The world is changing quickly. As global inequalities increase, political tensions rise, and climate change threatens everyone’s well-being, business schools are seeking students who can provide solutions to problems that were once largely ignored or perpetuated by business.
B-school adcoms are hired to select candidates who can enrich the school community and who will use the MBA to achieve great things and give a good name to their alma mater. And now that positive change is now more urgent than ever, part of what adcoms are considering in potential candidates is their experience with and drive towards social impact.
This is why it’s so important for you to be able to demonstrate both past and future impact in your application essays – you want the readers to have a clear idea of what changes you are passionate about and capable of making, and how the MBA will empower you to make even greater change.
Link your past achievements with future impact
Part of convincing adcoms of your commitment to impact is telling a coherent story about your experiences and achievements and how this influenced others. Therefore, when an essay question gives you the opportunity to discuss your past experiences, use it wisely!
For shorter essays, it is recommended to highlight professional and extracurricular examples that demonstrate, in STAR format, how you were able to overcome a challenge and what results this brought. (We would highly recommend including cases from any community service you’ve taken part in, if relevant!) In longer essays, we encourage you to include personal examples as well. The best way of illustrating impact in these situations is to always highlight not only the success of your actions, but also what external changes you supported.
Ideally, you should be able to show how these larger changes you played a part in relate to the future impact you want to make (after you’ve acquired the necessary skills, knowledge, and capacities from the MBA program).
For example, if you are most passionate about increasing the quality of education systems, focus solely on:
- past examples that demonstrate skills (such as interdisciplinary collaboration or negotiation),
- lessons learned (e.g., “businesses’ involvement in providing supplementary education programs is essential to educational equality”),
- and impact (e.g., “My efforts led to 5 new partnerships that provided extra English support to 1,000 students.
Ultimately, this model has demonstrated collaborative educational projects’ feasibility to the business community”) that prepare you to create bigger educational change in the future (e.g., “In the future, I want to scale up such initiatives and create global partnerships between corporations and educational institutions”).
Following this advice will ensure that you are not just saying that you want to make an impact, but showing how!
Show how your goals will create change
The word impact is embedded in the idea of strong influence and change. Thus, in your discussion of your post-MBA goals, in addition to detailing your desired role, industry, and responsibilities, it’s important for you to also illustrate the changes you want to make as a result. 
It is often helpful to establish what problem(s) you are motivated to solve or what global/industry changes you want to contribute to, so that it’s clear how your goals address this issue or promote progress. Then, you can easily discuss how you will be creating change and what things will look like once you have intervened.
Specify how the school’s MBA program will prepare you to make impact
Do your research on each school you are applying to so you are aware of the clubs, courses, faculty, communities, and other opportunities that are available to MBA students. Then, think about which of these are most relevant to your goals and future impact.
For example, if your ability to create change requires you to increase your negotiation skills in an interdisciplinary environment, discuss how opportunities like leadership laps or aspects of holistic-focused negotiation classes would help you grow. It’s also helpful to discuss how you will apply those lessons in the future.
For this, it’s essential to be specific, both in terms of how the opportunities relate to you and how they will influence your future. Prove to the adcom that you have done your research and planning!
Show how you will enrich the school’s community
An effective way of demonstrating that you are driven to make an impact is by showing that you also want to promote growth and progress on campus. B-schools are striving to build communities that are full of impressive individuals who can learn from one another and enrich the environment as a whole.
Think about how your skills, knowledge, and capacities are unique from other candidates. Then, in your essays, explain how you plan to impart these things on to the school community, and why this will be important.
For example, you may have an interdisciplinary approach that has yielded particularly successful and unique results or have come from a background that allows you to see problems differently than others. Then discuss how these unique aspects will enrich other students and how (e.g. in what clubs or classes).
Demonstrate passion
One often overlooked aspect of MBA essays is the importance of demonstrating authenticity and passion. While this is difficult to do, it gives adcoms the ability to see your motivations and be convinced that your drive to create impact is deep-rooted and will continue post-MBA.
Being passionate about the impact that you want to make shows not just that you want to promote progress, but that you are motivated to achieve it and have a practical plan to do so.
To demonstrate passion, we recommend clearly establishing in the earlier parts of your essay aspects of your life choices that have always been motivated by a particular problem or aspect of the world.
Many clients have told stories about how growing up in underserved neighborhoods showed them the importance of decreasing bias in recruiting practices, for example, or how a certain leader’s impact inspired them from an early age.
We also suggest that you discuss your vision, and how your desired impact contributes to this broader idea. For example, if you are pursuing a leadership position in a tech company to create financial literacy apps, your vision might be the financial empowerment of all citizens to manage and plan their own economic well-being. While you generally want to avoid being too broad in your responses, providing an outlook as to what ultimately motivates your specific future plans can be a really great way of proving your passion for impact!
Getting help with illustrating impact
As important as showing clear impact is, it is certainly difficult to master how to demonstrate past impact, connect this with your goals, and market it in a memorable, genuine, and successful way. Sometimes, it can be clear in your head, but as we see with many of our clients, proving that you are serious about wanting to create change can be extremely hard to communicate to others, let alone a committee of strangers!
Luckily, our team has the combination of perspectives and expertise to support you in writing about impact and convincing your top schools that you are the right candidate for them. That’s why 98.9% of our clients secure admissions to at least one of their target schools.
For more information on how we can help you harness your individual skills and experience to prove that you will make outstanding impact, contact us and schedule a free consultation today!
Real MBA Essays That Got People In
School-specific sample essays that got our clients accepted
