In this in-depth MIT Sloan MBA essay and cover letter tips, I cover:
• Background Information
• Mission, Values and Traits
• What to Highlight
• What not to Highlight
• How to Stand Out
• Cover Letter Tips
• Short Answer Essay Tips
• Video Essay Tips
Background Information
MIT Sloan used to have a traditional essay prompt as the primary evaluation up until 2016 before they introduced the cover letter format. The format is partially working as the school was forced to introduce a shorter question in 2022 to complement the narrative in the cover letter.
A big challenge for applicants writing cover letters is the impersonal tone that often comes with a professional tool like the cover letter.
With AI, it has become even more challenging to differentiate from hundreds of similar ‘professional’ sounding cover letters, unless you personalize and bring some ‘essay’ tone into the letter.
One wonders whether MIT’s goal of attracting exceptional engineers, who might not be great essayist, is working when mediocre and great STEM applicants have access to the same AI tools.
As an editor and consultant, I believe that with the recent overuse of AI in cover letters, in the near future, MIT Sloan will be forced to tweak their questions to include some other form of reflective narrative – similar to essays or bring back the essay format.
Although MIT Sloan has cover letter as its primary evaluation tool, the application also has video question and a short-answer question that requires tools and framework we use in essays to create a persuasive narrative.
Mission, Values and Traits
MIT is an engineer and science-heavy institution. It is not an accident. From the dawn of industrial revolution, society was craving for a new form of educational institution that offers the academic rigor and thinking for the 20th century.
MIT’s founding in 1865 was around the transformative stages of industrialization.
With industrial science and agricultural science – the most in demand in the late 19th century, the school trained its graduates to embrace science as the foundation for thinking and decision-making. The school has a legacy of embracing international students from all over the world as long as they believe in MIT’s mission,
“To advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century”
Traits
Curiosity and Humbleness are two traits that MIT Sloan values the most. Most of the discoveries arose from the great mind’s innate desire to explore, while innovation arose from the search for ‘better solutions’ that need the humbleness to question one’s own assumptions.
Collaborative: To seek better solution, the person must have a foundational belief in science as a tool to question one’s assumption and explore new paradigm. While one could be confined by the exploratory limits of a human mind, a collaborative attitude and openness to peer’s ideas are also considered as a winning trait at MIT.
Passionate: The road to a solution or innovation requires passionately persisting in a path. MIT values a candidate who can persuade a team or passionately state their position and influence change.
Analytical: The foundation of scientific rigor is determined by the applicant’s analytical skills. Often, in technology or finance, tools and frameworks exist to assist with analysis. A trait of finding trends or finding new ways to combine data or analytical tools is also considered an innovation.
Betterment of Humankind: A serving mindset for the betterment of humankind is a strong motivation for MIT’s mission, as reiterated by the second half of the mission statement, “best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century”.
What to Highlight
The school strongly believes that past achievements are a strong indication of future success. This is an ethos across M7 schools.
Recency: MIT also believes in momentum and consistency. It would be unwise to stretch back to an achievement that you accomplished 5 or 7 years back when there are no mentions of achievements from your past three years of professional experience.
The only exception are unique milestones like an applicant, who had a traditional technology career but had one impressive patent under his name 7 years ago. In such cases, going back to an achievement that demonstrates the person’s intellectual rigor is worth the risk.
Innovation: The idea is the winner in MIT’s culture. The cover letter and essays should include ‘ideas’ that are atypical for the culture of the organization or society.
For example: An applicant developed a new way of making decision in a volatile team. The thinking was based on a mathematical concept that he explained in just 2-3 lines. Summarizing a complex framework was the challenge I faced as an editor.
Leadership: Even without leading a large team, an applicant can demonstrate leadership with traits of initiative and strategic insights. These insights need not be at a business level. Even technological solution if explained with the right context for a novice reader can convey your initiative.
For example: If it is Finance or Financial technology, the application of this technology or overcoming incentive structure that limits the adoption of the technology can also be a good example.
What not to Highlight
Technology-Only Narrative: The biggest red flag in the cover letter and essay narrative is the lack of awareness about the impact of the solution. When the writing is excessively around the solution instead of briefly breaking down the solution, it could be a challenge to gain attention from an engineer-heavy application pool. Most have at least one impressive technology project under their belt. It is all about how you explain it.
Academic Pursuits: If you have a master’s degree or a PHD, it is strategic to include the technology you worked on or the innovation you spearheaded, but for everyone else with at least 4 years of experience, going back to a college project will not help you. Limit academic narratives. Focus on professional accomplishments and projects. Even for applicants with a master’s degree, there should be some connection between what you academically pursued with what you are doing now.
Least impactful Metrics: Often, the first thing that I cut out from the MBA resume for MIT Sloan are redundant metrics that limits the impact of your personal brand. What to leave out is dependent on the examples you highlight.
For Example: If you are narrating a manufacturing project, automating 300+ processes, saving 150 person days, and $20M - all relevant for an MBA resume entry, capturing the background struggle to persuade 3-5 key engineers or gain buy-in from 2 levels of management will be too many metrics for one entry in a resume.
What is the metric that you can sacrifice in a resume but need more context in a cover letter?
It is the 150-person days saved. We could use the cost - $20M, instead, to show impact or vice-versa if the cost saving is typical for your industry.
What is the metric that you must expand in a cover letter?
Although we used buy-in from the management for the resume and removed 150 person days, I wanted to show the scale of the ‘change.’
Automating 300+ processes was a complete disruption to 2 manufacturing units that had the potential risk of a complete shutdown in operations.
The applicant’s unique achievement was in streamlining the automation with an innovation that persuaded the management to agree to his solution.
The solution was innovative – aligning with MIT’s ethos of curiosity and passion.
Curiosity in itself has limited value if you can’t persuade your team or, ideally, the management to embrace a solution.
How to Stand Out
Doer Mindset: No cover letter or essay will stand out if you don’t demonstrate your ‘doer’ mindset. An awareness of the ‘details’ of the problem is essential to set the stage for the doer mindset. These details should include the technological roadblock, the operational challenges, and the constraints from an organizational or a brand perspective. Ideally, include them all. Then, when you narrate the solution, the IMPACT will be visible.
Tone: The tone of the letter should be formal. This is tricky as the admissions team expects some storytelling. And many applicants struggle to mix storytelling with an official-sounding narrative. A shortcut to overcome this challenge is to analyze the resume and note down all the missing contexts in each entry.
Another area where applicants find it challenging to balance the tone is in ‘humblebragging.’
Brag, but don’t take all the credit. Strategically credit the team with certain solutions that helped you gain momentum. Make sure that you keep the focus on you – the protagonist after you credit your team.
Team: Although MIT expects you to show your individual contribution, you should also offer a context on how that contribution had an IMPACT on your team, the client team, and the beneficiaries if you are working in Technology Products or Consulting.
I have read the resume of a high-achieving engineer whose solutions were influential in integrating a FinTech App. Although we captured 2-3 metrics, the challenge was that it was the first time the applicant was working on a technology framework. It was released just 2-3 months back. There was a steep learning curve. Because the applicant took on himself to develop the solution in a new framework as a Proof of Concept, the company went ahead and trained the entire team of 20+ engineers on the new framework.
Inspiring the team to an unknown path is a subtle way to showcase your leadership skills.
Cover Letter Tips
How to Approach
Establish your Credentials early on before sharing motivations
The first paragraph of your cover letter should be all about establishing your credentials. Unlike cover letters for jobs that have a clear title and job description, MIT Sloan MBA expects applicants to be true doers. The context of being a doer is all about leading the solution either through your unique problem-solving capabilities or with creative, strategic, engineering, or solutions in integration.
Any phrasing that you use to demonstrate humbleness in contributions could backfire if the lines hint that your role was supporting in nature.
For example: Vincent shares his leadership skills in the first paragraph of the cover letter with, "The oversight of a 120-member operations team, broke many leadership myths on motivating a team of 23 nationalities. The facility would contribute towards 55% of all energy needs in North America until 2030" before sharing his motivation for transitioning into renewable energy.
Shortlist Hands-On Experience First
When you start your career, you won’t be leading a team. You are mostly alone in the trenches figuring it out, solving problems functionally and creatively. These examples are the first hint of your potential as a ‘doer.’ In the cover letter, include the experience if you tackled a unique industry-level problem. As you progress, you have a team to manage the multiple tasks that define the problem, but you will be taking over a task or function where you have shown competence.
For example: Ms. Ying shares her hands-on experience developing a sophisticated dashboard for monitoring supply chain bottlenecks in Chips that emerged from the popularity of Generative AI
"Under such a dynamic supply-demand cycle, I developed a dashboard that gave a live update on the life cycle of the phone components."
Follow a strategy to find a combination of metrics that clearly show your strengths.
Choose 2 vs. 3 vs. 1 Experience
In our 1-Essay/Cover Letter service, I first ask myself whether the applicant needs 1, 2, or 3 experiences to demonstrate impact. The challenge is from the 300 words. We can afford only to use 150 words to show a ‘doer’ mindset. The rest of the narrative is about your motivation for a Sloan MBA and the gap.
For career switchers, 2 experiences are needed to reiterate the motivation.
For career enhancers, it is about a theme if you have worked mostly with one client or one industry or function. And to build the theme of your story, you might need to offer more context about the 1 project if it spanned multiple years or three to show the challenges. This is common for Manufacturing and Energy applicants.
For consulting applicants, it could be about broadening horizons with unique exposures and initiatives that MIT Sloan is leading like in AI. But even to show that you will get the most value from the Sloan curriculum, you should show a track record of success.
Don’t use Stagnation as a Motivation
For the traditional post-MBA goals essay, you can use stagnation or typecasting into a function as a motivation for pursuing an MBA.
In MIT Sloan's Cover letter, stagnation can backfire. Use an interest-based narrative to demonstrate a broadening of your horizon and then exposure to a new function or industry through extracurricular, volunteering, or work that motivated you for an MBA.
For Example: A client who was in a VC role felt that her background as a Technologist was wasted by just offering advisory services to entrepreneurs. She wanted to return to Technology in a Product Managerial role. An MBA with the right all-around exposure to pricing, accounting, marketing, and branding was the skill gap she planned to mitigate with the MIT Sloan MBA.
Lab, Certification, and Tracks
MIT Sloan’s doer mindset is clearly visible in how they have organized the curriculum.
From experiential learning in ASEAN countries and the US, to functional exposure through labs (Analytics, Finance, Operations, Healthcare, and Sustainability), MIT Sloan also has graduate-level initiatives that MBA candidates can leverage to aggressively fill the gap in their skills.
Mention them in the 2nd half of the cover letter.
MIT Sloan MBA – Could Have to Must Have
The gap in your skills or the timing of an MBA should be self-evident in the narrative. It should not hold against you but look like the limits of the roles that your industry could offer. For the narrative to work, the recommendation letter should validate the claims in the letter if they were in the top 5%.
The cover letter doesn’t work alone. It should complement the personal narrative in the optional essay and your growth narrative validated in the recommendation letter.
Short Answer Essay Tips
MIT Sloan MBA Short Answer Question: How has the world you come from shaped who you are today? For example, your family, culture, community, all help to shape aspects of your life experiences and perspective. Please use this opportunity to share more about your background. Please do not include any links in your response. (250 words or less)
For this optional MIT Sloan MBA Admissions essay, the admissions team has clearly highlighted three aspects that you need to focus on before writing the essay – family, culture, or community, or all three.
1) Include Family and Values
Our perspective about the world evolves with age and exposure but fundamental values of fairness, agreeableness, conscientiousness and integrity, and our instincts to be an extrovert is determined by parents – most importantly mothers.
The narrative on family can be structured around the science behind parenting – Authoritative, Neglectful, and Permissive.
Permissive parenting could spark an entrepreneurial mindset to problem-solving. This could mean breaking conventional roles and thinking independently – qualities that MIT Sloan values. It could also mean a lack of self-control and addiction. The question doesn’t require you to get personal with such narratives. Focus on the positive aspect of permissive parenting and how it shaped your thinking.
Authoritative parenting is around rules and structures. This style brings confidence in managing teams and peers – essential for leadership roles. It could also mean low creativity. Such a style of parenting influences an applicant’s growth in traditional industries and roles.
Use a neglectful parenting narrative if you were raised in a foster home and you had to face significant trauma growing up.
Many of the great essays we have read for Stanford’s What Matters Essay are from applicants who were separated from their parents for a prolonged time.
They tend to develop a strong resilience to life’s negative outcomes – essential traits to work in high-stress environment like Finance and leadership position in a growing startup.
2)Bring your unique culture and upbringing into the answer
Considered the largest study of culture, Geert Hofstede’s study of hundred thousand IBM employees from 40 countries categorized cultural values to five main traits - individualism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance or power distribution, masculinity, and long-term thinking.
1) Individualism: Your tolerance of risk or uncertainty is primarily driven by culture. If you were raised in a society where individualism is valued, you are likely to be an independent thinker – a prerequisite for creative thinking. In a collective society, any unique thinking is considered a violation of rules, and there are consequences for questioning traditional practices.
According to Hofstede’s study, the top 3 countries for Individualism are:
1) United States
2) Australia
3) United Kingdom
The biggest challenge for applicants from a collective society is the style of communication. They tend to be indirect to respect the reviewer. If you are applying to any top US school, especially MIT Sloan, the communication across your application should be direct. Even in the cover letter, the style is formal, but the communication should be direct.
2) Uncertainty Avoidance: MIT doesn’t believe in mindless risk-taking but the impact of influences on your risk-taking read well in essays. It could be nudging to a career or a guidance that led you to an innovation or a value that you hold dearly, there are multiple ways to highlight your influences.
3) Long-Term Thinking: In problem-solving, long-term thinking could have a huge impact on how you approach a technological solution, a market, an operational problem or even strategy. With the cover letter format limiting the examples that you capture to a maximum of 2, there is a potential to share a solution for a volunteering engagement. Highlight your long-term thinking and how it helped the organization create a new process and systems to manage accounts, track volunteers, sales calls, recruitment, or even measure the IMPACT it had on the beneficiary.
3) Include Community narratives
Although countries where you were raised influence the mindset, the neighborhood where you grew up will have the most IMPACT on how you see the world. There are hundreds of examples of conservative towns in a liberal state or liberal town in a conservative state. The city you grow up and the neighborhood has the most consequence on your success potential and mindset even in a modern digital economy.
Video Essay Tips
MIT Sloan Video Essay Question: Introduce yourself to your future classmates. Here's your chance to put a face to your name, let your personality shine through, be conversational, and be yourself. We can't wait to meet you!
Videos should adhere to the following guidelines:
• No more than 1 minute (60 seconds) in length
• Single take (no editing)
• Speaking directly to the camera
• Do not include background music or subtitles
• Once the video statement question is viewed you will have 60 seconds to prepare, and then 60 seconds to record your answer.
• You will only have one attempt to record your response.
1) Be mindful of the Length and Pace
The length of the script should ideally be between 130 and 200 words. Beyond that, your video statement would look rushed. Record the script at varying paces and playback your recording.
Does it sound like reading from a prompter?
Does it give the impression that you are struggling to cover the ground?
Ensure that you sound as natural as possible. Most dialogues sound natural when there are sufficient pauses between sentences and paragraphs.
Memorizing the script works when you know how to modulate and convert the written script to a conversation-style recording.
2) Choose a style - Formal or Friendly
Another dilemma that I have seen clients struggle is to plan whether the format should be formal or friendly (casual).
Sloan’s decision to stick with a cover letter format is to cut all storytelling and force applicants to choose their defining achievements and share them with the admission team in a concise manner.
For the MIT Sloan video statement, you can shine a light on your personality and passion. Your unique mannerism and ‘way of talking’ could be captured if you script the statement accordingly.
Ideally, don’t crack any jokes or start with outrageous hooks.
Stick with a traditional introduction, pivoting quickly into your passion, and demonstrate why you are a good fit with the Sloan culture.
3) Align with MIT Sloan Culture
• Entrepreneurial: Sloan values true doers. Your introduction should suggest this unique trait either by association (working with start-ups, entrepreneurial teams), or starting a unique initiative (non-profit), or developing a concept (patents)
• Analytical + Creative: A large percentage of the Sloan MBA class had an outdoor interest to showcase. An interest outside academics, preferably in sports or public performance, would balance the narrative on your professional achievements (cover letter + resume). It could also be a non-profit engagement that required overcoming considerable logistical challenges through interactions with multicultural stakeholders. Or it could be a passion to test one’s limits through adventure sports or developing a unique skill – flying a helicopter, photography, or learning a new language through travel.
• Ambitious: Mentioning goals work if it sounds natural in the video statement. It would also hint at your ambition and why Sloan is necessary to achieve them. Citing a long-term goal that impacts a larger demographic or an underserved market (through Investing or Entrepreneurship) is a better approach than mentioning short-term goals that you had already mentioned in the cover letter.
References
- Geert Hofstede’s study
- Comparison of Personality among Mothers with Different Parenting Styles
- 7 Dimensions of Culture
- Ms. Ying - Cover Letter Analysis
- Mr Vincent - Cover Letter Analysis
