Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
You may wonder why you have to write essays to get into business school. Aren’t you going to learn finance and accounting — not write papers? Why do MBA essays matter?
The good news is that no one I’ve spoken with at an MBA program mentions any worries about essays. So you shouldn’t be concerned with producing a master’s thesis to get your MBA.
Schools will have you write essays for your application largely because they want to get to know you. Your resume only says so much and your test scores and GPA are but data points on you as a person.
While the world of business for sure moves forward because of hard quantitative skills, make no mistake that relationships are perhaps the most important part. I spoke with a number of MBA alumni from top schools who are now executives at major companies (connections I made via my outstanding mentor from American Corporate Partners). They all mentioned that the network and relationships they gained from their MBA were the single greatest things they gained from school.
Schools realize this and put great effort into putting together a class of people who will balance each other and build relationships that will continue after school. To help them understand you more, they ask that you write essays about yourself and your goals.
A valuable lesson I also learned from my mentor is that writing is still very much an important skill in the business world. Texts, Slack messages, emails, and reports all require you to effectively communicate via the written word. Make no mistake—being a good and clear writer is an often-undervalued skills that will further your career and help you achieve success
And so you will write essays for your application.
Where to start on your MBA essays?
Unfortunately, I can’t give you a master plan that will be able to give you a full roadmap that you can use for every school. Each school has variations that make this an untenable prospect.
So before you striking the keyboard, I recommend that you start with the essay questions from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Even if you aren’t planning on applying to GSB, being able to answer these questions effectively will likely help you with any other essays you have.
What matters to you most and why?
Why Stanford? (Or whatever school you are thinking about.)
You don’t need to actually write the essays — just think about them. Write them down on a notecard and carry them around for a week. Or put them somewhere you will see them and just think about them. Talk about them with your partner, your friends, or your relatives.
What matters?
Simon Sinek is a popular business writer who has a great book called Start With Why. You should definitely read the full book; he does an excellent job analyzing case studies of business that succeed or fail with this question. The main premise is you should know your purpose for doing something.
The first question is perhaps the most important. This is a great question to ponder as you even think about your decision to pursue an MBA. For many veterans, this decision is based on: “I don’t know totally what I want to do, but going to school seems like a good place to find out.”
Look, we aren’t necessarily going to leave the military and know exactly what we are getting into for a new career. But you should think long and hard about what it is you want to do in life and how (and if) a graduate business degree is what you need to help get you there.
Having a more clear understanding of what matters to you can help you think more clearly about what schools you will apply to, what you want to do after graduation, and how a graduate business degree would fit into that equation. That will make for good MBA essays.
What do you want to do? What are you trying to accomplish? In thinking thoroughly about this question, you will likely find yourself feeling better about the purpose of pursuing an MBA. And being able to answer the question of “Why do this?” and “To what purpose?” will aid you in every school essay and interview.
Know why you want to go to a school
Every school is going to want to know why you want to go there. They are going to want to hear specifics as to why in your essays and your interview. If you find yourself struggling with this answer, you are then going to have a difficult time convincing that school to accept you into their program.
Thinking through this question will also help you to match your goals with how this program will help you achieve those goals. In answering this question, you should be able to point to specifics. This is a good question to force you to research a school.
What is their history of placing candidates in your target industry? Or in your desired location? Does the school have classes and faculty focused on a certain topic you deliberately want to learn about? How effective are the clubs for your target industry? Do you match with their culture and academic program?
Being deliberate in thinking about this question will help you know more about what you want to do at school and why.
Organize your thoughts before you write
I promise, I’m really going to try to avoid sounding like your high school English teacher here — but those writing principles you learned in the classroom are still true.
Start off with thinking.
Get your ideas organized before you start writing. Try this technique: look at the school’s question a few days or a week before you actually plan to sit down and start writing. Just like with the two GSB questions, having this in the back of your brain will get you to start thinking.
Write down the ideas you have. I keep my notes function on my phone filled with these thoughts, that way I can add them wherever I am. Often I will also email myself a short note about what I was thinking. Just from a few short thoughts like that, I have written hundreds of words.
Think about stories from the military that demonstrate your leadership and ability to produce results. What will be difficult for most veterans as they start writing is communicating in a “me” focused manner. We learned to appreciate teamwork in the military and there is less of a focus on who gets the credit. But you need to start communicating about the impact that YOU made in the role you had and why success happened because YOU were involved.
Create an outline.
Start with an outline where you start taking the thoughts you had about your topic and begin to organize them. The outline will then serve as the skeleton of your essay.
Get writing.
For your first draft, just write. Just sit down and let the words flow. You can fix errors and misspellings later. Just start putting words on paper.
I do some writing on Medium (I write under @mbdelaney) and have found their word processor to be my favorite way to write. It’s clean and easy. I usually start writing there and then transfer to a Google doc to start editing. This also makes it easier to share with others for feedback.
Don’t worry about going over the word count. MBA essays are definitely a challenge simply because you have to be so concise. Most essays are no longer than 500 words, which is not a lot of room. Put your ideas out first, and later you can conduct triage on what is essential to your point and what can be cut.
For whatever school the essay is for, I recommend having a few notes written down on a notecard about that school. For example, Berkely Haas is really big on their leadership principles of Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. Vets that I’ve spoken with at Haas told me they wrote these down on a piece of paper as they wrote their essays and kept looking at them to see if their writing was expressing how they demonstrate these values.
Start editing your MBA essays
Proofread.
If you are writing on a computer, I highly recommend installing Grammarly. This is a plugin which will be your spelling and punctuation check from everything to essays to emails. It’s awesome.
Read it out loud. And then again.
I catch mistakes in my writing all the time when I read out loud. This forces me to slow down and go through every word and bit of punctuation.
Share with other veterans.
My first recommendation is that you share your essay with a veteran from your target school. Every school has a veteran’s club, and every club has the purpose of helping other veterans through the application process. Working through these clubs is extremely useful in helping you to communicate your military experience in a way that a civilian admissions committee can understand.
A note of caution on this approach: just because they got in does not mean they are experts on the admissions process. While I HIGHLY recommend that you reach out to veterans at these schools, I found that a lot of the advice ended up being “Well, this worked for me so that’s what I’m going to suggest for you.” That’s not a terrible approach, but it can be limited.
I sent all my MBA essays to the clubs at my schools. 10/10 recommend.
If you are applying to an MBA program, you should for sure work with Service to School. They are a nonprofit that will link you in with a volunteer (most likely a current student or recent MBA graduate) to help you through the application process.
Important note: Service to School is a great organization, but MBA admissions are not their top priority. Their main effort is put into getting veterans, especially enlisted ones, into Ivy League undergraduate programs. For this, they are truly amazing and have created some incredible partnerships. But the success you find with them in applying to an MBA program is a lot more dependent on the work you put in, the individual ambassador they assign you, and the work you’re able to do together. Your Service to School ambassador should not be the end-all-be-all of your admissions advice, but can for sure act as a solid sounding board.
Share with family.
MBA essay questions are often very personal and any commentary you will find from admissions’ deans will have them say how much they want to hear your story.
Well, who knows your story better than your family? Get them to help you!
Consider hiring someone.
I plan on writing more about admissions consultants, but they exist. In full disclosure: I hired one. I was on deployment, flush with cash, and was seriously stressing (way more than I should have) about admissions. So I hired someone. I personally regretted it, but have known people that found value from it. The value I got was not even remotely close to what I paid them, but the most value was found in the help I got with essays.
If nothing else, these people see a lot of essays. They also are most likely not veterans and can be great at helping you effectively translate your military experience.
A lot of consultants will offer a price just for them to review your essays. If you aren’t feeling fully confident in your essays, this could be worth it for you, especially for your top schools.
They will not be cheap. Expect to shell out a few hundred bucks for a consultant to review your essays for a single school. Think about the long-term ROI of getting into a top school, though, and this could be a great investment for you.
One last note: you may expect to find short essays hidden within the application. Schools may show on their site, “here are the two essays we want you to write,” but then you may also find questions in their application that require a few hundred words to answer. I definitely recommend taking this into consideration before you start doing the application and think that you will just be filling in basic info.
Your essays will be the best way to communicate who you are to school in order to get an interview. The MBA essays serve as the conduit between you and the admissions committee to help them learn about who you are and what you are trying to accomplish. As in all things, be deliberate and intentional in how you write in order to give yourself the best chances for success.
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