What Not to Write in your MBA Essays and What to Include

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Betsy Massar founded Master Admissions in 2009 and has worked with hundreds of candidates on getting into the top business schools in the world. She was one of the pioneering women graduates of Harvard Business School and has been a long-time communications coach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Betsy worked for Goldman Sachs after business school and has spent most of her career working for investment banks and investment management firms. Before moving to California, where she is on the board of the Harvard Club of San Francisco, Betsy lived and worked in Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong for 10 years.

When should I apply to business school?

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Stratus Admissions Counseling is a premier admissions counseling firm committed to helping clients achieve their dreams of going to business school, law school, and graduate school. Stratus has served thousands of clients from more than 50 countries with our unique team-based approach. Our expert MBA counselors are graduates of Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, The Wharton School, Chicago Booth, and other esteemed programs. We are a true team, working together on all aspects of our clients' applicants. We believe that every applicant deserves a personalized approach, efficiently developed and strategically tailored to make their application stand out. At Stratus, we are committed to helping every client present their best self so that they are accepted at the program of their dreams. Start with a free consultation with an admissions specialist.

Insights from Stratus Admissions Couseling

A common question we at Stratus hear is “When should I apply?”— or more specifically, “In what round should I apply?”

Most schools have three rounds of application deadlines: generally in September/October, early January, and April. If you are deciding between R1 and R2, you should aim for the earliest round when your application will be strongest. Although most admissions committees will tell you that they plan to admit students in R3, the fewest seats are available in this round — and they tend to be reserved for applicants with unique profiles who can round out the class. This past year more than others, we saw waitlists as a strategy to hold onto strong candidates.

Deciding which round is the best for you is like trying to decide where you want to go on vacation. Trip planning involves many factors such as budget, activity level, location, and travel requirements. What is going on in your life at that particular time will influence your decisions. Here are some key points to consider as you decide when to apply to business school:

Time to dedicate to applications:

As you must decide how much time you want to spend sightseeing versus relaxing when planning a vacation, you must conduct a realistic assessment of the time you will have to dedicate to your MBA applications. You know your work and life commitments best. If your fiscal year ends in September, for example, and you know July and August are your busiest months, or if you are planning a fall wedding, you might consider R2. Otherwise, if you can balance work and applications during the summer, you will be well positioned to apply in R1 if you start now.

Quant readiness/test score:

Most schools still require a test score, so you will need to figure out the best test for you to take and the realistic best score you think you can achieve. In our vacation analogy, when deciding how to get to your destination, you may see that plane ticket prices are too high for your first choice of dates and instead consider traveling at a later date or driving instead of flying. With regard to test scores, if you feel like you have achieved the best score you can attain, then consider applying in R1. If you are not happy with your score, especially if you have only taken a test once, retake the test in early July and then reassess. Although your test score is only one portion of your application, if you think you can do better, it is worth considering applying in R2. If you have finished your testing journey and are still not happy with the quant profile you are displaying to admissions, consider taking a “Math for Management” course.

School research:

It’s important to spend time getting to know the schools to which you are applying, as you would when selecting a vacation spot that you will enjoy. Although business school is not a two-year vacation, it will consume two years of your life! The Covid-19 pandemic has leveled the playing field from an access perspective; because business schools are still not open for visits, they have worked very hard to put resources online. This availability of information has increased the expectation for potential applicants to engage with schools. Therefore, plan to attend multiple webinars for each school of interest to you, reach out to students at those schools with similar interests or career paths, and understand the culture of and resources available to you at each school. Admissions committees want to know that you’ve taken the time to get to know their school, and this should come across in your essays and application. If you don’t have time to do this before R1 deadlines, consider applying in R2.

Scholarship opportunities:

You need to think about your budget for business school as you would when financing a vacation. Business school is likely to be the biggest investment of your life other than buying a house. In R1, the entire scholarship pool is available, so you have greater odds of receiving a scholarship. However, keep in mind that scholarships tend to be awarded to those with a strong background compared to the class profile — so all the factors discussed above are just as important in order to put together the strongest profile possible.

The last two application years have seen some significant changes. However, at the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants conference in early May, we heard a similar message as in years past from admissions directors: apply when your application is the strongest. And logic tells us that the earlier you apply, the more seats will be available. So, you should build a plan that helps you achieve your strongest application as early as possible.

Not sure when to apply? Our Stratus MBA counselors can help you review your situation when you reach out for a free consultation.

Find your story with brainstorming

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Your journey to business school starts with mbaMission. Our top-ranked team of full-time admissions experts has helped more than 10,000 MBA applicants gain acceptance to the world's elite business schools. With more than 1,300 verified five-star reviews from satisfied past clients, mbaMission is by far the top-ranked MBA admissions consulting firm on GMAT Club, and Poets&Quants has named us the number one firm. Each member of our team is carefully selected and trained. They are all graduates of leading MBA programs and expert writers and editors. Interested in working with us? Sign up for a free 30-minute consultation to receive meaningful, personalized advice from one of our experts.

Insights from mbaMission

At mbaMission, we often tell candidates, “You cannot turn a bad idea into a good essay.” Before our clients ever begin writing drafts of their essays, we guide them through a comprehensive brainstorming process — beginning with a thorough questionnaire — to uncover the stories that will make them stand out. If you are uncertain about where and how to start, we suggest that you create a master list of your professional, extracurricular, community, and personal accomplishments and then examine each one via “multidimensional brainstorming” — viewing them from as many different micro-angles as possible. Doing so will not only help ensure that you understand your depth of anecdotes but also provide you with maximum flexibility, considering that MBA admissions committees ask questions that vary dramatically from school to school.

As an example, an applicant of ours reflected on her experience as the coach of a baseball team at an underfunded high school, an experience that might at first glance appear to be just a single story. However, by brainstorming around this experience and delving into it in detail, she discovered multiple dimensions:

1. She had creatively motivated an underachieving team and changed attitudes, despite losses
2. She initiated and led fundraising efforts so that each player could afford proper equipment
3. She mentored struggling players and watched them get stronger on the field
4. She helped a player deal with a family issue off the field
5. She recruited other coaches and worked together to improve the team’s on-field performance

After discovering this variety and depth of anecdotes within a single experience, our applicant was able to use this core story to respond to MBA essay questions about overcoming adversity, leading a team, developing others’ talents, making an impact on an individual, collaborating with peers, and other such themes. Note that all the listed options came from exploring one experience from her community activities; using brainstorming to examine the many other facets of her community endeavors, as well as her professional, extracurricular, and even personal life, provided a robust inventory of ideas that ensured she always had a thoughtful, relevant response at hand for any essay question — and later, for her interviews as well.

Indeed, the word “thoughtful” is truly critical for answering the essay questions before you. The MBA admissions committees are not expecting you to have an array of experiences they have never heard before. In fact, they absolutely assume that your experiences will be similar to ones they have heard before, but what they want is to come to understand you and your values through your sharing of those experiences. Brainstorming allows you to not only bring to light multiple compelling experiences for your essays (and different ways of viewing them) but also to refresh your sense of who you are at your core so you can reveal yourself most authentically to the admissions committee.

Do you need help brainstorming for your MBA application essays? Sign up for a free 30-minute consultation with an mbaMission admissions expert.

How Understanding Admissions Officers’ “Hierarchy of Needs” Can Help You Get Into a Top MBA Program

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Expert MBA admissions advice doesn't have to cost a fortune! ApplicantLab.com is revolutionizing the MBA admissions consulting industry by giving you detailed, step-by-step advice via an online platform, available 24/7, for a fraction of the cost of traditional consulting. Created by a Harvard MBA graduate with 18 years of admissions experience, ApplicantLab.com guides you through everything you need: your "brand" and application strategy, essays, resume, recommendations, interviews, and more. Our founder is a featured expert on the weekly Poets and Quants podcast, and the Lab has over 100 "5 star" verified reviews at GMATClub. Start your free trial with ApplicantLab now!

Insights from ApplicantLab

You probably know that the MBA admissions process is a holistic one — admissions officers will look at your academic chops (primarily your undergraduate grades and your GMAT / GRE test scores), your work experience, your extracurricular/community involvement, and yes, even your personality when trying to decide whether or not to accept you.

One conceptual mistake applicants make is assuming that each of these factors carries equal weight. They don’t. This is a problem because applicants then might waste precious space in their application trying to emphasize something about themselves that, frankly, isn’t nearly as important as other things!

To help candidates think their way through this — that is, which facets matter most and therefore which facets you should most emphasize — I have liberally borrowed a concept from psychology known as “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”. The idea is that while humans all have needs — for food, safety, belonging, self-esteem, etc. — they need to be met in a certain order. Put bluntly, it’s kind of difficult to spend too much time worrying about your self-esteem if you’re starving! You need basic physiological needs met before you can advance to basic psychological needs, and psychological needs met before you can advance to the ultimate level of “self-actualization”.

Similarly, admissions officers do indeed look at every facet of a candidate as part of the holistic process, but certain criteria need to be satisfied first, before the candidacy can advance. Drawing inspiration from Mr. Maslow, here is the MBA admissions committee “Hierarchy of Needs”:

Let’s dig into what each of these means, starting at the bottom:

Level 1 - Academics:

Given the understandable but often unproductive obsession on MBA message boards around a candidate’s “stats” (GPA and GMAT/GRE performance), sometimes these data points feel like “THE” major barrier to admissions.

But let’s take a step back and think about why schools even look at this information to begin with: True, one part of it is “bragging rights” or trying to move up in the U.S. News rankings (“Our average GMAT score is 720!”). But the main reason they care about these things is that they want to make sure that you can handle the academic workload of business school. In the obsessive flurry of this process, sometimes it’s hard to remember that business school is … well, it’s SCHOOL. Given the fast pace of many MBA programs, combined with the many demands on students’ time (namely job-hunting and extra-curriculars), admissions officers want some sort of reassurance that a candidate won’t struggle, be miserable, or drop out — and also that the other students in that person’s class will respect them.

If a school worries that a candidate won’t be able to handle the work, they won’t progress to the next levels: “Do not pass ‘GO’, do not collect $200.”

Level 2 – “EQ”:

If your grades and test scores are an indicator of your “IQ”, what starts to matter even more is your emotional intelligence, often referred to as “EQ”. We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the evil genius scientist: huge brain, but a real jerk to be around. MBA Admissions Committees do their best to try to admit people who are, well, “nice”: empathetic, humble, generous, and caring. This isn’t due to some sort of “Kum Ba Yah” bleeding heart touchy-feeliness: It turns out that being conscientious can actually be a key contributor to someone’s success … yes, even in the business world! Customers, teammates, and investors are more likely to “go to bat” for someone they like. While it’s true that unpleasant people can be successful, the fact is that those people could have probably been even more successful, had they understood how to work well with and win over others.

EQ doesn’t just matter as a predictor for career success, it also matters in the short-term, in terms of who you will be on campus. Many MBA programs are tight-knit communities that rely upon students selflessly helping other students find jobs, organize conferences, and even plan social outings! A selfish person probably would not help others out much, and so the entire community loses out. Show that you’re more of a “giver” than a “taker”!

Level 3 – Employability:

Ok, so you’re smart (and can prove it) and you’re a super-nice person (I can tell!) … so your admission is guaranteed, right? Alas: not so fast. One of the major stakeholders of MBA programs are the recruiters: the corporations, banks, and consulting firms that scoop up the program’s graduates each year. This is important not only for students’ satisfaction with the program, but also because employment statistics also factor into the almighty program rankings.

Admissions officers want to have reassurance that they are accepting candidates that — should those candidates later on find themselves at an interview with a fancy corporate recruiter — will be valued and make the recruiter think, “Hey! This interview wasn’t a waste of my time! This school really selects great talent!”

Note that this does NOT mean that you HAVE to have business experience prior to an MBA program — each year, candidates from all sorts of backgrounds (from teaching to professional athletes) get accepted. But it DOES mean that you need transferrable skills and personality traits that recruiters value (work-ethic; time-management; team management). Put another way: a candidate who crosses the first two levels of the Hierarchy of Needs — that is, someone who is really bright and also a nice, warm person — but who has not been able to hold down a job for longer than a year, who seems to quit jobs/bounce around jobs while taking six months off each time to relax will not go past this next level. Someone with a very spotty work history raises lots of questions, none of them flattering: “Does he keep getting fired? If so, why? Or, if he is quitting jobs so quickly, does it mean that he lacks tenacity and when the going gets tough, he simply quits?” While it’s fine to have, say, one job on your resume that had a short tenure (especially if you were the victim of downsizing!) — multiple short-tenure jobs risk raising a red flag. In a pool of hundreds or thousands of applicants that any corporation would be happy to hire, why take a risk on someone who might embarrass the school?

Level 4: “Leadership Potential”:

And now we get to the pinnacle of the hierarchy: leadership. Either proven leadership (via a list of prior accomplishments), or at least, evidence that the candidate has the raw materials to become a leader. “Leadership” is a word that gets thrown around a lot and appears on countless motivational posters (usually with an eagle on it), but one way to think about it is the ability to drive positive change, through others. Someone who doesn’t really drive much change may be many positive things and a wonderful person, but he or she is not a leader. Someone who single-handedly creates change is a little better, but eventually one has to be able to work through others. There are only 24 hours in a day and no one person can literally do every single thing a business requires, so the ability to get teams, groups, companies, even governments to change is vital.

The more “elite” the program, the higher the bar will be for leadership potential. Put another way – when you look at the average statistics across the top programs, many of them have VERY similar average GMAT scores, average GPAs, etc. And yet, one school with an average GMAT of 720 might be MUCH tougher to get accepted into than another. What gives? Well, two candidates might have 720 GMATs, 3.8 GPAs, and four years of work experience … but one candidate spent those four years testing software for bugs, while the other worked with the government of an African nation to launch an accelerator program for entrepreneurs. There is nothing “wrong” with testing software for bugs; the problem is that its repetitive, rote nature doesn’t give that candidate a chance to show that they can drive any change (since they are documenting and fixing other peoples’ mistakes, and the solitary nature of the work doesn’t give them a chance to prove that they can do things through others. On the other hand, the candidate who was able to convince a government to launch an accelerator program has demonstrated BOTH the ability to drive BIG change — change that has impacted hundreds, perhaps thousands of people — but was also able to convince a group of people, in government, no less, to agree to her vision. Suffice it to say, the second candidate is infinitely more likely to get into a top MBA program.

This is why on message boards sometimes you’ll see an incredulous candidate whining: “I don’t get it! I had a 780 GMAT and a 4.0 GPA from a top college, yet I was rejected by Harvard Business School!”. The next time you see a post like that, you can be sure that while this person clearly met the “Academic” need, there must have been other elements of his candidacy that did not advance him to the next levels of consideration.

I think that being aware of the MBA admissions committee “Hierarchy of Needs” can be useful in a few ways:

If you’re currently applying, spend more energy in your essays, resume, etc. on proving your leadership impact, instead of trying to prove that you’re “smart”.

If you’re still a year or more away from applying, try to find opportunities at work, on campus, or in the community to start developing those leadership skills, so that when you do apply later on, you’ll be able to demonstrate the sort of impact that makes you more likely to reach the top of the hierarchy!

The essential qualities of a successful MBA applicant

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At Vantage Point MBA, we believe that applying to business school is a team effort — and that's where we come in. Meredith and I have built a team of expert MBA admissions consultants who are passionate about coaching applicants to the top MBA programs. We will guide you through the process of crafting your story, identifying and addressing your weaknesses, developing your personal brand strategy, aligning on a target school list, editing your resume and essays until they’re perfect, and eventually helping you prepare for interviews. We personally invest in each person we work with and our firm only works with a limited number of clients each year so that we can give you all of the time, attention, and guidance that you need to be competitive. In fact, our consultants only work with an average of four clients at a time, the lowest ratio in the industry. Our results speak for themselves — our clients are admitted to the top 10 MBA programs at a three times higher rate than the average! To schedule a free initial consultation with our team, visit Vantage Point or email melody@vantagepointmba.com.

Insights from Vantage Point MBA

Much has been written about what makes a successful MBA application but as coaches, our team places a special emphasis on the applicant first. After all, applicants are people too and what we’ve found from having coached hundreds of successful applicants through the application process is that certain behaviors or qualities set those individuals apart. The good news is that all of these can be learned, and with some effort — and perhaps some coaching — you can leverage them as your super power in the MBA application process. We hope these will inspire you as much as they’ve inspired us!

1. They are self-aware.

Above all else, the commonality we see amongst the most successful applicants to the top MBA programs is self-awareness. This often manifests as an easier time distilling the values, passions, and motivations that guide your past decisions and future goals — all of which is critical material to nail in your MBA essays. Separately, strong self-awareness typically lends itself to deeper and more productive relationships with others, from which the best leadership and teamwork stories usually emerge.

2. They are open.

For many people, the toughest thing about writing business school application essays is getting comfortable sharing personal details. It can be surprising to learn that the admissions committee wants you to let your guard down and share more about yourself than you would in a typical professional setting.

Trust me, it would be incredibly hard to differentiate between candidates if they were only judging you on your work experiences (consulting engagement stories really run together after you’ve read a half dozen of them) and GMAT scores. To truly assess your leadership potential and the value you would add to classroom discussion, they want to understand your unique perspective — one that has been shaped by your upbringing, college experience, and personal hobbies.

If it is not your natural inclination to reflect on your values and motivations and then share them with perfect strangers, that is ok! But be prepared to get comfortable going down this path. Here is an exercise on developing what we call your ‘personal brand’ that might help.

3. They are curious.

No matter what stage of the MBA application process you find yourself in, our best piece of advice is to seek any and all information and truly listen to those who have come before you. In other words, network! Nine times out of 10, applicants we speak with underestimate the number of conversations they need to have to adequately learn the subtle differences between top MBA programs. Remember that each person you speak with is just one opinion; to develop a robust perspective on how a school fits or does not fit your goals, you need to accumulate a variety of views.

Let’s go back to the admissions committee for a moment. Just as schools probably sound the same if you are only reading the generic language on their websites, applicants sound boringly similar if they speak in broad strokes about a school’s ‘culture’ and ‘experiential curriculum’. No matter how compelling your profile, they will be hesitant to admit you if you can’t articulate how you will leverage their program to achieve your goals.

So be curious and enjoy the process of learning about the experiences of others. Many of the details they share may not apply to you, but those that do will make all the difference in the world.

4. They are willing to put in the work.

Just as networking takes time and effort to do well, so does the broader application process. From arriving at compelling short-term and long-term post-MBA career goals to recrafting your resume for an admissions committee audience, a strong application can’t be done in days or even weeks. Remember that you are competing for one of 300 to 1000 spots (depending on the program) with a pool roughly nine times as big as the incoming class based on the latest acceptance and yield data. Invest the time into crafting an authentic, well developed application and set yourself up for the best chances of success.