UPDATE: This article was originally posted on August 31, 2020. It has been updated with new information and tips below. 

Composing your MBA admissions essays can be tricky. This is your chance to really stand out and wow! the admissions committee. After all, you can assume that every candidate who applies to a top MBA program has a great GMAT score and a proven track record of success. For applicants, this means you need to think about your essays as the chance to tell the adcom why they should choose you over everyone else. 

We believe that one of the best ways to make your essays rise above the competition is by utilizing a tactic we like to call theme. Winning applicants utilize a theme to help strengthen their message, make their argument clearer and more cohesive, and emphasize what makes them one-of-a-kind.

But, first things first: what is a theme and how does it apply to MBA essays?

 

What is a theme?

Your theme is your broader topic, or the main message, of your essay. It is the main idea you want your readers to know and remember about you while reading. Everything – and I mean absolutely everything – in your MBA essay should pertain and relate back to your theme.

A theme is important for your MBA essay because it is what ties everything you say together. Instead of random stories that have no common thread, your theme is what allows you to use multiple stories to reinforce what you really want to say about yourself. 

For MBA essays, this can represent a value (for example, communication, impact, helping your community, or leadership). It can also emphasize a certain passion, like innovation, intercultural exchange, or sports, or a characteristic of your personality, like boldness or proactivity. Your choice of theme will depend entirely on the essay question.

We have seen clients use a wide range of diverse themes to create successful essays that landed them a spot in their top MBA program. For example, one client we worked with used the theme of solving a Rubik’s cube to demonstrate their drive for problem-solving. Another client used the theme of ballet to express her values of determination. Other clients have used topics like their cultural heritage, learning from past failures, or family hardship as successful themes. 

Keep in mind that your choice of theme must answer the essay question. While this might be easy in open-ended essays, some answers may require much deeper thought to determine.

Some admissions essays may require a more straightforward theme (such as “I dream of becoming an eco-minded professional through business”), which we most often see in goals essays. Others may call for something more creative, like “Being there for my community is what matters most to me.” These types of themes are often utilized in values-based essays.

Keep in mind that not all MBA admissions essays require a theme! If the prompt is asking for straightforward, factual information, a theme is probably not required. A theme is also hard to implement for responses with a very limited word count. INSEAD’s job essays, for example, as well as LBS’ short answer questions, probably do not require any special theme. For those prompts, simply follow the instructions and clearly present your answers. 

That all sounds great in theory, but how can you actually create an effective theme yourself? Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered! Here are just a few ways your MBA consultant can help you navigate those twists and turns to establish your theme.

 

Way #1: MBA consultants can help you examine your values and those of your target school

There are multiple strategies for determining the ideal theme for your MBA admissions essay. One winning tactic is to examine your values alongside those of your target school. 

 

Examining your values

Business schools like to assess candidates’ values. They use these to determine if you are a good fit for their school, to understand your personal motivations, and to see who can truly and genuinely justify their career path and goals.

Values in MBA essays can be clearly established through your stories and, most importantly, your theme. 

But what are values in the MBA context? 

Values represent the core pillars of your personality, life philosophy, and/or career objectives. They dictate your behavior, establishing certain principles and standards of conduct, attitude, and performance. They also show what you believe in, and how this dictates your future.

When choosing the value(s) you will write about, it is essential that you choose a value you truly believe in – faking it to sound good will be immediately obvious to any admissions board.

But good news — there is no cap to the kinds of values successful MBA candidates choose. These can range from internal values like hard work or bravery to external values, such as an inclusive workplace or caring for the planet. The possibilities here are nearly endless: for example, one candidate we worked with last year established promoting technology as his central value within his fintech career, while another determined that her key value – and her theme – was perseverance after describing the effects of her mother’s death on her life philosophy.

We know that identifying your values – let alone your theme – can be difficult. However, our expert MBA consultants at Ellin Lolis Consulting have extensive experience helping clients identify a theme based on their values – and are ready to help you narrow down your values, too!

Here are just a few of the ways your consultant can help you identify what values fit best with your profile:

1. Helping you brainstorm core aspects of your personality based on your past experiences.
2. Taking a look at your strengths and weaknesses – remember, even stories about failures and weaknesses can make great MBA essay topics!
3. Discussing major accomplishments, challenges, and choices in life to see what drove those decisions.
4. Examining both your personal and professional stories to understand your motivations for action.
5. Helping you define your passions in a way that connects actions you’ve taken in your personal, academic, and professional life.
6. Brainstorming the moments when you felt most fulfilled or engaged.

By taking an in-depth look at your past experiences, your consultant can help you dig into some of the really fundamental issues that make you you. In what moments in your life did you feel most engaged? Have you overcome any challenges that marked your identity? What events have really touched you or made you think differently about your life or career? 

Questions like these can help you get to the heart of the ideas that resonate with you most and will help you discuss the motivations and influences that are behind your own desired future impact.

If you want to prepare a few ideas before meeting with your MBA consultant, family members and close friends can be an excellent resource to help you zero in on the best topics. Ask them what are the most defining aspects of your personality and to provide some examples of when they have observed this.

By diving deep into your values, you or your consultant may be able to suggest a theme that clearly connects the experiences you discuss in your essay. This is a great way of communicating authentically and making your entire application stand out!

However, it is often not enough to examine your own values to determine your theme. You must also ponder if the values you have determined fit to you also fit your target school, too.

 

Examining the values of your target school

A good theme also relates back to the school you’re applying to and its values. The school’s values will give you an idea of who the school is looking for, and you should always take these into account when choosing your theme. Each school will have different, individual values that its adcom wants to see reflected in applicants’ essays. 

Now, depending on the schools you are applying to, you will have to decide which of your top values and characteristics relate best to the school’s ideals and opportunities. Therefore, you will first have to do some research for each school to determine what they are looking for. 

For example, if you are applying to Kellogg, where community service is a core value, it would be advised for you to focus on themes like “giving back.” If you are also applying to INSEAD, where diversity and globalism are key, it might make more sense to switch your focus a bit to focus on “inclusivity.” 

The school’s values may be implicit or explicit – you may need to take a long look at their website, visit their campus, ponder their motto, or study their application materials to figure out what they are. 

Take Stanford Graduate School of Business, for instance. Their values include the following:

Global awareness, community-oriented, integrity, collaborative team leadership, passion, intellectual vitality, etc.

The theme of your Stanford essay should not, therefore, simply be “integrity” or “global awareness”. Instead, give the value a personal touch that says something about you: for example, you could go with “honesty above everything” or “the importance of an international team”. If you’ve chosen your theme well, it may even overlap with multiple values of your target school. 

Additionally, some schools feature questions that specifically ask the candidate to discuss one or multiple values. 

Take the following prompts, for example:

• Stanford’s Essay A: What matters most to you, and why?
• Kellogg’s Essay 2: What values are important to you and how have they influenced you?
• INSEAD’s Essay 1: Give a candid description of yourself.

Unlike other prompts, where choosing a value as your theme is optional, these kinds of questions require candidates to discuss their values. You must put your values at the forefront of discussion when answering these questions.

Our MBA consultants are extremely familiar with each school and their values, as well as which tactics work best with which school. We are more than happy to discuss which of your core values align best with your favorite MBA program.

 

Way #2: MBA consultants can help you see what unites your stories

As discussed above, 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. 

This can be one winning tactic to establish your theme: take a look at your stories to determine what unites them. 

For example, you may have already decided that you would like to discuss the following stories in your essay:

• How you took the initiative in high school to begin your school newspaper 
• How you led your disadvantaged university rugby team to a regional championship 
• A project at BCG where you had to resolve multiple disputes between team members to accomplish your goal. 

Together with your MBA consultant, you can examine these stories to see what bigger ideas tie them together. What do they have in common? In this case, you might find that a theme such as communicative leadership really resonates with you and your profile. 

Feel free to brainstorm two or three ideas that you feel would work and try them out. What feels more natural, what fits better to your overall narrative, and what impression you would like to leave on your dream school? If you can determine this, you may have found your theme.

Conversely, it is absolutely essential that all your stories align with your central theme. For example, if your theme is community, it might not make sense to use a story about a solitary hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, even if it’s an impressive story on its own. If you cannot derive a solid lesson about community from that experience, you need to either avoid using that story or rethink your theme altogether. 

This is where we often see one of the biggest issues regarding a client’s chosen theme:  it does not align with the stories in the essay. Your theme might be great – and your stories too – but if they do not fit together, you have no chance of creating a compelling argument. You will never be able to put the pieces together if they are from different puzzles. 

As you can see, your choice of theme is only limited by one thing: the stories you decide to tell to prove your point. Of course, your theme is completely dependent on your stories – you cannot make up experiences from your past to underline your theme.  

 

Way #3: MBA consultants can help you find a theme that is unique to you

Even if you have now made a list of possible themes, how do you know they really fit you? After all, we have already established that your MBA essays serve to show the adcom why you stand out among all the other qualified candidates.

So, how do you ensure that your theme is unique and will help you stand out? With so many candidates applying each year, hasn’t the adcom seen it all already?

Well, yes and no. There is no way you will be able to come up with a theme that they have absolutely never heard of before. In fact, trying too hard to find something no one has ever seen before can backfire and become confusing or too niche. However, you can tailor common themes to your individual profile.

For example, it might well be true that What Matters Most to You might be making an impact. However, this is one of those themes that tends to get overused – if you don’t want to make an impact of some kind, you probably don’t belong in an elite MBA program in the first place. 

This is a good start, but we usually work with our clients to hone into more general ideas that are a bit more specific to them, their experiences, and their goals. Here are some of the ways we suggest to do so:

 

Put a specific spin on it

Instead of choosing a monotonous theme like making an impact, put a unique spin on it that really makes that value individual to you and fits your personal brand. You can do this by adding details that are specific to the type of impact you want to make. 

For example, you could talk about making an impact in the agriculture sector by advocating for more automation via robotics. Alternatively, you could land on the theme impacting your community through diversity.

Since no one else will have the same motivations and vision for making that kind of specific impact, you can thus make your theme much more unique to you.

Similarly, this tactic works well with essays that seem to have a ‘required’ theme, giving candidates the general direction for discussion upfront. Take Kellogg’s first essay question, 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)

In this example, Kellogg clearly requires candidates to talk about a leadership experience. So, does that mean your theme has to be leadership? Well, sort of.

Indeed, to answer Kellogg’s question, you must talk about leadership. However, to make your essay more compelling, you can take it one step further. Instead of simply talking about leadership, you can discuss a specific kind of leadership or a characteristic of leadership based on the story you choose to tell in your response. 

For example, a recent candidate demonstrated that she valued speaking up in the face of dissent as a valuable aspect of quality leadership. Another client decided to discuss why aligning expectations was a necessary leadership characteristic.

With a unique spin on traditional themes, you can make your profile stand out and show the adcom what really makes you tick. 

 

Add some emotion

Another way to make your theme unique is to enhance your experiences with authentic emotion. 

This will not only make your writing process more lively, but also help your story resonate with the admissions board, and it is key to making sure that you demonstrate the motivations and passions that lie beyond the mere events you are recounting.

Think of it this way: a good story doesn’t just tell the reader what happened. You could read a synopsis of Romeo and Juliet, for example, and understand all of the events that happen in the story. However, you could never understand the couple’s passion for each other, their torn loyalty to their families, or their desire to rebel in the name of love without reading the passion of Shakespeare’s language. Just because you know the plotline does not mean you understand what moved the characters – or the audience.

This is why it is important to not just focus on what you did during an experience, but also why you did it and the value you see behind your decisions. Keep in mind, the adcom already has your CV, so recounting it to them will not make them feel like you are valuing their time. If you simply repeat events of your CV in your essay in narrative form, you are not using the space you have wisely. 

MBA admissions essays are the place to show the admissions committee what motivated you to make difficult decisions in your life or understand why overcoming certain challenges was important. If you do not include the reasoning behind your decisions, your essay has no chance of compelling the admissions board to accept you into their school.

A persuasive story is a story that sparks empathy in the reader using emotions the reader can relate to. Even if your story is clear, error-free, and you have adhered to the STAR format, you will not be able to connect with your reader without expressing emotion. 

Adding emotion – as well as your underlying motivations and passions – like this can help you articulate how your theme makes you unique. This way, even if you decide to use a rather common theme, it will be clear why that theme is singularly expressive of you.

Regardless of which topic(s) you choose, make sure they are genuine and that you can point to specific moments in your life during which you have acted on this value. Without concrete examples of your motivations and values, your essay will neither be convincing nor memorable.

 

Need some assistance with your theme? We can help!

So, after you and your MBA consultant have used these tactics to brainstorm some possibilities for a theme, how do you know which one to choose?

Narrowing down your theme to select the best one for you and your target school is what MBA consultants are here for. At Ellin Lolis Consulting, we have the experience of getting hundreds of candidates into their MBA programs of choice. Although some take more digging than others, we constantly help our clients establish clear, unique themes that will leave the admissions board hungry to get to know you better. 

So, whether you need help getting an introspective look at your values, are unsure of which themes might be best for your desired MBA program, or need help seeing which themes align best with your stories, we are here to help. Work with our expert team today!