After spending months fine-tuning your MBA application essays, you’ve finally received that long-awaited MIT interview invitation — only to discover that now you need to write more essays!
With more and more competitive candidates applying every year, elite MBA programs like MIT Sloan are always looking for new ways to distinguish the “admits” from the “dings.”
Though they may seem small and relatively unimportant at first, MIT Sloan’s interview essays are an important element of your overall application and should be carefully crafted. That’s why we’re sharing our top tips on how to approach and write your own interview essays. By following these tips, you can ensure you stand out and land a spot at MIT Sloan.
The MIT Sloan Pre-Interview Essay Questions
MIT Sloan has also long required candidates who are called to interview to submit an additional essay. This year, MIT Sloan’s interview question is as follows:
Required Question #1 (Diversity)
The mission of the MIT Sloan School of Management is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice. We believe that a commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and well-being is a key component of both principled leadership and sound management practice.
.In 250 words or less, please describe a time when you contributed toward making a work environment or organization more welcoming, inclusive, and diverse.
How to approach your answer
At MIT, diversity is a core value. This means that at Sloan, you’ll constantly interact with people who think and act differently than you do.
Succeeding in such an environment requires a great deal of adaptability and flexibility, as well as a willingness to learn from those who are different. This type of environment, however, is not for everyone, which is why MIT seeks to gauge how you respond to diversity in this essay.
We suggest you start by considering the brand you are presenting to MIT and examine which examples about diversity you can share that will add value to the stories you told in your cover letter and video. Then, make sure you narrow this list down to your single best story. In a 250-word essay, you won’t have time to fully explore multiple examples, so limit yourself to one killer story.
Required Question #2 (Data)
We are interested in learning more about how you make data-driven decisions and communicate results. Please select one of the following prompts to respond to.
- Please select an existing data visualization and in 250 words or less explain why it matters to you. The data visualization should be uploaded as a PDF. Examples may come from current events, a business analysis, or personal research (e.g. climate change, COVID maps, etc).
- In 250 words to less, please describe a recent data-driven decision you had to make, and include one slide presenting your analysis. The slide may include a data visualization example and should present data used in a professional context. Your slide must be uploaded as a PDF.
How to approach your answer
Considering how short the MIT application is, you should also use this as another opportunity to add something new to your application.
With this question, MIT seeks to understand how you are able to use data to make important decisions. MIT states that this example should come from data used in a professional context, so keep this in mind. When designing your slide, remember that you’re being judged on how you present the information visually, not on the data itself.
In your essay, make sure to explain how you analyzed the data and used it to make a decision. If you are not able to show how you applied the insights gained from the data you presented in a clear, concrete way, you may want to consider a different approach.
If you don’t have a job that requires you to use data on a regular basis, question 1 would be a better fit for you. If you do use data frequently at work, question 1 may still be a good option, but showing a real and measurable way in which you used data to make a decision is an excellent way to show the adcom you possess a great fit with their program.
TOP TIP: Make sure not to share confidential information. If you need to “sanitize” the data, this is acceptable.
MIT Sloan Pre-Interview Essay Examples
The mission of the MIT Sloan School of Management is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice. We believe that a commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and well-being is a key component of both principled leadership and sound management practice.
In 250 words or less, please describe a time when you contributed toward making a work environment or organization more welcoming, inclusive, and diverse.
As a volunteer at ORG, I helped educate 400 students from all over my city, some in very marginalized situations. Although we were providing a low-cost pre-college course, I began to notice how everyday norms we took for granted were inadvertently exacerbating difficulties faced by the underprivileged.
For instance, I noticed that I never saw certain students at lunchtime. Lunch was in an open space where most students ate together and forged friendships. However, students with nothing to eat routinely stayed in other parts of the building and were not just isolated but, more importantly, hungry. To address this situation, I prospected potential donors, developed a proposal, and presented it in an internal all-hands meeting, gaining approval. After coordinating with the university community, I helped build a fundraising department. Our first donor, NGO, provided a sandwich and juice to every student, so those in need would not feel ashamed to be singled out. The fundraising department has since continued to build partnerships to benefit students.
This experience taught me that there are norms in place that prevent us from seeing persistent inequalities. It would have been easy to dismiss the absence of certain students as a result of shyness or simply not notice at all. Commitment to creating inclusive environments means noticing systemic problems in everyday contexts and working collaboratively toward solutions.
Looking for MIT Sloan pre-interview essay examples? Our MBA Resource Center includes multiple examples of both the diversity and data prompts, as well as countless other resources, including interview mock sequences, sample interview responses, and so much more. Sign up here!
We are interested in learning more about how you make data-driven decisions and communicate results. Please select one of the following prompts to respond to:
- Please select an existing data visualization and in 250 words or less explain why it matters to you. The data visualization should be uploaded as a PDF. Examples may come from current events, a business analysis, or personal research (e.g. climate change, COVID maps, etc).
- In 250 words or less, please describe a recent data-driven decision you had to make, and include one slide presenting your analysis. The slide may include a data visualization example and should present data used in a professional context. Your slide must be uploaded as a PDF.
A few years ago, I helped lead the sale of a payment company to a strategic investor. Negotiations included a price adjustment based on the company’s future performance. When the adjustment time came, the company was performing well below the business plan, despite not having reported abrupt operational changes. After thoroughly analyzing its financial data, I realized that its credit fund, responsible for providing credit to thousands of merchants, was underperforming. While it could be easily explained by external market issues, I decided to investigate other possible explanations, such as higher default levels. I asked the fund administrator to provide me with the credit database and developed an algorithm to parse data from hundreds of thousands of transactions, which allowed me to identify a spike in default levels. After filtering the data for individual client performance, an unusually high number of reliable clients seemed to have stopped paying.
To further investigate, I talked with several departments, discovering the fund administrator had changed right at the spike period and uncovering the underlying issue: an integration problem with the new administrator corrupted the database. I asked the fund administrator to refile the financials using a corrected database. Since this would incur a fine, however, they denied my request. So, I negotiated with senior leaders and convinced them to use a “simulation” with the corrected database to support negotiations with the investor. By doing so, we almost doubled the amount my client received.
Make Sure You Succeed in any MBA Interview
Though you might not be practicing for your interviews, your competitors are. When you’re competing at such an elite level (and top MBA programs are about as elite as it gets), practice is the only way to get the edge you need.
Working with highly-trained professionals, like our team of interview experts, can also be an excellent step to include in your interview process.
- Maybe you don’t know where to start preparing.
- Maybe you ramble on and lose your focus while answering.
- Maybe you’re concerned about making errors, discussing your strengths, or addressing weaknesses.
- Maybe you’ve downloaded interview guides or have spent hours reading interview report forums—but still have questions and doubts.
Our interview prep and practice service focuses on helping you determine what to highlight in your interview depending on the program while using appropriate, impact-driven language without being artificial, or worse, robotic. We also help you choose (and perfect) culturally appropriate examples based on the schools you’re interviewing for.
As our client João, who was admitted to MIT Sloan, said:
“I would like to thank Ellin and her team for the extremely careful service they provided. After talking to and working with a few consulting firms, her work was the most structured I found.
Ellin helped me with my interview preparation and provided specific feedback about my pre-interview essays, especially for the MIT Sloan application. During all sessions, Ellin and her team demonstrated a deep knowledge of every school and offered excellent suggestions on how to improve both the content and the structure of my answers. Their service was definitely critical for my acceptance.”
Don’t undersell your success. Set up your 1:1 interview prep and show that you belong at a top MBA program!
Real MBA Essays That Got People In
School-specific sample essays that got our clients accepted
