Committees conducting MBA admissions change their question sets practically every year, not least to deter candidates from plagiarizing previous essays. However, behind the many “skins,” they continue to ask applicants the same questions they have always asked. Following are five typical MBA essay types and some advice on how to approach them:
MBA Essay Question 1: Career Past and Future
Why choose MBA?
An MBA program is a catalyst for both professional and personal development. How did you advance previously? What plans do you have to advance in the future?
If the question is more about your past, such as “What has motivated you to seek an MBA,” you should carefully consider how you should structure your “why an MBA” response. Or concerning your future: “What do you plan to do after you graduate? How can an MBA benefit you? The question may have five sections, each covering one of three time periods:
- What past events helped you arrive at this goal and point?
- Why now, at this stage of your career, get an MBA?
- What do you intend to do with your degree in the future, both now and in the future?
- Why even get an MBA? (Why not a PhD or a different type of master’s?)
- Why this school’s MBA program in particular?
The “why an MBA?” question seeks to understand how your history and future are connected through business school. You must demonstrate how the MBA serves as a link between today and tomorrow.
You can present your past, present, and future in any sequence, but you must draw a picture of your future that is based naturally on your past accomplishments and your MBA from the school you are applying to.
MBA Essay Question 2: Weaknesses and Failure
To ace this question, keep in mind that this style of MBA essay is not intended to evaluate your strengths or areas for improvement. Everybody is flawed and has made mistakes. What is in question is how you responded, what awareness you got of yourself, and how you developed as a result. They are mostly interested in seeing if you have the maturity to identify your mistake, confess it, and communicate about it in a mature manner.
The MBA admissions committee is interested in knowing whether you are self-aware, willing to be open about your weaknesses, and motivated to improve them. If you try to hide your flaws or blame external factors or situations, this is a sign of immaturity and makes you a bad manager in the making. If you are responsible and quick to learn from your mistakes, the committee (as well as your future employers, partners, and staff) will usually overlook them.
MBA Essay Question Type 3: Leadership
Every application you submit will have as its central topic leadership (and teamwork). The purpose of these questions from the MBA admissions committee is to assess your grasp of leadership, attitude toward leadership, and interpersonal skills in addition to whether you have the “right stuff” for leadership. Just because you’ve held a leadership position in the past doesn’t mean you were effective in it. They need to see that you are aware of what is right.
Additionally, you must show that you have a clear knowledge of your own particular leadership style—how you persuade, encourage, punish, and inspire others to succeed—as well as the values that guide your method. Respect the challenges of leadership in all of your analyses of leadership. If you believe that leading is simple, you have never ever led.
MBA Essay Question Type 4: Uniqueness and Diversity
The admissions committee is interested in learning what about your background, skills, experiences, or training makes you special and will make you a worthwhile addition to your cohort and the program as a whole. The test here is if you can stand out from the pack, whereas other essays are meant to determine whether you match the MBA template.
Put another way, applicants present justifications for an MBA admissions committee not to reject them in several other essays and components of the application – covering all the bases, meeting requirements. However, doing so does not provide the committee with a strong cause to accept you. In this kind of MBA essay, they try to convince the reader to accept them.
MBA Essay Question Type 5: Ethics and Values
Values are crucial. Business ethics are under the spotlight after Enron, the credit crunch, the Panama Papers, and the continual list of severe public trust violations by business leaders. Business schools have come under fire for producing managers with questionable morals who just care about themselves. The selection committees for MBA programs are under pressure to choose better candidates.
The challenging aspect of the MBA essay on ethics is that everyone is aware of what excellent values are and professes to embody them. But there are plenty of cunning scoundrels in the world. Therefore, it is important to understand that writing a nice essay in which you shake your head and tut-tut at business and personal immorality, bid-rigging, claims-cheating, document falsification, payoffs, etc., while assuring the reader of your absolute allegiance to fair play, good governance, and honest dealings is completely useless to your admissions prospects. Speech is cheap.
In Conclusion
Getting admitted in a reputed MBA college is like a dream come true. However, intense competition in MBA admissions has turned this noble profession into a rat race. Make sure to prepare yourself at least a month in advance before you commit yourself for getting admission in an MBA college. The above question types will give you an edge during the counseling session but in the end, it boils down to proving your worth and skills in your own words. Follow the advice above and best of luck.
