Skip to main content

HBS MBA Business-Minded Essay: Private Equity and Power of Community

Harvard Business-Minded Essay 

Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

Commentary from the Author on choosing relevant personal stories and change in values for the HBS Business-Minded or Career Choice Essay if you are from the PE or VC industry


Background Information: The backstory is about the relationship between the applicant and her father, who manages a Small Business in New York under the backdrop of COVID spiraling out of control. The restaurant business was not doing well as sales dropped by 80% in March 2020.  As a PE professional, the applicant joins her father and faces one of the biggest setbacks in her life. The event is the backdrop for the realization that ‘community’ matters for a business. 

Theme: Community    

Theme (Explained): In a hyper-competitive PE industry, ‘community’ as a lever for making decisions about the potential of the business is a new insight that the applicant acquires. It is a value that transcended from her personal to professional life. 

Profile: Private Equity Associate

Industry: Finance

Similar Narrative (Industries): Investment Banking, Venture Capital

MBA Essay Strategy: While creating a narrative around community as a theme, include events that demonstrate your vulnerability and the importance of the value in such moments. Ideally, include stories from your personal life and strategically transition to your professional responsibilities where the value becomes a new insight. If the transition doesn’t work organically, don’t artificially segue. Use an alternative narrative. 

Opener: I want the reader to go back to a time when people were scared even to come two feet close to each other.

HBS MBA Business-Minded Essay - Private Equity and Power of Community (300 Words)

Did you sanitize? Did you wash your hands? Don’t allow that gap in your face mask? My father was rigorous with all safety standards when COVID-19 hit.

As a supermarket owner employing 30 in New York, my father couldn’t just shut down the business. Juggling between his sales falling by 80% in 

 
 

F1GMAT's Harvard MBA Essay Guide

 

• Business-Minded Essay: Please reflect on how your choices have influenced your career path and aspirations. (up to 300 words)
• Growth-Oriented Essay: Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)
• Leadership-Focused Essay: What experiences have shaped how you invest in others and how you lead? (up to 250 words)

Download F1GMAT's Harvard MBA Essay Guide (20+ Essay Examples & 300+ Pages of Essay Writing Wisdom)

 

About the Author 

Atul Jose

I am Atul Jose, Founding Consultant of F1GMAT, an MBA admissions consultancy that has worked with applicants since 2009.

 

For the past 15 years I have edited the application files of admits to the M7 programs: Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Wharton School, MIT Sloan, Chicago Booth, Kellogg School of Management, and Columbia Business School, together with admits to Berkeley Haas, Yale School of Management, NYU Stern, Michigan Ross, Duke Fuqua, Darden, Tuck, IMD, London Business School, INSEAD, SDA Bocconi, IESE Business School, HEC Paris, McCombs, and Tepper, plus other programs inside the global top 30.

 

My work covers the full MBA application deliverable: career planning and profile evaluation, application essay editing, recommendation letter editing, mock interviews and interview preparation, scholarship and fellowship essay editing, and cover letter editing for funding applications. Full bio with credentials and admit history is here.

 

I am the author of the Winning MBA Essay Guide, the best-selling essay guide covering M7 MBA programs. I have written and updated the guide annually since 2013, which makes the 2026 edition the thirteenth.

 

The reason I still write and edit essays every cycle: a good MBA essay carries a real applicant's voice. Writing essays for F1GMAT's Books and Editing essays weekly is how I stay calibrated to what current admissions committees respond to.

 

Contact me for school selection, career planning, essay strategy, narrative development, essay editing, interview preparation, scholarship essay editing, or guidance documents for recommendation letters.