Chicago Booth MBA Visual Essay Prompt: The photos below represent some of the values described above that we uphold at Chicago Booth. Select one and share how it resonates with one of your own values. (250-word minimum)
In this breakdown of the Chicago Booth MBA Visual Essay, I cover:
Values
If you have read the first page of F1GMAT's Chicago Booth MBA Essay Guide and the 6th section - Fit with Chicago Booth and contribution to school community/culture, and other qualities, you will notice the values that I have listed.
To summarize, the values are:
• Collaboration and teamwork
• Thinking for yourself
• Community Conscious
• Challenging Status Quo (Unique Thinking)
• Open-minded and Ambitious
• Integrity
• Adaptability
• Grounded/Humble
The challenge is in recognizing what makes you unique and then choosing one image based on the prompt that matches your values.
Mapping four Photos to Values
Image 1 - Booth Values Reflected: Collaboration and teamwork
This image captures Booth’s dynamic student clubs coming together in shared excitement, likely during LEAD activities or school-wide competitions like the Battle of the Classes. It highlights how Booth encourages collective enthusiasm, participation, and friendly competition.
Use this image if your values lie in energizing teams, driving morale, or bringing people together around a purpose. Perhaps you’ve led a fundraising campaign that mobilized hundreds, organized a college-wide event, or transformed team culture at work during tough restructuring. Your narrative should show how you build strong emotional connections within a team and spark momentum.
Connect it to Booth’s emphasis on LEAD (Leadership Effectiveness and Development), a foundational program that fosters peer-led team experiences. You can also mention how this reflects your desire to contribute to Booth’s student-driven culture through club leadership or event organization. The key is to demonstrate your role as an energizer and unifier, someone who doesn’t just participate but lifts the group through purpose and camaraderie.
Image 2 - 
Booth Values Reflected: Challenging Status Quo, Thinking for yourself, Open-minded and Ambitious
Booth Values Reflected: Challenging Status Quo, Thinking for yourself, Open-minded and Ambitious This image represents Booth’s commitment to student-driven dialogue, intellectual honesty, and clarity of thought, qualities reinforced by its classroom culture, where students challenge and learn from one another.
Challenging the status quo and thinking for yourself is evident in the booth culture, where the professors historically had a wide range of political beliefs from free-market idealists to left-leaning advocates. That diversity of ideas is what the schools expect.
If you have an interesting professional or volunteering experience that questions traditional market wisdom, cite this image and then mention that experience.
The goal should be to showcase your milestones with humility and demonstrate ambition while showing an open mind.
Download F1GMAT's Chicago Booth MBA Essay Guide
Question 1: How will a Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals? (Minimum 250 words, no maximum.)
Question 2: Chicago Booth appreciates the individual experiences and perspectives that all of our students bring to our community. This respect for different viewpoints creates an open-minded environment 
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.
The photos below represent some of the values described above that we uphold at Chicago Booth. Select one and share how it resonates with one of your own values. (250-word minimum)
Image 3 - Booth Values Reflected: Collaboration and teamwork, Community Conscious, Integrity
Image 3 - Booth Values Reflected: Collaboration and teamwork, Community Conscious, IntegrityThis image symbolizes the joy of connection across backgrounds, a cornerstone of Booth’s open and inclusive community. The setting, possibly a New Year Celebration, an International Food Festival, or a student club celebration, reflects Booth’s global diversity and how students embrace each other’s cultures, stories, and identities.
Booth values such diversity of team participation, outside narrow group identities in nationality, ethnicity, or industry.
Cross-Cultural Fluidity: If your personal values center on cross-cultural teamwork, this is the image to select. Perhaps you’ve worked across borders or cultures, built meaningful bonds in a multicultural team, or initiated inclusive spaces in your workplace. Use your story to illustrate how you thrive in diverse environments and respect different ways of thinking.
Image 4 - Booth Values Reflected: Adaptability, Collaboration and Teamwork, Challenging the Status Quo
Image 4 - Booth Values Reflected: Adaptability, Collaboration and Teamwork, Challenging the Status QuoThis image is from the New Venture Challenge (NVC), Booth’s flagship entrepreneurship accelerator. It captures Booth’s belief in ideas that move from theory to execution, where learning happens through questioning the status quo and adapting iteratively to find product-market fit.
Use this image if you’ve built something with tangible results: a startup, a community initiative, a new product, or system.
Even internal projects at large firms count if they involve creating something innovative under uncertainty. Your story should demonstrate adaptability, iterative learning, and team collaboration.
Tie this to Booth’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, where students are supported by faculty, mentors, and capital to pursue ventures that solve real problems. Mention how Booth’s entrepreneurial ecosystem aligns with your values, especially if you believe in using business as a tool for solving critical global problems like climate change, renewable energy, affordable housing, or access to healthcare.
Essay Editing - Consult with Atul Jose (Essay Specialist, F1GMAT)
The skills that a writer/editor brings to the table are different from what a former admissions officer or a consultant who has limited writing skills brings
Review Skills # Writing Skills
Movie Critics # Movie Directors
For any questions about the service, email me, Atul Jose, at editor@f1gmat.com
As F1GMAT’s Lead Consultant and Essay Specialist, I will help you structure the essay by:
1) Incorporating your Personal Brand
I will help you find unique life experiences that would differentiate you from the highly competitive Chicago Booth MBA application pool.
2) Including Storytelling elements
I have developed a keen sense of storytelling from over a decade and a half of editing essays and writing essay examples for F1GMAT’s Essay Guides.
The skills that a writer/editor brings to the table are different from what a former admissions officer or a consultant who has limited writing skills brings
Review Skills # Writing Skills
Movie Critics # Movie Directors
It is easy to comment, but it is tough to structure the essay from the perspective of the applicant and turn the essay into a winning application essay.
3) Aligning with the Culture of the School
A big part of editing and guiding applicants is in educating them about the culture of the school
Some schools have very ‘specific’ traits that they are looking for in an applicant.
If you don’t highlight them and lean towards general leadership or cultural narratives, the essay won’t work.
I will guide you through the writing process.
I will also iteratively edit the essays without losing your original voice.
Advice on structuring the Photo Essay
Since 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 dwelling 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 lives.
Even growing up in a certain culture, financial status, economy, family, or neighborhood would stretch your leadership skills in unexpected ways.
If it were 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 they act as fodder for ridicule inside the family, later translate 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 in 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 pursuits.
3) Bring Conflict/Tension/Unexpected choices early on
None of our life stories is 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 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 you are to develop values to counter such forces in the future.
5) End with Chicago Booth
The 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 also amplify your value.
6) Keep the 1 to 1.5 page word limit
When we wrote the six Sample Essays, the first and second drafts were elaborate narratives 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 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.