UPDATE: This article was originally posted on June 5, 2020. It has been updated with new information and tips below.
When you first begin your business school application essays, you are probably excited to get started. Looking at the essay questions, you might want to jump right in and begin writing.
Halfway through, however, you may find yourself wondering if you really should be talking about that project you led at work. Maybe explaining your passion for volunteering at the children’s hospital would be the better choice? And how much detail do your stories need? Can I really jump in by sharing the results, or do I need to focus more on my motivation to join the company in the first place?
Although many candidates are excellent writers, questions like these usually pop up. How do you know what the admissions committee values most when reading application essays? Which stories do elite business programs value, and what mistakes might get your essay set aside?
This is where MBA consultants come in. We are experts in all things related to your admissions essay and the stories you choose to tell – not to mention our expertise regarding the rest of the admissions process!
Through years of experience, your MBA consultant knows just how to tackle your admissions essays. From how to help you express your authentic self to properly structuring your stories and ensuring that they reflect the values of your target school, your MBA consultant is here to guide you through choosing and shaping the best stories for your business school application.
What are stories in MBA essays?
Stories in MBA admissions essays function to show the reader who you are by telling them about your past. They often tell of a single event that helped you grow as a person or a professional. Stories help you structure a past experience for the reader that is intriguing and compelling.
For example, you could tell a story about bringing your community together by creating a blood drive for a fellow classmate in middle school, joining an NGO to make an impact after college, or taking a leap of faith to start your own business. Almost any past experience can serve as a story in your MBA admissions essay.
Stories do not just tell your audience about events that happened in your past – after all, the admissions committee has your CV already, which means they are aware of your work experience, where you went to school, and your most recent employer.
Instead, stories function to show the reader the underlying motivations behind the decisions on your CV. Even better, stories can help you reveal to the admissions committee how simple moments or major life events that do not show up on your CV have helped shape your personality, anchor your core values, and foster your growth.
Why should I tell stories in my MBA essay?
So why should I use stories in my MBA essays to convince the admin committee rather than just tell them why I am passionate about their school?
But that’s just it – the most effective way to tell the admin board that you are passionate about their school is by using stories.
Stories will help the committee understand not just what you did, but why you did it. By telling stories, they can gain deeper insight into the motivations underlying the choices on your CV, your values, and what really makes you tick.
By telling stories, you can both reveal these aspects and spark empathy. An empathetic reader will be more likely to be persuaded to accept you into their program. Thus, utilizing stories in your MBA essay is a winning tactic for success.
Reason 1: MBA consultants can help you decide which stories are most effective
One of the keys to a compelling essay is choosing the right stories that can persuade the admissions committee.
You may indeed be tempted to tell a full-blown story about each major aspect of your CV. Even if each story you come up with is excellent, the hard truth is that you likely just won’t have the space to do this.
Most schools limit their essays to 500 words or less (with the exception of Harvard, Booth, Stanford, and a few others). We know from experience that it is not possible to discuss more than a few stories in the appropriate amount of detail in this small space. Of course, this does not mean your essays can’t be persuasive (for more details about this, check out our blog post How to Write a Compelling Essay in 500 Words).
In our experience as MBA consultants, the average candidate can include two or three stories in a 500-word essay. More than this will often exceed the word count or sacrifice necessary detail, whereas less can run the risk of showing only a single facet of your personality.
Of course, this depends heavily on the prompt. Compare Kellogg’s essay question with INSEAD’s, for example:
“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)”
“Give a candid description of yourself (who are you as a person), stressing the personal characteristics you feel to be your strengths and weaknesses and the main factors which have influenced your personal development, giving examples when necessary. (approximately 500 words).”
Despite similar word counts, the two questions require very different answers from candidates. Here, Kellogg gives candidates 450 words to share a single experience, whereas INSEAD asks candidates to share at least two stories (although we recommend sharing two strengths and one weakness for this question!)
So, how do you narrow down which stories are best for your essay? And how do you know that they are winners for that particular school? Your MBA consultant can help with that. Here are some of our winning tips.
Turning weaknesses into strengths
One of the ways that MBA consultants work their magic is by helping you turn your weaknesses into strengths. By doing so, we can help you make even your biggest professional or personal failures the key to winning over the admissions committee.
The trick? Exemplify the ability to learn from your past mistakes.
Remember, the adcom is looking for a pattern of success based on your abilities of self-reflection, open-mindedness, and capacity for improvement. By recognizing that there is always more to learn, you can make an effective argument for joining the program of your choice.
After all, a school – including top programs like Harvard, MIT, or Yale – are institutions of learning. All schools implicitly value growth, improving on one’s weaknesses, and intellectual appetite. High-profile MBA programs are specifically looking for these qualities in their candidates.
In fact, it can be very beneficial to recount stories about failure. Stories that solely recount success may show how you can communicate effectively or demonstrate your decision-making skills, but they may not show how you improved on those skills or recognized the need to expand your skill set in the first place.
By including this, you can show the adcom that, even in success, there are still ways to get even better – and become even more successful.
For example, in her INSEAD essay, our client Vanessa described a story about a professional failure like this:
“My performance in this project would be the main factor in determining a full-time offer as an associate, so I decided to impress the project leader and do every task by myself. In doing so, I encountered difficulties that I could not solve alone – yet, I refused to ask for help, missing a deadline. By the time I did ask the project leader for help, I had not finished the task, a crucial mistake. I learned that I must ask for help when I encounter difficulties I cannot solve, especially when timing is vital. Luckily, learning from my initial mistake did not damage my relationship with the project leader; I had enough time to change this bad impression and received a full-time offer. However, this failure could have cost me a huge career opportunity.”
Vanessa uses this mistake to clearly show how she grew out of this situation. She thus successfully demonstrated a growth mindset by explaining how she learned firsthand about the importance of asking for help.
By demonstrating that you learn from your mistakes, see the need to improve on your weaknesses, and know that you still have a lot to learn, you can show the admissions board that you are the type of reflected leader that belongs at their school.
Make sure your story is focused on you
No matter what stories you choose, you need to make sure they feature you, your values, and your accomplishments. In most cases, candidates are afforded very little space to make their case. Do not waste precious words talking about someone else.
For example, one candidate began the first draft of their essay like this:
“It`s impossible to tell you what most matters to me without talking about the people that shaped my personality, and the person that most inspired me was my great-great-aunt. She dedicated her whole life to taking care of my family. When I was a child, she used to walk me to school every day, frequently advising me on the privilege of knowledge to help others who are struggling. She passed away last year at 96 and was the kindest person I`ve ever met. She did not get married or have a job, instead she gave everything to making sure others make the most out of life. What matters most to me is closely related to what she was to me; what matters most to me is to help others.”
While this story eventually makes the case that our client, Victor, learned to help others through his aunt’s dedication, it does not highlight him or his actions. The admissions committee is not considering Victor’s great aunt for a spot in their program, so a story like this is unlikely to be successful. Instead, they want to see how Victor’s actions helped him learn this invaluable lesson.
However, it is possible to still include this information while shifting the focus elsewhere. Instead of using this as a full-blown story, our MBA consultants helped Victor express the values he learned from his great aunt as the introduction to his essay via a concrete example of her influence:
“Every Sunday, my great-great-aunt took me to volunteer to teach other kids to read and write – one of the many things she did to show me the importance of empowering others.”
This way, you can still integrate necessary information without losing focus on you and your accomplishments.
Of course, telling your stories in an effective way can be tricky. If you are looking for help to determine if your essays are structured in a way that stands out to the adcom, don’t hesitate to check out our MBA Resource Center!
There, you can find dozens of past successful essays and detailed brainstorming worksheets to help you plan out a winning essay. Our library also includes guides for all top global MBA programs, interview tips and mocks, CV templates, and recommendation letter guides. Click to join!
Reason 2: MBA consultants can help you structure your stories
Ensuring your stories – and your essays themselves – are well-structured is one of the keys to a successful candidacy.
A well-structured essay will guide your reader through your argument and the action in your story. It will ensure that the reader understands how your arguments build on each other and that they see a logical progression of events.
Unstructured stories, on the other hand, often feel chaotic to readers. Even worse, the reader may even find themselves lost between events in your story or even simply decide TLDR (too long, didn’t read).
However, a solid structure has many functions beyond simply ordering events. For example, a clear structure can help emphasize readability or how easily a reader can process a text.
Grammarly describes readability like this:
“Readability is a quality of your writing. If the readability of your text is high, people will be able to understand your sentences easily. If the readability is low, people still might understand what you’re saying, but it’s likely to be a draining experience. Instead of focusing on the substance of your writing, they’ll need to spend a significant amount of energy unpacking overly complex vocabulary and sentence structure.”
As you can imagine, ensuring that your text has a high readability level will help your reader stay engaged and read until the end. Although they may be employed at some of the world’s top universities, this rule applies to the adcom, too.
As you can see, a well-structured essay can help you hit the mark. We have a few more tips up our sleeves, however, to provide you with a few structural ground rules.
Use the STAR format
Our MBA consultants recommend using the STAR method. STAR helps you remember four essential elements: Situation, Task, Action, and Results.
All of these elements must be present in the stories in your MBA essay. Without them, your story may lack the necessary context or fail to reveal how you grew from the experience.
Taking a closer look, STAR boils down to:
Situation: The context of your story and all the necessary background information.
Task: The problem or the challenge you faced.
Action: What you actively did, and the action steps you took to solve that problem.
Results: What you learned from the experience and any significant benefits it brought you, your company, or your team. Your takeaway from the experience can include skills you gained, a mindset you developed, or the acknowledgment of a rewarding experience.
Take this example, in which our client Alice clearly uses the STAR method to tell a story about urban planning:
“Inspired by the social good engineering can achieve, I developed a special interest in urban planning (Situation) and wanted to solve a problem I saw daily in São Paulo: miserable living conditions for many of the city’s residents (Task). To tackle this problem, I invited two colleagues to collaborate. I suggested using our technical knowledge and abilities to design a new subsidized rent program that would minimize government participation by attracting private investors (Action). Handing over the final product to the mayor’s office was truly gratifying knowing that our work could inspire policy that would affect 860,000 families on the waiting list for housing units. The project confirmed for me that my career must make an impact on the development of Brazil – and that I will succeed in doing so if I continue embracing new challenges and choosing difficult paths (Results).”
Alice was able to structure her story about the housing project to show the reader how she made an impact and grew from the experience. By using the STAR method, Alice successfully argued her case to Harvard’s admissions committee.
STAR helps reinforce storytelling because it keeps the reader intrigued to find out how you solved the problem you describe. It also presents a logical sequence of events that reinforce how your reader understands and interprets the story.
Using the STAR method in your MBA essay stories is a surefire way to present your experience to your reader – and, more importantly, show them how the experience contributed to the person you are today.
We can help you build a consistent message
One of the most reliable strategies for ensuring you present a consistent message throughout your MBA essay is utilizing a theme. Our MBA consultants at Ellin Lolis Consulting are experts at examining your stories to help you identify a common theme.
A theme is like your topic. For MBA essays, this usually represents a value like clear communication, maximizing impact, helping others, or empathetic leadership. It can also emphasize a certain passion, like innovation or volunteerism, or a characteristic of your personality like determination or proactivity.
A theme ties everything you say in your essay into a single, unified message. This way, although you may be presenting many arguments – aka stories – to your reader, they will finish your essay with a central takeaway.
By giving your reader this central message, you make sure they are remembering the most important thing in your essay. Whether that – and your theme – is that you value giving back, focus on learning from your mistakes, or always strive to explore new things, you can ensure that the reader remembers the most important thing about you.
This way, all the stories in your essay function as arguments to support your theme. You can use your experiences to back up what you say and prove your theme to your reader using evidence from your past.
Because of this, it is absolutely essential that all your stories align with your central theme. For example, if your theme is leadership, you probably do not want to use a story about a solitary hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. If you cannot derive a solid lesson about leadership from that experience, you need to either avoid using that story or rethink your theme altogether.
Aligning your stories and uniting them under a single theme can be tricky. However, your MBA consultant has a lot of experience helping clients examine their stories in-depth, develop an appropriate theme, and ensure your essay conveys a central argument from beginning to end.
Reason 3: MBA consultants can ensure that you sound professional
Of course, one thing you do not want to do in your MBA application essay is risk sounding unprofessional.
Your MBA consultant can help ensure that you hit just the tone you were going for, that your stories – professional and personal – are appropriate for your application, and that you avoid mistakes that could make the adcom think that you are careless or sloppy.
Avoid ambiguities or misinterpretations
As MBA consultants, we constantly help clients iron out ambiguities and misunderstandings in their writing. It is important to point out the essential role these issues play in a successful MBA essay.
Ambiguities are passages of text that could be interpreted in more than one way. For example, if I told you, “I had a meeting on Tuesday, which was right on time”, you could understand this in multiple ways. You could think the meeting started punctually, for example. On the other hand, you could understand that I am relieved because the project would have been endangered had we waited until Wednesday to hold the meeting.
It is easy to see how ambiguities can pose a problem in MBA essays. Even more important than avoiding ambiguous phrasing, however, is avoiding phrasing that can cause the reader to misunderstand an entire mindset or value.
With inappropriate phrasing, you could potentially run the risk of sounding offensive to the reader or a specific group of people.
For example, in an early version of an essay, one client recounted volunteering with youths in Brasilia. He began his story by saying:
“In Brasilia, I began volunteering for an NGO that helped poor people, especially kids, improve their English.”
While this may be true, it might not always come off as polite or politically correct. After all, you have no idea who will be reading your essay, what their background is, or their political affiliation. Thus, it is best to avoid language like “poor people” – which a sensitive reader could interoperate negatively – and instead write something like:
“In Brasilia, I began volunteering for an NGO that helped underprivileged children improve their English.”
This way, a misunderstanding of your text – and your mindset – can be easily avoided.
Avoid unnecessary mistakes
Finally, your MBA consultant is also there to proofread your essay. We don’t want anyone to think you are unprofessional simply because you didn’t catch a few typos.
In fact, not proofreading your essay for mistakes, typos, and grammatical errors is one of the top three mistakes you can make when composing your MBA essays.
Our editors at Ellin Lolis Consulting have extensive experience proofreading MBA admissions essays, especially those written by non-native English speakers. Our eye for detail guarantees that the final version of your essay will be error-free.
Checking for grammar mistakes, irregular sentence structure, punctuation, and spelling are part of what we like to call technical editing. Technical editing ensures that your essay follows the rules of the English language and will be understandable for an English-speaking or international audience.
Of course, technical editing is only the bare minimum of what your MBA consultant can do for you. Indeed, our consultants’ expertise can help you make the strategic decisions about and within your essay that will help the adcom focus and prioritize your application.
We Make Your Story Shine
One of the most common mistakes we see in MBA essays is that candidates fail to tell compelling stories. This is important because if your stories are not compelling, they will not be persuasive. At the same time, they must be backed by strong examples that establish a track record of success and prove to the admissions committees why you belong at their school.
Striking this balance between content and creativity can be tough, however, as succeeding means not only choosing the right stories but ensuring they are told in an optimal manner.
This is why our iterative developmental feedback process here at Ellin Lolis Consulting helps you mold your message through the application of our storytelling expertise until it reflects exactly what makes your profile stand out and show fit with your target program.
Not only can you take advantage of our iterative feedback process through multiple edits – you can also benefit from it after a single review! If your budget is tight, our editors will be happy to help polish your text as much as possible and leave “bonus comments” so you can keep working on it on your own!
No matter how long we work with you, we will always ensure your essays shine. Sign up to work with our team of storytelling experts and get accepted.
Real MBA Essays That Got People In
School-specific sample essays that got our clients accepted
