The MBA admissions process is no moment for humility. 

With thousands of highly-qualified applicants from around the world vying for a limited number of spots, your main objective during the application process is to stand out from the rest. 

Succeed in this endeavor, and you’ll find yourself joining the ranks of the world’s elite business schools. 

Fail, and you’ll find yourself on a waitlist or, worse, not admitted anywhere at all. 

Though there are many aspects of the application process, you must see each step as an opportunity to justify your fit with your top MBA programs and explain your greatest hits to the admissions committee.

Nonetheless, developing a standout application requires much more than sitting down to your computer and writing a stream of consciousness to account for your career highlights. 

Instead, it requires careful selection and crafting to ensure your profile really sells you. 

To help you succeed in this task, this post covers best practices for highlighting your uniqueness in your MBA application essays, including excerpts of successful and not-so-successful attempts to tackle this challenging aspect of applying to business school. 

 

Decide how you will position yourself in your application

Before you write your first word, you want to make sure that you have a solid application strategy in place. 

Considering the fact that the MBA application process usually takes around a year, it’s no surprise that getting into a top school is a process that involves completing numerous tasks and making thousands of small decisions that will impact the success of your application. 

Ensuring that each of these application aspects demonstrates what makes you unique requires careful consideration. Though there are many areas to map out; the following three are key. 

 

Define your goals

Adcoms are looking for applicants with clearly defined goals who can show that they have clearly thought out how to create meaningful and realistic impact — this is the easiest way for them to see whether you will use your spot at their school wisely and purposefully. You want the readers of your application to come away thinking “Wow, this person’s goals are really important!” 

While it is important for you to demonstrate your strengths and capacities, none of this means much to adcoms if those ideas don’t work towards a bigger purpose. That bigger purpose is both what motivates you to pursue your career, and also what motivates them to open one of their limited spots for you, so you can go forward and give their school a good reputation.

Considering that you are competing against thousands of others for a selective spot, it’s important that you give a very clear picture of what you will do with your MBA. You also want to show how that will have some kind of notable impact – this will be essential in helping you stand out from the rest of the candidates. But to accomplish this task, you must first arrive on clear, detailed short and long-term goals.

 

What do clear, detailed goals look like?

The key to a good goals statement is clarity and detail. Failing to provide this can leave the reader feeling like they do not fully understand your goals — and that you don’t, either. 

Avoid vague goals like, “I want to work for a Fortune 500 company,” because who doesn’t? According to a Bentley University admissions team member, it’s much more effective to do your market research and choose a specific organization you’d like to work for because they align with your motivations, values, and vision (for example, they may be particularly innovative, socially responsible, etc.). 

Furthermore, your chosen goals demonstrate your “career risk” to the admissions committee. In other words, they show the admissions officers how likely you are to succeed in the future and how well their program can set you up for success. 

If your goals are vague, they will not be able to determine your career risk and your application will likely be rejected.

For example, for her long-term goal, one candidate wrote:

 “In the long-term, I want to increase sustainability in major Brazilian companies.” 

However, there are some key elements missing in her statement. Who does she plan on working for and in what field? What role will she have? What kinds of sustainability? What exactly does she want to achieve as a result of her actions? All of these things leave the reader wondering if the candidate actually knows what she wants to do in the future.

In a good goals statement, however, all of these questions will be clear. Take a look at how the candidate’s long-term goal developed by the end of the editing process:

“In the long-term, I hope to become a principal at BCG who focuses on emphasizing sustainable solutions by promoting renewable energy in consumer goods companies across Brazil. In this position, I can not only help companies become more sustainable but reinforce this mindset among BCG teams in order to increase widespread environmental awareness in business.”

Not only is her long-term goal clear, it is clear how she plans to manifest this goal. Specifically, she names the position and company she hopes to work for as well as how she plans to focus on sustainability in that position.

By adding detail, you also add clarity to your MBA goals.

We strongly encourage you to be specific enough to name both the position you hope to hold in the future as well as the company (or an example of the type of company) you plan on working for. Doing so will help ensure your goals are specific enough.

If you’re still not quite sure what you want to do post-MBA, you may want to consider career coaching before starting to craft your business school application. 

 

Determine your personal brand

One of the first things we tell our clients who are applying to an MBA is that standing out requires them to define their personal brand. 

A personal brand is a powerful tool you will use not only throughout your application but also during your studies and later on when you re-enter the job market. It helps you guide your story and define what makes you you. Crafting your personal brand includes deciding what your values, motivations, strengths, weaknesses, and vision are — the bigger-picture aspects guiding your career decisions and impact.

Great, right? But how do you get to the point where you have your personal brand? 

One of the best ways to do this is to work with a coach or consultant you trust, as they can help you understand how to focus on different elements of your profile yet still ensure you submit a cohesive application.

Though it may be tempting, make sure not to skip this step. Just as solid houses require strong foundations, outstanding MBA applications demand careful planning. 

 

Think about how to leverage your letters of recommendation

A letter of recommendation is a business school’s unique chance to hear about your strengths as an applicant from an outsider’s perspective. For this reason, selecting the people who recommend you is one of the most important decisions you will make during your MBA application journey. 

In general, most business schools require two letters of recommendation. 

Preferably, one of these letters should come from your current supervisor, as this person is likely able to go into detail about your strengths, areas for improvement, potential for senior management, and ability to take constructive feedback. 

Your second letter should come from someone with whom you have worked extensively. This person would likely bring in examples that are similarly consistent with your brand, but that show a different side of this brand than the first letter. 

You should not ask for letters from family members and/or friends. In general, it is also best to ask for letters from executives who are more senior inside the organization than yourself.

No matter who you choose, it is essential that your recommenders bring story-form examples to the letter, as these offer “proof” that the characteristics highlighted in the letter are, in fact, strengths. Furthermore, stories allow the admissions officer reading the letter to “feel like they know you” by the end of the letter, which does a great deal to help you stand out from the crowd. 

(source: Stanford Graduate School of Business)

If you’ve just changed jobs or have a complex relationship with your current boss, you can choose to ask for letters of recommendation from other professionals. Just make sure to include the reason for this choice in an optional essay. 

We’ve worked with reapplicants who could not quite get an acceptance letter because their letters of recommendations were working against them, not for them. It is essential to plan ahead to ensure this doesn’t happen to you. 

If you need help determining who to ask for letters of recommendation to best support your personal brand, bringing in an admissions consultant who is highly trained to best understand what each school is looking for may be your best option.

After your recommender has finished your letter, he or she will submit the letter online using the link the school emails them. To receive this link, you will need to register your recommender into each school’s online application system. 

TOP TIP: Check out our comprehensive guide on choosing and guiding your recommenders here! 

 

Choose the right stories

Writing your MBA admissions essay may feel like an intimidating task. With precious little space, what should you tell the adcom? How much detail should you include? Whatever you do, it is important to use the space you have effectively to demonstrate the experiences and characteristics that distinguish you from your competition.

In theory, you can use practically any story from your past in your MBA application. That all depends on the overall message you want to impart to your reader and the personal brand you intend to use throughout your application (again, knowing what this message is will depend on how you define your personal brand). 

Our expert team at Ellin Lolis Consulting has a lot of experience with choosing MBA stories, which means we know which strategies work best depending on the school, your personal background, and your goals. More than anything, we know that the key to a successful application means choosing the right stories. 

 

Reflect on your best examples

Over your career, you’ve likely had a lot of wins — both big and small. 

Though you’re hopefully nodding your head in agreement, when was the last time you really reflected on which of your achievements are your strongest?

Most of our clients are extremely ambitious, forward-looking people, however, writing your MBA essays requires keeping one eye on the future and the other on the past. 

That’s why you should take the time to compile a list of your top stories. 

 

What Makes A Good Example?

In general, clients make the mistake of thinking that the only examples they can include in essays are about outstanding achievements for which they helped establish one of Africa’s first private equity firms, created the world’s first mind-controlled jet pack, or developed a cure for cancer.

 Though these are certainly all incredible wins, your examples don’t necessarily have to be so big. 

For example, while brainstorming his essay topics, a recent client was struggling with the fact that his corporate finance job felt to him like a lot of financial reports and Excel spreadsheets. 

However, when we dug into the details, he told us that he’d led the process to help his company negotiate better terms with a foreign government to ensure they were able to continue offering affordable protein in that country. 

Bingo! 

Not only did this example show his ability to negotiate and communicate across cultures; he was also able to show how he generated meaningful results for his company and positively impacted people in an entire country. 

That’s a pretty great example!

Go back and think of all the moments of your career you are proudest of. In the rest of the article, we’ll talk about the importance of filtering these examples based on your personal brand and based on which are more suitable for story formats, so write down as many as you can!

 

Matching stories to essay prompts

One of the keys to a compelling essay is choosing the right stories for the prompt. This means that, after you have looked at all the stories that fit your branding and demonstrate your unique experience, you must then narrow down the best ones for your essay. 

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 their 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.

Though there are many types of essays (and you should make sure to show yourself off in every single type), three are particularly well-suited to show off your unique background: essays focused on leadership experiences, achievements, or your future goals are the perfect platform to show off what you have achieved and learned throughout your career thus far and demonstrate how you will contribute to the class in a way no one else can. 

Of course, if you’ve participated in volunteer work, discussing this can also go a long way to  demonstrate how you stand out from the crowd, especially if you can relate it to your motivations, work ethic/approaches, and goals, so be sure to check out our tips on discussing community work here! 

 

Tell your stories the right way

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 nor memorable to the adcom.

You must be persuasive for your essay to be effective and truly stand out. Remember, you are ultimately arguing to the adcom to accept you into their school. 

Many candidates attempt to tell stories that do not have the right amount of detail.

They might not clearly highlight what their role in their story was, fail to demonstrate a problem that needed solving, or not give the reader enough information to understand the context of the story in the first place. A compelling story must have all of these elements to keep a reader’s interest piqued until the very end. 

If you’re not used to selling your profile or to writing compelling stories, writing your MBA essays may seem like a daunting task. The following tips are here to help you overcome your initial writer’s block and ensure you write strong essays. 

 

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 on 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 struggle. 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 make 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. This would be a great story to tell in most settings. However, we reminded him of who his audience was; the admissions committee would not be considering Victor’s great aunt for a spot in their program, so a story like this would be unlikely to be successful.

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 allowed Victor to have an outstanding hook that proved that his main motivation came from the heart, while giving him room to expand on how he translated his aunt’s example into his own life and career. At ELC, we encourage our clients to integrate necessary information without losing focus on you and your accomplishments.

 

Use the STAR Method 

STAR (Situation – Task – Action – Result) is the best framework to keep your stories concise, clear, and organized. STAR will help you write a compelling answer that provides background, tells exactly what you did, and ends with a big reveal. 

Here’s how it works:

• Situation – Begin with setting the stage and presenting the complication, context, or conflict of the story. For example: “My brand was losing market share to a new competitor” 

• Task – Identify your objective in light of the complication and summarize the task or project performed: “I decided to revise our strategy” 

• Action – Describe the action steps you took toward your goal: “I surveyed customers to learn what traits they valued and implemented product changes accordingly” 

• Results – Summarize the outcome and how you and/or your team made a difference: “We gained 20 additional market share.”

The STAR method makes it very easy for your reader not only to understand what took place but to also see your role in all of it — important given the fact that it’s you and not your team or company that’s applying for an MBA. 

Not convinced you should follow this method? Check out the two stories below. Which does a better job of clearly showing the applicant’s strengths and achievements?

My greatest achievement in life so far has come from my study effort. It was one of the best days of my life when I got the news I was chosen for a scholarship from the Brazilian government to start a project in University of Texas. From this episode I learned that the long run counts a lot because this scholarship didn’t depend on taking a test and having a great day on it. It was awarded to students who had an English proficiency diploma at a specific point in time and a great college record. In Texas, I was forced to become a more independent man and I had the chance to connect with so many people with so many different backgrounds that I can say my desire to explore the world started there.

Or this one?

The achievement I’m most proud of happened recently. At my company, it had been three years since we had raised investments for a new fund, so finding a new opportunity was critical. In mid-December, that great opportunity arose, however, we’d be battling against an unbelievably short deadline to get the project approved. 

Normally, at this time of year, we’re still fully staffed, but given the stagnant market, only one manager and myself remained. In addition, the fund’s investment policy relied on a strategy that we’d never used. Finally, I’d never worked on the public offering of a fund before. 

Nonetheless, I knew that if the partner and I worked diligently to support each other, we could land this deal. Our first move was to organize a meeting to align all parties involved. Then, we divided tasks, and I took over coordinating stakeholders, assigning tasks and managing deliverables. In the end, we successfully delivered everything on time.

This experience made me more comfortable in a leadership position, as managing diverse stakeholders under pressure helped me better analyze what each brought to the table and execute accordingly. Recently, I’ve even been able to help other teams coordinate new offers. Finally, the project was a great opportunity to learn new management skills from my superior. This reinforced for me how important it will be to learn additional management frameworks at INSEAD and prepare myself to be a leader in the Private Equity market. 

Though the first essay includes a tremendous achievement, the lack of structure and detail makes it difficult for us to understand exactly what happened and why the story is important. 

The second essay clearly tells the story, walking us step by step through her decisions and achievements and creating a much more compelling picture of the applicant’s leadership skills and impact. 

We have written extensively on how to incorporate the STAR method to enhance your storytelling abilities in your MBA essays. Check out that post here! 

 

Avoid ambiguities or misinterpretations

Although the stories you are writing are well-known to you, it’s important to remember that you are telling them for the first time to a group of complete strangers. This means you must be extra careful about specificity and clarity. As MBA consultants, we constantly help clients deal with 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. If two or more meanings can be derived from a single word, this is referred to as lexical ambiguity. If the confusion derives from possible meanings from the sentence itself, this is called syntactic ambiguity. Both can pose a problem in MBA admissions essays. 

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 was punctual, 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. This is an example of syntactic ambiguity.

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. 

However, recognizing these errors is commonly neglected by people editing their own essays, as it’s often hard to see things that are clear to you differently! 

 

Contact your MBA storytelling consultant today!

MBA consultants help candidates make crucial decisions when it comes to which stories to tell, how to tell them, and which details to provide. Of course, they also make sure you stay focused, keep you at center stage, and highlight your professionalism. 

Of course, our work goes way beyond just shaping stories. Your MBA consultant also plays a critical role in helping you choose your target schools, prepare for your interviews, and develop an outstanding application that effectively highlights your uniqueness.

Our dedicated team is ready to offer you the support, encouragement, and insider expertise to help you find your voice and “wow” the admissions committee. 

So if you want focused help shaping how you present your life’s greatest hits to one of the world’s toughest critics, get in touch with our expert team of MBA consultants today!