Chicago Booth MBA Essay 2# An MBA is as much about personal growth as it is about professional development. In addition to sharing your experience and goals in terms of career, we’d like to learn more about you outside of the office. Use this opportunity to tell us something about who you are… (Minimum 250 words, no maximum)?
Since Booth MBA Essay #1, narrates your pre-MBA professional experience and post-MBA goals, the essay should focus on the extra-curricular, volunteering experience, or summarize your values.
Ideally, include them all through a narrative on your leadership development –personally, and the event(s) that created your values.
1) Personal Growth Through Adversity
Growth rarely happens in an obstacle-free environment. Regardless of our tendency to avoid pain, our personal growth actualizes after a prologue of hardship, risk-taking, and hopelessness.
The trick for MBA applicants is in differentiating adversity from routine daily challenges and not to dwell on the ‘negative’ emotion. The redemption to growth should be quick, relevant, and consistent with the qualities that the school expects you to highlight in an essay.
2) The Origin Story
We underestimate the role our parents, elder sibling(s), or the father/mother figure played in the development of our leadership skills, attitude, and the choices we made in our life.
Even growing up in a certain culture, financial status, economy, family, or neighborhood would stretch your leadership skills in unexpected ways.
If it was a tough neighborhood where safety was a concern, attention to cues of threat might later develop into attention to details in your professional environment.
If it were an immigrant family, you would never take the opportunities for granted. The tales of parents’ struggles, although act as fodder for ridicule inside the family, later translates into an unmatched work ethic.
If you were raised in an emerging economy – Asia and Africa where the fruits of globalization are finally showing results, you would be the lucky few to witness the before/after snapshot of the economy. Technology and free trade’s value at multiplying opportunities would have built your confidence in capitalism despite its numerous flaws.
If your parents navigated their small enterprise to a multi-million-dollar business, the optimism would translate to a growth-mindset, even outside Entrepreneurial pursuit.
3) Bring Conflict/Tension/Unexpected choices early on
None of our life stories are devoid of conflicts, setbacks, and life lessons. To hook the admission team to your story, the essay requires an early setback or unexpected turn of events. Often, we have seen applicants rambling on and on about a cause without spending enough time on narrating how the challenge/setback injected passion into the cause.
Most stories have a personal connection to the cause.
The ideal example would include a non-profit - either founding or leading that was driven by long-term goals and vision for a better world/community/country.
There is no one winning formula.
It is all about personalizing your story and demonstrating a passion outside your work.
4) Acquisition of Values – Through Inspiration or Setback
We either acquire values by mimicking a person we admire or learn through a personal setback or use a combination of both.
Inspiration changes with age. Childhood heroes would have no relevance when we take our careers and life goals seriously.
While mentioning mentors/heroes/inspirations, be mindful that it should be relevant to your career and values.
Shortlist failures for the narrative. They force you to introspect.
The mightier the forces that put you down, the more likely that you would develop values to counter such forces in the future.
5) End with Chicago Booth
Chicago Booth MBA curriculum should be quoted in Essay #1. However, Essay #2 should capture one ‘unique’ advantage that would help you achieve your vision. It should not just be a goal but a way of thinking or a value that is characteristic of the Booth MBA program.
6) Keep the 1 to 1.5 page word limit
When we wrote the six Sample Essays for the choices in life essay, the first and second drafts were elaborate narrative with ample details on the environment, the era, and the neighborhood. I was hesitant to delete it. Once the samples sat for a couple of days, I went back and defined the target audience.
The admission team is not interested in reading the ‘details.’ They want just enough detail to understand the circumstances, the challenges you faced, and the origins of your leadership values and passion.
By strictly following a 1 to 1.5 page or a 500 to 750-word limit, you can keep the narrative short and interesting.
Sample Essay #1: Father’s Restaurant Business and Leadership (451 Words)
Sample Essay #2: Teaching and Scientific Temperament as a Virtue (654 Words)
Sample Essay #3: Learning from Tragedy (610 Words)
Sample Essay #4: Risk Taking and Learning (Reimagining the Food Supply Chain)(628 Words)
Sample Essay #5: Nature or Nurture (Hunting and Conservationism) (497 Words)
Sample Essay #6: Single Parent and Entrepreneurship (631 Words)
that supports curiosity, inspires us to think more broadly, and take risks. At Booth, community is about collaborative thinking and learning from one another to better ourselves, our ideas, and the world around us.