We will begin the next series of articles with a school by school examination of the essay prompts. First up: The Harvard Business School.

Next in our series is Stanford Business School, colloquially known on campus as the “GSB” (i.e. Graduate School of Business).

The following article will break down the Wharton essays (2) this year and provide a comprehensive approach for how applicants should handle it.

Next in our series is the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, simply known in the school’s lexicon as Booth.

The following article will break down the Booth essays this year and provide a comprehensive approach for how applicants should handle them.

The following article will examine both strategies and approaches to the Kellogg essays this year and provide a comprehensive overview of how applicants should handle it.

The next school in this course is the Columbia Business School, or CBS. The following article will examine both strategies and approaches to the CBS essays this year and provide a comprehensive overview of how applicants should handle it.

As we wrap up the discussion of individual strategies, it is time to take a step back and draw some universal insights for well-written essays. Over the years, we have gathered patterns of essays that captivated audiences and others that have turned away Admissions for their cliché-based or less-than-original writing. Still, with this experience, we have read enough bad essays to recognize a good one. Uniformly, good essays were clear, concise, and grammatically correct.

In the final article, we want to provide some thoughts on how you should approach editing the essay.
As we discussed, the business school application essay provides you the valuable real estate in your candidate package to tell Admissions what they need to know: who you are, what you value, and the driving influences behind the bullet points on your resume. These motivations are hard to fake and easy to spot, so any qualitative assessment or attribute that you want to come across in your application needs support with examples, stories, anecdotes, or previous experience that you can cite.

Discuss a defining experience in your leadership development. How did this experience highlight your strengths and weaknesses as a leader?

So you were eighteen when you went to college. Young, impression- able, and experimental—you just wanted to have a good time. Also, you probably did not select your college or courses to justify them to the HBS admissions committee, did you? Besides, come on, that was such a long time ago! Why does the HBS admissions committee want to know about your academic experience? You do not even re- member where the diploma is now. No, this essay question is not intended to penalize you for those frat parties and spring breaks years ago.

So you have spent the last five years trolling the seas in a British naval submarine, have been trading on the floor of the stock ex- change, or have just recently graduated from college. Moreover, you have just spent several essays talking about your scintillating experiences of the last decade. Now it is time for you to answer what is arguably the most important question of the application: What do you want to be when you grow up? More precisely: What is your career vision and why do you need a Harvard MBA to achieve it? A well- structured response to this question will address four critical points.

This is an essay question that at first glance seems almost too easy: describe a typical day. How hard can that be? Do not be fooled; this is a question worth spending some time on, one that if done well can communicate a great deal about your personality and how you approach the world and solve problems.

While the other essay topics may change somewhat year to year, this essay continues to be a permanent fixture in the HBS application. With a more generous word limit of six hundred words, it offers a unique opportunity to tell the admissions committee what is most important to you as an individual and as a professional.

Life would be dull if you got everything you wanted without having to struggle a bit. This question is all about how you deal with adversity. The key here is to turn whatever setback you experienced into something positive. Do not dwell on the disappointment—although describe it vividly—but rather focus on how you solved the problem and what you learned.

This topic represents a slight twist on traditional ethics questions that focus on a dilemma applicants have experienced firsthand: it is forward-looking, asking applicants to anticipate challenges they may encounter in the future as business leaders. Applicants may wish to use this opportunity to expand on their career goals or to address ethical issues that are specific to their chosen industry or job function. Despite the forward-looking nature of the question, students may wish to draw on past experiences handling difficult ethical dilemmas and demonstrate how this has shaped their principles as well as their plans for handling such issues in the future.

What an interesting topic! Open-ended questions are challenging because candidates have to go through the sometimes harrowing process of deciding what to talk about. They can, however, be the decisive, positive factor in an application. We encourage applicants to think of this question as an opportunity to display elements of their personality that haven’t come across in their other essays. For example, some applicants choose to talk about their family life and their personal values; others touch upon specific aspects of their personalities that they think will differentiate them from the rest of the applicant pool.