• Leadership-Focused Essay: What experiences have shaped how you invest in others and how you lead? (up to 250 words)
Background Information: From the privileges of a cocooned life, the applicant is displaced from Syria and forced to restart her life in the US.
Leadership Traits: Resilience
Leadership Trait (Explained): Harvard MBA applicants loosely use resilience as a leadership trait. Unless you were part of a journey that helped you survive a war, loss of parents, recovery from financial setbacks, or overcoming a life-threatening illness, don’t use resilience as a leadership trait. For the applicant, starting over after a war destroyed her family’s assets is a valid narrative to demonstrate resilience.
MBA Essay Strategy: I consciously chose not to start the essay with a dialogue or trauma. Two lines are allocated to set up the narrative before the trauma event.
Theme: Gratitude, Resilience
Theme (Explained): A big part of my editing involves fine-tuning the tone of the essays to include an attitude of gratitude for recovering from a setback event. For the essay, the applicant maturely addresses the cost of living in Michigan and acknowledges the challenges for the relatives to support her and her sibling’s education.
Profile: Investment Banker
Industry: Finance
Opener: The opener conveys the contrast of living in peace while the Syrian war was waging on. I have used a W-pattern strategy to set up the narrative for the trauma event.
Sample Harvard MBA Leadership Essay – War, Immigration, and Starting Over Again (246 Words)
When my cousins shared the horrors of neighbors falling dead to crossfires and mortars rumbling 30-year-old ancestral homes, my father would say proudly, “We are in heaven’s zone of a war.” He had a hardware business. Grandmother stayed with us. She was right to be worried. Almost all except for one of her siblings were wiped out in bomb attacks.
My father’s ..
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Download F1GMAT's Harvard MBA Essay Guide for the essay on losing everything and starting over again
