MBA Essay Tips

LBS MBA Essay 2: What Makes you Unique (200 Words)

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).  

LBS MBA Essay 2: What Makes you Unique (200 Words)

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. 

Essay 2: Describe a highly stressful situation you faced and how you managed it. What did this experience teach you about yourself and your interactions with others? (400 words)

It is a myth that financial insecurity will solve the ills of all our lives. It certainly solves one problem – ‘insecurity’, but the feeling never fully disappears even when one reaches the top of the socio-economic ladder.

Essay 2: Describe a highly stressful situation you faced and how you managed it. What did this experience teach you about yourself and your interactions with others? (400 words)

Any stress emanating from an entrepreneurial experience can be expressed through financial constraints, technological restrictions, or market dynamics. 

The market dynamics is a broad bucket that can also include user behaviour. 

Essay 2: Describe a highly stressful situation you faced and how you managed it. What did this experience teach you about yourself and your interactions with others? (400 words)

The stress in an applicant's professional career might arise from the conflict between their beliefs and the conflicting evidence a new finding presents. 

Most applicants shy away from sharing such professional examples where their initial belief was challenged. 

They don’t want to show that vulnerability. 

Essay 2: Describe a highly stressful situation you faced and how you managed it. What did this experience teach you about yourself and your interactions with others? (400 words)

Applicants hesitate to mention their missteps in the highly stressful situation essay. Although there is a separate strengths and weaknesses essay, INSEAD has removed the requirement to mention failures from the application essay questions. 

Failure – A Common Reason for Stressful Situations

The stressful situation is an excellent space to mention a failure. 

Essay 2: Describe a highly stressful situation you faced and how you managed it. What did this experience teach you about yourself and your interactions with others? (400 words)

The INSEAD MBA application highly stressful situation essay could be made personal with trauma and life events that offer the admissions team a perspective about you outside your professional career. 

IMPOSTOR Syndrome – A Rarely Used Essay Theme

But a theme that is not often used but has been consistently cited by high achievers is the ‘IMPOSTOR Syndrome’. 

Happy memories appear in MBA essays predominantly in two places - as a memory snapshot in the opening line or a way to resolve the essay into a future full of possibilities.

Before you incorporate the ‘happy memories’ in MBA Essays, understand these four contexts:

1)  Happy Memory from Childhood

2) Achievements and Happy Memories

Storytelling is an outline of your relationship with time, world, future, and yourself. 

The inner conflict between your ego and the challenge put forward by the outside world is similar to the turmoil that the reviewers go through on a daily basis while reviewing your essays or pondering over their future. 

When the story is about your life journey, the essay should demonstrate why you are interesting. Focus on 5 Strategies:

1. Differentiate Just Enough

Q) How to start the opening line for an MBA or a Master's Essay?

The opening line could be approached in three ways:

1. Poetic
2. Memory from Childhood
3. Value or Personality

1) Poetic

If you have the inclination to write clever turns of phrases or capture the essence of a memory in an interesting manner, then a poetic style as the opening line would work for you.

As the program with the highest application volume, Harvard must differentiate between two applicants with similar scores (GMAT/GRE and GPA). 

In your application (essay, resume, and recommendation letter), make sure that these 10 traits are highlighted.

1. Experience

   2.  Preparedness

   3.  Learning

For the Harvard MBA Essay 1 on Career Choice, Aspirations & IMPACT, we cover: