Hindsight is 2020 - Harvard - Free sample business school application essay

Free sample business school application essay

I like to joke that I chose to study history in college as a career move. After all, history is a growing field. The truth is, I studied history because I love stories. When we incorporate the experiences of our lives into stories, we give them meaning. The stories I learned in college were the most meaningful parts of my education.

I chose my major after encountering Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. I had enrolled in a rigorous series of five interdisciplinary courses to read the great works of Western philosophy, history, and literature from antiquity to the modern period. Known among students as “philosophical boot camp,” this application-only program required a thousand pages of reading each week. Despite the volume, certain stories refused to be skimmed, and Thucydides’ history was a page-turner. Filled with complexity, it continually forced me to reevaluate my own predictions about how the Athenians would react to the looming conflict with Sparta. The dogeared, scribbled-on pages of my paperback remind me of how the enjoyment of wrestling with the story convinced me to study history.

In my junior and senior years, I wrote three major independent research papers, all of which shared a single broad theme: the political consequences of communications technology revolutions. These projects taught me how to research, evaluate conflicting evidence, and write analytically. They taught me how to write stories myself.

My thesis was a 112-page study of Richard Nixon’s successes and failures as an improbable pioneer of televised politics. His story taught me that effective persuasion depends not only on having the right message, but choosing the right venues to communicate the message. It also taught me that, even with a winning message delivered by the right medium, a leader’s integrity is what determines his destiny.

Ironically, of all the stories I learned in college, my favorites were not told in the history department, but in an engineering course, High-Tech Entrepreneurship. Taught by a former HBS professor, it introduced me to the case method of learning through stories. I was challenged to form opinions with limited data and debate the best path forward in the uncertain situations confronting the cases’ entrepreneurial protagonists. I loved it. It was like reading Thucydides again. Ever since that class, I have thought that two years of full-time case study in business school would be an invaluable professional culmination of my education in history.

Analysis

Maxwell is a history major who likes stories—reading them, dissecting them, and writing them. The entire essay is a web of stories netted together with clear transitions and turning points. The essay is unique because of this alternative approach and its emphasis on self-reflection.

Note that Maxwell explains what made him study history but opts not to discuss his choice of institution. This is not the norm, but it draws the reader into his world of influences and turning points. It also reinforces an essay that shows how the “small” choices

we make—like taking a class that reads Thucydides—can be as transformational as the “big” choices.

Although Maxwell presents a powerful synthesis of lessons learned from these undergraduate experiences, the biggest critique of this essay is that while he likes stories, he is unable to make a tangible link between that passion and his success. A sentence or two to solidify the link between his love for stories and how that has led to his competencies and success would make this essay a complete success.

From 65 Successful Harvard Business School Application Essays edited by the Staff of the Harvard Crimson. Copyright (c) 2009 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Publishing Group