UPDATE: This article was originally posted on June 21, 2021. It has been updated with new information and tips below.

For competitive MBA programs at elite schools like Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton, there is no room for mistakes when it comes to your admissions essay. While there is a broad variety of things you can tell the adcom, there are also a few mishaps that you should definitely avoid. 

Top MBA programs are searching for candidates across the globe that show that they share the values of their school, are interested in growing personally and professionally, and can structure their thoughts and communication. With so much international competition, it is especially important that your MBA admissions essay stands out.

This is especially true for non-native English speakers. Even if your English is excellent, if it is your second language, you might find yourself at a disadvantage. 

While admissions committees do not discriminate against speakers of English as a foreign or second language (in fact, this will often be seen as an advantage!), this may affect your ability to communicate clearly and precisely. Of course, you do not want this to lead to a mistake that could get your application set aside. 

Whether or not English is your first language, there are some common mistakes that can be easily avoided when writing your MBA admissions essays. 

 

Mistake #1: Your MBA essay lacks clarity

If there is one mistake you should definitely avoid in MBA essays, it is being unclear. The adcom will be reading with vigilance, so even small ambiguities could have a big effect. 

You are always writing from your own perspective. While you already know the context behind your content and the motivations behind your experiences, this will not always be clear to your reader. 

It is absolutely essential that you not only express all details necessary for understanding the whole picture of your MBA application responses, but that you also express that context clearly so it is understandable for a reader of any background.

And it is not just the context behind your stories that must be understood. Almost as important as background information are the details themselves. You cannot assume that a reader will know how many people were on your team, if a project was internal or external, or the specific role you played. 

We have gathered a few useful strategies to help you enhance the clarity of your MBA essays.

 

Be explicit

As mentioned above, it is imperative that you are explicit about information – big or small – in your MBA essay. 

Being explicit means that you do not assume that the reader can guess at what you mean simply by reading the text. Remember, the adcom can’t read your mind. It is important that you actually tell the reader information you require them to know.

For example, take a look at this recent excerpt from a client’s essay:

“I am looking forward to attending Wharton with my fiancée. My grandmother is also excited that I will be gaining my MBA. I live with her because I am helping her overcome health issues, so we talk a lot about my future plans and how they will help me advance professionally.”

Looking at this excerpt as a reader with no personal knowledge of the client, a few questions come to mind. Why is the author’s fiancée attending Wharton too? Does she also plan to gain an MBA? Who does the author live with, exactly, his fiancée or his grandmother? Which of these two women is suffering from health issues, and with which one does he discuss his plans with so intensely?

While the answers to all of these questions may be clear to the author, they leave the reader confused and uncertain about what is being said. Take a look at this improved version of the text:

“I am looking forward to attending Wharton with my fiancée, who began her MBA in Philadelphia last year. My grandmother is also excited that I will be gaining my MBA, who I currently live with in Rio. I help her with daily tasks she has difficulty with due to osteoporosis. My grandmother is very inspiring and encourages me to chase my dreams. We talk a lot about my future plans and how they will help my fiancée and I advance professionally.”

In this version, the text is much more explicit about information like which person the author lives with, what his grandmother suffers from (and thus the desire to live with her), as well as why Wharton pertains to his fiancée. 

This way, there can be no questions in the reader’s mind as to the information in the text. Being as explicit as possible helps clarify ambiguities and misunderstandings from the start. 

 

Avoiding ambiguities and misunderstandings

While we are on the subject of ambiguities and misunderstandings, it is important to point out the essential role these issues play in clarity. 

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 for clarity 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. It is therefore 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. 

 

Clarity for non-native English speakers

Naturally, avoiding ambiguities and misunderstandings can be particularly tricky in MBA essays if you are not a native English speaker. 

Even if your language skills are great, you may not have spent a lot of time in your target audience’s culture, which can also have tremendous effects on how a reader interprets a text. 

Our MBA essay editing services at Ellin Lolis Consulting are specifically targeted at non-native English speakers. Even if your English isn’t perfect, we are here to help you polish your essay to avoid mistakes in clarity and meaning. We can also help you identify if the language you are using is professional and fits the cultural context of your school. 

If you are a non-native speaker and are having trouble with these issues, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Similarly, we can also help you brush up on your language skills for the TOEFL through our prep course. Or, if you prefer learning on your own, check out our blog post about ways to improve your English before your MBA. 

After all, no matter how good your English language skills are, there is always room to improve!

 

Utilizing a theme

One of the most reliable strategies for ensuring clarity throughout your MBA essay is utilizing a theme.

A theme is like your topic. For MBA essays, this usually represents a value like communication, impact, helping others, or leadership. It can also emphasize a certain passion, like innovation, forging relationships, or sports, or a characteristic of your personality like determination or proactivity.

A theme functions to tie everything you say in your essay into a single, unified message. This way, although you may be presenting many arguments or stories to your reader, they will finish your essay with a central takeaway and remember you better. 

By giving your reader this central message, you make sure they are understanding the most important ideas in your essay. Whether your theme is that you value giving back, focus on learning from your mistakes, or always see the need 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. But it is essential for you to stand out among all the other applicants you’re competing with. We have a lot of advice on this subject, so be sure to check out our blog posts on essay writing to help make sure your theme is right for your stories, and vice versa!

We highly suggest you take a look at other successful essay responses before you begin writing. 

Our MBA Resource Center has dozens of past successful essays for these prompts – and many more! – and detailed brainstorming worksheets to help you plan out an essay that gets you into your top-choice MBA. 

Our library also includes guides for all top global MBA programs, interview tips and mocks, CV templates, and recommendation letter guides. Click to join!

Mistake #2: Your MBA essay lacks storytelling

As we mentioned above in tandem with your theme, our editors at Ellin Lolis Consulting believe that one of the best strategies for effective MBA essays is to use stories and storytelling tactics. This is another essential way of standing out and being remembered.

Stories in MBA admissions essays highlight the most important and relevant aspects of experiences from your past. They serve as authentic examples that help the reader understand why your theme is important to you. An MBA essay can have one or more stories depending on the prompt. 

For example, if your theme is communicative leadership, you may begin your essay with a story about how you took the initiative in high school to begin your school newspaper. You may continue with how you led your disadvantaged university rugby team to a regional championship before finally talking about how you have utilized this skill in your work at BCG.

Of course, your theme is completely dependent on your stories – you cannot make up experiences from your past to underline your theme. This means that you must take a look at your stories and see what ties them together to create your theme.

An effective way to tell stories is by using storytelling techniques like these:

 

Use structure

Quality MBA essays require structure. Not only does a solid structure improve clarity, it also helps the reader understand how you proactively tackled past challenges and how you improved personally and professionally as a result.

For MBA admissions essays, we 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 necessary context or fail to reveal how you grew out of the experience. 

Taking a closer look, STAR boils down to:

Situation: The context of your story and all necessary background information.

Task: The problem or the challenge you faced.

Action: What you actively did to solve that problem.

Results: What you learned from the experience and any significant benefits it brought your company or team. Try to include measurable results, if possible. And you will also benefit from adding in your takeaway from the experience; this can include skills you gained, a mindset you developed, or the acknowledgment of a rewarding experience.

Take this example, in which our client Lucas clearly uses the STAR method to tell a story about volunteering:

“I began volunteering to help tutor children from public schools living in one of the poorest neighborhoods of São Paulo. Growing up faced with financial instability, I attended both private and public high schools, which exposed me to the huge skill gap for public school students who lacked basic writing and math skills. (Situation) In the tutoring program, I realized children had trouble understanding scientific problems because of their poor foundations in basic education. (Task) To change that, I invested time to develop experiential learning methods adapted to their educational gaps through in-class science experiments and adjusted vocabulary. (Action) As a result, most of our students graduated high school and one even went to college – a remarkable fact in Brazil, a country where only 50% of high school students graduate on time. I was able to help counteract Brazil’s inequalities – even in just small ways. (Results)”

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.

 

Passions, motivations, and underlying values

To make your story really resonate with the admissions committee, it is important to make sure you demonstrate motivations and passions that lie beyond the mere events you are recounting.

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. A great way of defining and prioritizing the values and motivations you want to communicate is by establishing a personal brand — read more on this here. 

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.

 

Persuasion, empathy, and emotion

Compelling the adcom is the ultimate goal of your MBA essay. It functions to show the admissions board who you are, that you are genuine, and that your values align with their school. This means you are effectively using your essay to persuade your audience – the adcom.

A persuasive story is one 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. 

You may fear that expressing emotion will come off as unprofessional or unfitting for an academic context. While this may be true in a statistical report or a term paper about environmentally-friendly manufacturing methods, the right balance of emotions do belong in your MBA admissions essay. 

Do not be afraid to let loose and show the adcom the person behind your application. In fact, you must do this to effectively persuade the committee by revealing the underlying values, motivations, and passions mentioned above. 

Remember that showing emotions in your MBA essay is not a weakness. And even so, showing weakness in your essay can be a winning tactic, too! 

 

Mistake #3: You did not proofread your MBA essay

Failing to proofread your essay is the most grievous of MBA essay sins. Proofreading your essay should always be the last thing on your checklist for composing professional or academic texts.

No matter how much time you have spent brainstorming and writing your essays, coming back to your texts with a rested set of eyes is always a good idea so you catch those confusing ideas that didn’t seem confusing while you were writing them, or spot those awkward phrases that didn’t sound so bad when you were hyper-focused. 

Proofreading any text involves a detailed reading to eradicate errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, or semantics. Proofreading acts as your firewall – it is the last protection a writer has between making a mistake and submitting one.

You may be an excellent writer or feel that you are detail-oriented enough to ensure that your texts are error-free. However, this should never deter you from giving your text a thorough proofread. 

Every good writer needs a great editor – and this is even more relevant for proofreading that functions to catch errors and inconsistencies. 

While you should definitely proofread your essay yourself, we also highly recommend letting someone else read your essay. By looking at your essay from a different perspective, your proofreader will not only spot a wayward typo or two, they can also point out issues related to clarity like ambiguities.

They may even be able to make you aware of possible misunderstandings, passages where your motivations are unclear, or the fact that you did not talk about the results of a project despite attempts to follow the STAR format to the letter. 

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 structures, 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. Additionally, we see trimming word count as part of technical editing. 

However, our editing services also go beyond that. We also offer strategic editing, which takes a closer look at issues related to clarity, making sure your stories align with your theme, relevance, structure and shaping of stories, and fitting your essay to your target school. 

Together, we see this approach to be the key to successful MBA admissions essays. If you want to know more about strategic and technical editing as well as our editing feedback process, feel free to check out our article on this topic. Of course, we are always happy to answer any questions you may have about the process, so don’t be afraid to reach out! 

 

Mistake #4: You haven’t related your ideas to the school

One of the biggest mistakes we see in our clients’ essays is writing an excellent essay with a great intro, stories, goals, and conclusion, but leaving out any meaningful connection to the school or program they’re applying to. Effectively, this means they have forgotten who their audience is.

A key consideration that adcoms make when deciding whether to admit you or not is whether you are a good fit for the program and how you will contribute to the school community. It’s not much different from a job application, in fact. Consider that the adcom is ultimately looking to select people who will give their school a good name and use their MBAs wisely. 

The best way to prove that you will do this is by doing your research on the school and program so you can show a clear plan for how the different opportunities, courses, faculty members, clubs, and values will help you reach your goals.

So after you’ve done all the work to create a theme that connects your experience, strengths, motivations, and goals together, you then want to connect all of that to the school. This is how you will truly be convincing and stand out as an applicant.

 

Get help fixing your MBA essays today

This is a lot to keep in mind when writing your MBA admissions essay, especially when you want to do your best to impress the admissions board and convince them to accept you to their school. 

You want to be sure to avoid key mistakes. For example, it is utterly important to make sure your texts are clear and free of ambiguities. Simultaneously, we highly recommend using storytelling – thoroughly infused with motivations, emotions, and a solid structure – to really build a rapport with your audience and spark their empathy. Of course, it would also be a mistake to hand in an essay full of grammatical or syntactical errors, which is why it is essential to proofread and edit your essay before you settle on a final version. And lastly, you don’t want to spend time crafting an excellent essay only to leave the readers wondering how it relates to their MBA program. This is why it’s important to show how you will enrich the school and use your MBA in the future.

Our editing services can help make sure you do not fall prey to these mistakes – or any others that may pop up. Not only can we help make sure your essay is written in proper, error-free English, but we can also go beyond that to help you shape your essay to make sure the adcom sees you as a winning candidate. 

Your MBA application is the time to shine and be your best. At Ellin Lolis Consulting, we are determined to help you get there. Whether you need help brainstorming a theme or simply need a second pair of eyes before clicking send, reach out to take advantage of our editing services today!