Essay: Kellogg leaders are primed to tackle challenges everywhere, from the boardroom to their neighborhoods. Describe a specific professional experience where you had to make a difficult decision. Reflecting on this experience, identify the values that guided your decision-making process and how it impacted your leadership style. 

Background Information: A young technology leader makes one of the toughest decisions in his professional career – to let go of two senior team members.

Theme: Leadership

Essay: Kellogg leaders are primed to tackle challenges everywhere, from the boardroom to their neighborhoods. Describe a specific professional experience where you had to make a difficult decision. Reflecting on this experience, identify the values that guided your decision-making process and how it impacted your leadership style. 

Background Information: A consultant in a non-profit balances short-term value creation with long-term impact by cultivating empathy for the beneficiaries.  

Theme: Leadership, Empathy

Essay: Kellogg leaders are primed to tackle challenges everywhere, from the boardroom to their neighborhoods. Describe a specific professional experience where you had to make a difficult decision. Reflecting on this experience, identify the values that guided your decision-making process and how it impacted your leadership style. 

Background Information: A campaign manager risks losing an account when a star copywriter takes emergency leave.

Theme: Leadership, Authentic Communication

Berkeley Haas MBA What Makes you feel Alive Essay Example: Innovation in Education with Satellite Technology

What makes you feel alive might be a vision that you have about a future – a future where education is affordable and accessible, renewable energy is mainstream, polluting industries operate outside the earth, or any sci-fi-themed narratives that benefits a large population.

Berkeley Haas MBA What Makes you Feel Alive Essay Example (Flying and Building Tech Products)

Extra-curricular feeding into the profession can be structured with two strategies. 

One – finding a common set of skills that are useful in both endeavors. 

Two – sharing that both have a unique purpose in your life. 

In this example, we have used the 2nd strategy - by highlighting an extra-curricular that makes the applicant feel alive. Then a professional endeavor which has provided a similar meaning to the applicant’s life. 

Anyone working in the Technology industry would attest that change is the only reality. 

A leader should have the foresight to accept that holding onto processes, technology, and strategy of a bygone era is a losing pursuit. 

Case studies of the 1980s and 90s have little relevance for the current generation, where with each iteration of technology or geopolitical development, iron-clad strategies have become fictitious narratives. 

Haas MBA Career Goals Essay: What are your short-term and long-term career goals, and how will an MBA from Haas help you achieve those goals? (3-5 years short; a decade or more long-term goals) (300 words max)

Berkeley Haas MBA What Makes you feel Alive Essay Example: Pushing oneself until Failure and Learning from Diverse Teams

Theme: Entrepreneurial Thinking, Failure, Diversity

Required Haas MBA Essay #3: One of our goals at Berkeley Haas is to develop leaders who value diversity and to create an inclusive environment in which people from different ethnicities, genders, lived experiences, and national origins feel welcomed and supported. Describe any experience or exposure you have in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging whether through community organizations, personal, or in the workplace?

Required Haas MBA Essay #3: One of our goals at Berkeley Haas is to develop leaders who value diversity and to create an inclusive environment in which people from different ethnicities, genders, lived experiences, and national origins feel welcomed and supported. Describe any experience or exposure you have in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging whether through community organizations, personal, or in the workplace?

Brands have remained neutral to society’s ill and the overreach of organizations, government, and powerful influencers. With social media putting pressure on leaders to follow the pulse of society, businesses have also embraced positions that would categorize them as a pro or against a position.

From a business perspective, this is a risk as any misconception about their position could have an immediate impact on their cash flow as customers demonstrate preferences with their pocket first before verbalizing their opinions in popular media.

Required Haas MBA Essay #3: One of our goals at Berkeley Haas is to develop leaders who value diversity and to create an inclusive environment in which people from different ethnicities, genders, lived experiences, and national origins feel welcomed and supported. Describe any experience or exposure you have in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging whether through community organizations, personal, or in the workplace?

Berkeley Haas MBA Video Essay Question: The Berkeley MBA program develops leaders who embody our four Defining Leadership Principles. Briefly introduce yourself to the admissions committee, explain which Defining Leadership Principle resonates most with you, and tell us how you have exemplified the principle in your personal or professional life. 

Pre-MBA Employer: Facebook
Pre-MBA Title: Product Manager
Post-MBA Title: Associate
Post-MBA Employer: Venture Capital Firm

Foundational Knowledge: Because the candidate has extensive experience in Technology, the curriculum mentioned in the goals essay was customized to include foundational skills in Finance and Investments.

Fast-moving consumer goods manufacturers like Unilever and P&G struggled to find a market in developing economies with traditional American and European-themed promotional strategies. Poking the aspirational class with the hope of a better future or the sparkling smile of the celebrity didn’t help the market share. On the verge of giving up the drive to enter rural markets that represent the lion’s share in developing economies, the executives called on ‘MBA’ consultants, many from reputed universities, for solutions. 

Haas MBA students selected for the IBD (International Business Development) consulting engagement, apart from sharing the tourist getaways, share a poignant observation - while discussing the client and their customers from thousands of miles away, they lacked the perspective on the ground realities. The statistics were too impersonal. When they reached on-site, the real challenges for enterprises to overcome infrastructural limitations and price sensitivity became apparent.

Haas MBA Essay: What makes you feel alive when you are doing it, and why? (300 words maximum)

Sometimes life’s mission might be something that has a ripple effect on an entire generation and the future of humanity. It could be working on a vision to bring equity into a society that is growingly becoming unequal. It could be working on systems, policies, and technology that would determine how humans will consume and expend resources for the next 1000 years.

Theme: Climate Change

Berkeley Haas MBA What Makes you feel Alive Essay Example: Design as a Tool for Change

Theme: Design

Theme (Explained): When engines and integrated chips can be concealed beneath the flow of human interaction with no one even wondering that there are hundreds of machines and technology, a few inches and a few yards away from our daily existence, the eye soaring wind turbines and clunky solar panels are a big resistance to the adoption of renewable energy. 

Berkeley Haas MBA What Makes you Feel Alive Essay (Selling and Serving Low-Income Immigrants)

Theme: Selling

Q) Tell us who you are. How have your values and experiences shaped your identity and character? How will your background contribute to the diverse Tuck culture and community? 

Background Information: A Product Manager in Healthcare shares her experience in transforming the culture in a healthcare company to support working mothers. 

Theme: Gender Equity, Working Mothers

Tuck MBA Essay: Tell us who you are. How have your values and experiences shaped your identity and character? How will your background contribute to the diverse Tuck culture and community? (289 words)

Background Information: The applicant noticed a strange bias emerging in a machine learning algorithm despite data verification. The solution to the bias and the creation of an algorithm review process is the core of the narrative.

Theme: AI, Bias, DEI

Tuck MBA Essay: Tell us who you are. How have your values and experiences shaped your identity and character? How will your background contribute to the diverse Tuck culture and community?

Background Information: The applicant credits early education through storytelling as pivotal in her career orientation into marketing and escaping the bad influences in the neighborhood.

Tuck MBA Essay: Tell us who you are. How have your values and experiences shaped your identity and character? How will your background contribute to the diverse Tuck culture and community?

Background Information: An applicant caught in the battle of his analytical and creative brain finds a match at Teach for America, where he is entrusted to apply his editing skills to keep Grade 1 to Grade 3 students engaged in online study sessions. 

Theme: Creativity

Tuck MBA Essay: Tell us who you are. How have your values and experiences shaped your identity and character? How will your background contribute to the diverse Tuck culture and community?

Background Information: An entrepreneur musician shares the power of music in improving the mood of distressed children, her mentorship, and the agency she started to help upcoming artists. 

Theme: Music, Education, Job Security

Background Information: The applicant notices one person in his team consistently underperforming. His humane intervention to address the personal challenges helped the teammate rise to a star performer. 

Theme: Inclusion, Mentorship

Theme (Explained): Often, mentorship when a peer or a sub-ordinate underperforms need context-setting about the problem.

For the essay, the theme of the intervention is holistic mentorship where the person’s personal challenges are handled sensitively.