In a slow job market where competition for top MBA programs increase, applicants from the technology, finance, and consulting industries must bring their A game to demonstrate uniqueness.
Before you draft an essay or prepare for your interview, understand what is considered unique in MBA Admissions:
1) Resourcefulness
2) Self-Awareness
3) Inclusive Leadership
4) Identity
5) Courage to Question the Status Quo
6) Lived Roles – Professional and Personal
7) Belief
8) Adaptability
9) Curiosity
1) Resourcefulness
Even during the worst job market, employers look for candidates who are entrepreneurial. The popular culture, unfortunately, has painted entrepreneurs as these superhuman beings who persist and stare at failure with a Zen attitude. They are not.
What makes entrepreneurial applicants unique is their resourcefulness in turning limitations into their strengths.
Case Study: Low Cost and Least Disruptive Solution
I once read an essay from an automobile engineer who spotted a defect in the automatic braking sensor. Any traditional engineer would have started with the sensor, but because the applicant was entrepreneurial, his root cause analysis was different. He found a fault in the forward-facing camera, whose visibility was affected by a faulty windshield wiper. What could have turned into a costly recall turned into a quick fix by replacing the rubber strip of the wiper.
He sourced the best-in-market component from a supply chain partner in Latin America, an 85% lower cost solution than anticipated before. Interestingly, automobile forums raved about the high durability of the windshield wiper blades.
From root cause analysis to low-cost solutions, the applicant demonstrated resourcefulness in taking ownership of the problem and turning a weakness into a strength.
Resourcefulness should be ‘specific’ to your job function.
2) Self-Awareness
Interestingly, what makes an applicant resourceful could also be a curse when the person doesn’t know when to quit and seek help.
Quitting a path of problem-solving is considered a weakness in our culture, where every tale of persistence and resilience is praised, while ‘seeking a mentor’ or ‘seeking help’ is seen as a weakness in all quant-heavy cultures (Finance and Technology).
Bringing self-awareness into an ‘approach’ – be it with problem solving or a career transition is the biggest difference between a successful and an unsuccessful applicant.
The obvious strategy that most applicants use in the goals essay is an awareness of the skill gap.
Applicants can take a step further and show self-awareness of the limitations of their resources to tackle a problem.
Case Study: Awareness of Limitations
One applicant, who was bringing rural healthcare services to women, quickly realized the limitations of not having sufficient funds to start rural healthcare centres. Her self-awareness on the funding cycle, the disbursement time, and the time it took to build infrastructure – typically 1-2 years is precious time to let women in rural heartland suffer. A spike in seasonal diseases made the decision easier. She started a hub and spoke model where her only investment was in mobile vans to collect samples and dispatch them to towns and cities nearby for testing.
The applicant’s self-awareness about her limitations helped her search for an alternative solution.
The biggest challenge that I face as a consultant and an editor is to guide clients to reach that level of self-awareness to take corrective steps or improve the narrative to include examples where self-awareness is clearly demonstrated in the essay.
Leaders possess this unique trait.
3) Inclusive Leadership
Inclusive leadership is not democratic leadership, which, according to studies, is the worst kind of leadership in a crisis.
Asking for votes for every small decision is counterproductive. That is why in democratic societies, we have representatives to take care of the interests of the constituents.
Inclusive Leadership is much more nuanced.
An applicant shared how his recommender taught him this ‘interesting’ technique to take the pulse of the team by asking three things they loved in work from last week and three things they didn’t enjoy. If the majority voted on one aspect of a project as the ‘worse’, there is a deeper problem brewing.
Case Study: Weekly Communication and Spotting Friction in Team
One time, the problem was on lack of communication on escalating the urgency of certain deliverables. The client often in the last minute would changed the scope of the deliverable. In a highly evolving industry like AI, this was considered an acceptable protocol, but when the client began changing the scope every week, the team’s key contributors were on the verge of quitting.
The weekly ‘pulse’ of the team session helped the applicant, a team lead, understand the crisis that could emerge if key ‘talent’ quit the team. He escalated the problem with his manager and negotiated a policy on the ‘change’ frequency. The negotiated terms helped the team complete all test scenarios before pivoting to new LLM models.
The persistence helped as an LLM model considered insufficient turned out to be effective for the client’s banking needs. Chasing the latest and fastest models was not necessary.
4) Identity
In a class where 35-90% are international, bringing one’s unique identity to the ‘What Makes you Unique’ essay would be the only chance when competing with similar profiles from Finance, Consulting, and Technology.
Broadly, identity-based narratives fall into four themes:
a) Cultural
b) Geographic
c) Gender
d) Familial
a) Cultural
Not all cultures are equal, but every MBA applicant has the opportunity to bring the ‘strength’ of their culture and closely tie it to their identity.
Case Study: Culture Redefining Unit Economics
For one applicant who grew up in a collectivist farming community in Tanzania, where principles like Ubuntu (“I am because we are”) and Ujamaa (shared economic prosperity) were lived realities, her culture valued the prosperity of the community equally as the individual or the shareholder.
Rather than framing her uniqueness around founding a non-profit, she went a step deeper into her belief in food as a communal right, not as a market commodity, shaped by supply-demand cycles. Her policy advisory role in a leading international organization also involved creating policies that ensured that no one is left food insecure, regardless of the market forces, poverty, war, or climate change influencing the supply of essential food items. Such a thoughtful framework led to better risk management.
The long-term and strategic thinking positions the applicant for an ESG consulting role where such thinking is valued.
b) Geographic
The global citizen tag is slowly evolving with restrictions on visas across Europe and the US. The emerging restrictions will make a truly global experience across Asia, Africa, Europe, Canada, and the US – or at least three of the five regions a unique quality.
Case Study: Global Perspective and International Visa
One applicant shared how his schooling in Kenya, his consulting tenure in London and Toronto, and his undergraduate degree in the US have positioned him to succeed in the next stage of his consulting career.
What most applicants want to share as their unique trait is their global perspective. This global perspective is not driven by fragmented media bubbles based on algorithmic segregation or even motive-driven mainstream media narratives.
The geographic perspective is a lived experience. And that is why schools value applicants with international work experience.
There are perspectives that one could acquire from consuming media and networking with peers from different cultures, but it is the face-to-face interactions and lived experiences in communities from which a true understanding of culture emerges.
Capturing this unique lived experience is essential to connecting international work experience to your identity.
c) Gender
Even if women are graduating at a higher rate than men, the preferences of women for certain job functions have propagated inequity in certain roles. As industries prioritize leadership roles from these emerging functions, the shortage of VP candidates in Fortune 500 companies will exacerbate.
Case Study: Slow but IMPACTFUL cultural Changes
For one applicant, who was leading an initiative in her PE firm to nurture and build the talent pool for women leaders, the challenge was unique to the regional office the firm had expanded into. The culture in the country limited the travel of single women without the support of male family members. To break the ideological barrier, the applicant had to carefully plan logistics and assure the family members of the colleague’s safety.
Such changes in norms take time to fully immerse in cultures, but it is worth highlighting such long-term thinking that often triggers new trends in bringing equity in the workforce and senior leadership.
Citing examples of ‘unique’ interventions without critiquing the culture is a balancing act and should be carefully worded.
Another applicant mentioned the struggles of Oil and Gas female engineers, who had to work in uninhabitable terrains. The intervention to bring dignity to female employees with portable toilets and scheduled office hours also translated to improving the working conditions of the entire company.
Improving working conditions, offering equitable growth opportunities, and changing culture could also be phrased as a net positive for the entire company. Such narratives stand out from the often-divisive tone seen in essays on gender equity.
d) Familial Influence
A consistent theme I have read in MBA essays is the influence of family – parents, grandparents, and siblings in choosing a cause.
I would recommend that you use your family’s uniqueness as the last option. The only exception is if your parents immigrated to or reached the US/UK as refugees. The hardship in attaining a career milestone is different for an applicant from a stable family than for an applicant who had to manage the turmoil of losing relatives and settling into a new culture.
For other applicants, you don’t need dramatic narratives to show you unique traits and values.
Case Study: Values and Parents’ Influence
One applicant shared how her early involvement in educating underprivileged children through her parents’ foundation helped her to see her role beyond an owner. The parents were hands-on, often arranging the chairs in the venue and assigning chores for the applicant. Even the purchase of books and school supplies was done in the presence of the applicant, with discussions around budgets and making bulk deals. The cost-conscious upbringing to maximize impact in communities brought financial rigor and community focus to all her involvement, regardless of the profit/non-profit nature of the project.
This unique trait translated to due diligence for PE investments, where she intervened while investing in a portfolio company.
When the majority in the investment committee wanted to discontinue a product to maximize profit, she decided to visit the communities that relied on this product for their nutritional needs. She advised against discontinuing the product, sustaining goodwill among the community during a challenging 2020 to 2022 period.
Keep the familial influence to traits, habits, and values.
5) Courage to Question the Status Quo
With the incentive to cut costs by building a global supply chain, trade flourished around the world, with each country bringing its unique strength to the products and services served in the marketplace.
The collaboration was not limited to skills. The cultures of the interacting countries are also transmitted while collaborating.
Under such global influences, a skilled professional can gauge the difference between innovation that works in any culture and that which needs careful tweaking.
Case Study: Questioning Traditional KPI
One applicant from a Venture Capital background shared how the 7-year timeline for exits popular in US VC firms doesn’t translate to Indian ventures, where the revenue multiples are not as predictable as the US markets. One of the reasons is the diverse income groups in the market and the dispersal of the market to tier-1, tier-2, and tier-3 cities, with each group behaving differently. Such nuance can only be experienced through on-ground market research.
The courage to question traditional wisdom in the VC community made the applicant’s global awareness and local intelligence a unique trait.
6) Lived Roles – Professional and Personal
An applicant is unique when their multiple lived experiences through professional and personal roles create a unique profile that is unlike any of their peers.
Most applicants choose to cite professional roles from their full-time or volunteering roles and articulate the influence of their diverse experiences on their thinking and decision-making.
The 1st lived role that differentiates an applicant is narratives that capture two roles.
Case Study: Lived Professional Experience & Solutions
An applicant, a doctor who served in rural communities, pivoted to a policy role where he advised the city council on improving access to healthcare for low-income families. A surprising parallel existed for patients in rural communities and low-income families, with ‘trust’ in healthcare service at an all-time low. The policy rejection rates from insurers and a history of misdiagnosis were the cause of the discontentment.
The solutions that the applicant suggested came from his experience coordinating with insurers and offering diagnoses for the patients. The follow-up visits were broken, and the policy solution addressed this crucial gap and created a new incentive to allow patients to seek coverage for follow-up visits, regardless of the gap between the first and subsequent visits.
Anyone with only exclusive policy experience would not have brought the perspective of a doctor that the applicant’s lived professional experience offered.
The 2nd lived role that differentiates an applicant is in volunteering.
Case Study: Empathy-Based Solutions
An applicant from a military family, who created a digital app to report symptoms of PTSD, shared the tendency of veterans to underreport their symptoms. Many such underreporting was cultural, and many were from a lack of insight into what counts as symptoms of PTSD. Only with a haptic feedback mechanism that measured stressors, which correlated with PTSD biomarkers, could the applicant tweak the App and improve reporting. Later, when he volunteered for a non-profit offering counselling for veterans, the App offered in-depth reporting on the biomarkers – an insight that was quoted by lawmakers.
The 3rd lived role that differentiates an applicant is personal.
Case Study: Flexible Work Culture
An applicant who is the only caregiver for her ailing father offered a perspective on flexible working hours that were not driven by a day in the office but based on hours every day in the office. This was an unusual request at first, where an employee could choose to work from the office 2 days a week or choose to work four half days in the office.
The flexibility gained company-wide support as working mothers could spend time overseeing the homework or drop their children off at school.
The tweak in policy arose from a necessity, but the applicant interviewed working mothers and built consensus before approaching the senior leadership.
Consensus building outside a professional context is a unique trait when an applicant talks about improving the working conditions of peers or any narrative around change in culture.
7) Belief
Every competent professional targeting top school, has committed to excellence in their profession. That doesn’t make an applicant unique. The top 1-5% performance will help them gain attention, but to highlight uniqueness, an applicant should lean into their belief and the passion that emanates from the belief.
Case Study: Agri Business (Food as a Right)
An applicant who grew up in a farming community, where principles of shared economic prosperity were lived realities, the commitment to equitable growth was not a narrative built for MBA essays. She founded a non-profit to mitigate food insecurity, all arising from cultures she grew up around and a firm belief that 'Food' was a communal right and not just a commodity at the mercy of weather and market forces.
She pivoted from her non-profit to a policy role where she could solve the problem at a level above the operational lens. Now her belief in equitable access to food has set a new ambition - to influence IMPACT investment in African Agri Business.
The most believable essays include culture and growing up in a community as influences on the applicant’s strong beliefs.
8) Adaptability
Adaptability and Resilience are now the most bastardised traits that applicants highlight as their uniqueness.
In psychological contexts, there are nuanced differences between coping with stress vs adapting to stress, vs. remaining resilient throughout a stressful scenario.
In our modern workplace, where technology, markets, and strategies change at a spectacular pace, understanding the difference between each term, even if it is for an essay, would help you choose the best example for your uniqueness narrative.
Coping vs. Resilience vs. Adaptability
Coping
Coping is an individual’s acceptance that they don’t have the tools, mentorship, or strategies to manage an adverse outcome.
Resilience is an individual’s persistence through an adversity, with or without the support of mentorship, that could help the person come out of the adversity. Most of the time, the person is pushing through the negative outcome without fully recognizing their weakness, the factors that caused the outcome, and a life lesson that could help them prevent such an outcome in the future.
Adaptability
Adaptability mostly refers to Psychological flexibility, where the person accepts the adversity, remains present in the current moment, evaluates the problem, and commits to an action that could help the person come out of the adversity. The full awareness of the situation helps the person find life lessons from the negative outcome.
What makes Adaptability important for Uniqueness?
What makes adaptability a unique trait is that the person is fully aware of the uncomfortable internal experience while remaining focused on actions that have no guarantee of overcoming the adversity. The mindset helps the person push through several wrong starts and helps them find a solution for themselves, the client, the team, or the community.
Case Study: Adapting to Professional Setbacks and Finding an Alternative Career
One applicant found adaptability as a unique trait when his Olympic hopes died from an injury. The pivot from training every day for the goal he loved as a kid to training every day to be a technologist had many parallels. With a humanities background and a spark of Math genius in high school, the awareness of his strengths and the disappointment of his crashed dream didn’t deter the applicant from finding his footing in product development. When his peers were let go during the great shakedown of AI in 2024, he earned two promotions. The uniqueness of his trait was in his adaptability.
Facing setbacks was not just a personal virtue. The team’s 5-month testing of an LLM model was disrupted by the entry of DeepSeek. Without rushing to blame anyone, he took ownership and pivoted the team to test the open-source model for their banking product.
Eventually, the team chose a mix of two models. For any other leader, testing and choosing between LLM models at a breakneck pace would have been a highly stressful scenario, as the choice of the technology had a direct impact on the release of three products that were dependent on the testing. But the applicant’s adaptability was a standout quality that was highlighted in the recommendation letter as well.
9) Curiosity
All curiosity narratives are anchored around the applicant’s ability to think beyond the obvious, find insights that no one is looking for, and accentuate the solution’s impact.
a) Technical Curiosity
The least impactful curiosity narratives are around technical solutions, where the applicant fails to connect the solution to the business impact. Even if the technical solution had an impact on the client, solo solutions have the lowest influence on the admissions team.
An MBA program is a collaborative learning experience. The admissions team is expecting evidence of teamwork and receiving buy-in from the leadership.
Solo solutions fail in all aspects.
Since the recent technological innovations are all around AI, expect narratives around testing LLM or integrating LLM into different functional niches.
From technical to functional to industry, the technical curiosity should ideally cover all three contexts.
b) Cross-Functional Curiosity
Best unique trait essays capture the applicant’s ability to lead or persuade cross-functional teams.
Case Study: Receiving Buy-In from multiple Functional Experts
One applicant from the design team had to receive buy-in from the marketing, engineering, and factory floor while also remaining in close contact with the international supply chain teams in Mexico, Canada, and China to achieve the cost targets.
It all began when a person from the marketing team shared the challenges of promoting the driverless car in a crowded EV market. His USP was in designing the intervention system in Level 3 Conditional Driving Automation, where the driver could take over autonomous driving. His prototype had to go through 5 levels of approval. And through each functional team, he had to study their perspective and adapt his solution to meet their quality standards.
c) Community-Driven Curiosity
Community-driven curiosity could emerge through direct observation or through research insights. The direct observation translates to a personal essay over research-driven insights that looks like what a consultant would submit as a report.
One applicant who was taking over her family’s agri-business noticed the underutilization of women workers in her village.
Case Study: Improving Earning Potential of Low-Income Families
After kids were sent to school, they had 5 hours of free time before the school dispersal. With subsistence existence supported by husbands who were day laborers, the applicant found an opportunity to empower women workers. She offered training for the packaging division and provided a market rate for the service.
In just 6 months, the income of the family improved by 40% while her family business gained momentum with their personalized packaging. Such merging of intentions reads well essays and sounds authentic in interview where a balance of business acumen and social responsibility is clearly visible.
