning all of your points and examples for this essay and the following one (Essay 5) to eliminate conflicts.
2.5. Essay 5 Tips
Describe your weak points, personal and professional, explaining why you see them as such. (280 words)
As a direct companion to Essay 4, this essay calls for your personal and professional weak points. Please (please!) do not use a fake or made-up weakness. Your weakness should be thoughtful yet appropriate for business school.
Talking about how you often fight with superiors, for example, is not appropriate for business school since the experience is inherently collaborative and teamwork driven, so make sure you don’t build an argument that you have a hard time relating to others. Furthermore, answers like losing your temper easily or being lazy are not good choices.
You also don’t want to stray too far to the other side, choosing answers like “I work too hard.” Instead, choose real, well-considered weaknesses and include information about why this personal trait is a weakness.
For example, if you tend to get lost in the details, show the adcom that this has led to negative feedback at work, where you’re increasingly asked to take care of your team’s big-picture responsibilities.
Finally, end by showing how you are working on this weakness. The important thing here is not to show you are a “perfect” person, but to show them that you are mature, self-aware, and focused on self-improvement.
2.6. Essay 6 Tips
What are the reasons that lead you to apply to the Program at this point in your life? (280 words)
This essay asks you to consider your past experience, your general aim for the future, and how you are at the correct stage in your career for Bocconi to help you achieve those aims.
Paramount to your essay should be establishing your motivation for applying to the program. Ideally, your motivation will be grounded in both personal stakes and a realistic professional track with timely, practical considerations. For example, you might start by portraying the childhood origins of your personal investment in the natural world. Then, you could articulate how that personal investment manifested into a professional career focused on sustainability, complete with a story that grounds your motivation in a specific professional context.
Once you consolidate your motivation and experience, you need to explain your future aims in order to set up why you are applying to the program to achieve them. Do not include a detailed short-term and long-term goals statement here, as those are called for in Essay 9 and Essay 10.
Rather, this should be a brief statement that allows you to transition into the considerations for the timing of your application. If, for example, you need to move into a management position to realize your ambitions, you should state why now is the right time to earn your degree to make that transition. In other words, you should outline how it is the correct stage in your career to both be prepared for and fully maximize the benefits of the MBA at Bocconi.
Lastly, the connections you draw to Bocconi should be one or two general takeaways, as a more granular look at what the program has to offer will be included in Essay 9.
2.7. Essay 7 Tips
What other possibilities have you seriously considered, apart from the Program, for reaching your goals of personal and professional growth? (280 words)
This essay requires an exploration of 2-3 other options for you to reach your goals and a rationale for why each is a viable alternative to the program. These other possibilities should effectively be different pathways that still ultimately connect to your goals – it is important that your alternatives don’t contradict your primary goals.
If, for example, your primary goal focuses on moving away from operational processes into a more strategic, managerial role, your alternatives should not involve advancing further into purely operational capacities. Rather, a more viable possibility would perhaps involve a lateral move into a related field with more potential for strategic responsibilities.
2.8. Essay 8 Tips
Where do you wish to pursue your profession after receiving the MBA? (drop down menu) Why? (280 words)
First, make sure that the answer you include here is 100% aligned with the goals you detail below. If essays 9 and 10 state you want to return to your home country of Bahrain, for example, don’t put here that you want to pursue your career in Italy. This type of inconsistency will severely damage your application.
Since you have quite a lot of space dedicated to describing what your goals are below, you don’t need to rewrite your goals here. Instead, focus specifically on what is motivating you to pursue your goals in one region as compared to another.
For example, if you’re planning to go back to Brazil after graduation to play a role in using technology to revolutionize the country’s agricultural industry, make sure you mention why you are so passionate about returning home and being part of this change.
On the other hand, if you’re planning to move to a new region, you must explicitly state why you want to switch geographies and why this new geography is more advantageous for you and your goals.
Here is an example where our client Ana described the motivations behind her interest in pursuing her post-MBA goals in the UK.
“After graduating, I plan to take advantage of my connections to Blackstone’s UK office and become a senior associate or manager at a British real estate company. I want to learn from the country’s best asset-management practices, retrofit strategies, solutions to generate comfort for tenants and residents, and communications practices to investors to show transparency and confidence.
The UK real estate market is more structured than that of my home country. For example, UK’s public real estate companies have an impressive dynamic of buying and selling assets in a liquid market and can focus on generating portfolio value, are accessible to any private investor wanting to hold shares, and are able to promote renewable energies. Additionally, I expect to benefit from the UK real estate market’s numerous technology startups.”
TOP TIP: Mentioning that you can simply make more money in the “new” location won’t cut it here, so make sure your reasoning goes beyond this.
2.9. Essay 9 Tips
What are your short-term professional goals (within the next 3-5 years)? (280 words)
As one of the most important essays you’ll write, Bocconi’s ninth essay is a classic goals essay.
It is important, however, to keep in mind that Bocconi has deliberately been very clear about what they want here: short-term and medium-term goals only.
For your short-term goal, consider the job you hope to have immediately upon graduating from Bocconi. For your medium-term goal, we would suggest 3-5 years after you finish your MBA as a guide.
When discussing your goals, clarity is king, so make sure you include a job title and industry in your description of your post-MBA aspiration.
However, goals without context can be a little confusing to decipher or understand (or they can just seem a bit lackluster). For example, a client last year initially started his essay by saying:
“I want to become a Business Development Director at a Brazilian company.”
While interesting, it’s better to give a little bit of context to help these goals come to life. Check out the final version of the same essay’s introduction:
“In the 1970s, the phrase “think global, act local” came into use, suggesting that for the world to change, one must be active locally. With this mindset, I focused my career on Brazilian multinational companies to start creating global change at home. I now seek to take the next step to become a “glocal” leader by becoming Business Development Director at a Brazilian company.”
After clearly stating your goal (and your motivations for having this goal), meaningfully touch on how Bocconi can help you achieve these goals.
This should not be a “laundry list” of 10 classes you found on the Bocconi site, nor a section in which you repeat clichés about the school. Instead, you should thoughtfully consider how you must grow personally and professionally to reach your stated short-term goal and what elements of Bocconi (classes, faculty, clubs, etc.) will help you reach them.
Ending your essay with a killer conclusion sentence to leave your reader with a strong image of your profile is the perfect wrap-up.
2.10. Essay 10 Tips
What are your long-term professional goals? (280 words)
With this short answer question, Bocconi essentially has asked you to finish the story you started sharing in Essay 10. Furthermore, they have deliberately been very clear about what they want here: long-term goals only.
When discussing your goals, clarity is king, so make sure you include a job title and industry in your description of your post-MBA aspiration.
After clearly stating your goal, you should dedicate a bit of space to discussing what motivates you to pursue these goals and the impact you hope to make with these goals.
Since you might have additional space, you may also want to include a few ways in which the Bocconi MBA can help you reach this long-term goal specifically.
Ending your essay with a killer conclusion sentence to leave your reader with a strong image of your profile is the perfect wrap-up.
2.11. Essay 11 Tips
How do you expect to finance your Program studies? (280 words)
The Bocconi admissions committee wants to make sure that candidates they accept have a financial plan in place that ensures they will have the funding they need for their MBAs.
As such, the best answer here is straightforward. You don’t need to write a long essay here, but can instead simply outline how you plan to pay for your degree. Make sure to include information about savings and loans you plan to obtain.
Lastly, if you have good reasons for needing financial assistance, it is always a good idea to include this in your essay. Often, our clients mention that they are putting their savings towards supporting their families/spouses or do not have enough savings to pay for the MBA due to currency devaluation. While you don’t want to imply that you can’t attend if you don’t get a scholarship, providing insight into why a scholarship would be helpful, based on your financial situation, would be appropriate for this essay.
3. Worried you won’t get into your dream school?
You’ve built an impressive career and worked hard to get to this point, but now you’re facing the daunting task of pulling together a compelling MBA application. The pressure to choose which stories best sell your profile, write essays that reflect your achievements, prepare for interviews, and manage multiple deadlines can feel overwhelming. Are you doing enough to be noticed by admissions committees at top business schools?
At Ellin Lolis Consulting, we understand the stakes. With a 98.9% success rate, we’ve helped countless applicants just like you secure spots at their dream schools. Our expert consultants will work with you to develop a strategy tailored to your goals, ensuring every part of your application—from essays to interviews—tells a cohesive, compelling story that gets you in.
Don’t leave your future to chance. Learn more about working with us and take the first step toward a successful MBA application journey.
4. Bocconi Deadlines
Bocconi admits students on a rolling basis, which can be found here. You can access the online application here.
Real MBA Essays That Got People In
School-specific sample essays that got our clients accepted
