Wharton MBA Application Essay 2: Taking into consideration your background – personal, professional, and/or academic – how do you plan to make specific, meaningful contributions to the Wharton community? (400 words)
The narrative starts with the applicant’s failed attempt at persuading her community to stop consuming meat. She reflects on the ineffectiveness of shaming a person into changing behavior. By shifting her persuasion technique by solving the problem from the other person’s perspective – in this example, finding a tasty meat alternative, she could change her brother’s preference from meat burgers to her Tofu recipe.
The experience is cleverly quoted as a learning curve in persuading over 200 families to relocate from a high-value Ocean-front property that was at the brink of flooding. The city is the ground-zero of climate change, where the shorelines have been declining at an alarming rate, risking the lives of hundreds of residents. While working with the non-profit think tank, she utilizes her empathetic approach to problem-solving by partnering with a real-estate solution provider that met the aesthetic choices of the residents, helping the city relocate the high-risk residents to safe grounds.
The applicant then transitions into using a similar approach while contributing to Rebuilding Together Philadelphia, where the new energy efficiency code is quoted as a factor that could lead to hours of rework if not strategically managed. Her experience in shortlisting contractors with exclusive experience in designing and implementing energy-efficient homes and her overall understanding of solving problems in high-risk projects are quoted as experiences that would be valuable for the Wharton and Philadelphia communities.
Sample Wharton MBA Application Meaningful contributions Essay #2: Climate Change – Shaming to Inclusive Strategy with Empathy (392 Words)
As an animal lover, I repeated the shaming strategies used by X to discourage meat-eaters. Apart from becoming a pariah at parties, the aggressive messaging wasn’t working. While persuading my brother, I solved the problem from his perspective. There was no alternative that tasted like meat. Lab-grown meat was an outlier. I researched over 100 recipes, preparing 28 of them, and finally found a recipe with Tofu that came close to a meat burger. He has slowly replaced meat Burgers with my Tofu recipe.
While leading the Climate change rescue strategy with Z – a non-profit think tank serving X, the typical 2-time yearly flooding has now become a fortnightly event. The traditional methods of blocking the flow weren’t working for the porous ground. The residents increased commercial activity by 10x as a hedge against relocation that ....
