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.

Chicago Booth Essay Tips

Essay One: How will the Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals? (250-word minimum)

Essay Two: An MBA is as much about personal growth as it is about professional development. In addition to sharing your experience and goals in terms of career, we’d like to learn more about you outside of the office. Use this opportunity to tell us something about who you are. (250-word minimum)

Preparing to Write

Booth is known for asking creative essay questions, but this year there are some new changes to the business school application. The signature picture essay has been eliminated in favor of two short-answer questions that are more typical of other MBA programs.

Every year, Booth’s admissions team selects just under 600 students to join their prestigious MBA program. Beyond just the standard focus on academic and career excellence, Booth goes further in looking for an archetypical personality to succeed in its program. On its website, they specify curriculum, community, and career as their guideposts for assessing applicants to its business school program.

Core Themes: Booth

Chicago Booth has a tradition of intellectual inquiry, non-conformity, and innovation. This school’s mantra is all about taking risks, about maximizing the experience, and about getting out what you put in.

Data-driven approach to business. Chicago Booth specializes in building a curriculum and facilitating job placement into increasingly data-rich environments. The school believes that as data becomes increasingly important in today’s business world, a world-class business school should prepare its student to operate in this challenging and fast-paced environment. As such, you will be given access to an unparalleled array of academic and extracurricular opportunities in business analytics and financial data science.
Chicago is a place of ideas. The intellectual rigor that Booth offers its students is more akin to that of a law school than that of a typical business school. And this, of course, is by design. They want not only smart people but also those who are intellectually curious and inquisitive. The way to catch the eye of the reader is to showcase the key qualities of students that would be fully engaged in the classroom setting – namely, those include dialogue, debate, and discourse.
Flexible Curriculum & Risk-taking. The “Boothies” that arrive on campus usually show comfort with risk-taking and embrace this notion.

We recommend before writing that you explore the city’s history, and at a minimum, come to appreciate Chicago’s rich tradition of economic theory as well as its place as a “thinking person’s” business school. This is the kind of place where strong legal minds or public policy minds would thrive under a business context and vice versa.

Writing

Even though the picture essay question has changed, we still need to apply the same laser-like focus that we would otherwise put into organizing and structure a plan of attack. In response to the changes in the essay this year, the Senior Director of Operations and Evaluation, Donna Swinston, stated, “This year, you will find that we want to get right at those motivations: to the things that inspire you and your post-MBA future. We incorporated new questions that address your goals and passions”. As a result, we can think about applying the “Career Goals” format that we used for other schools’ strategy guides to approach this essay. Whether it is in the application or at the interview, almost every top MBA program will ask their candidates for some version of Essay 1.

Essay One: How will the Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals?

The fact that Booth made explicit a post-MBA Career Goals essay despite the overhaul to the application means that they still do want a holistic look at your goals and that most applicants were not articulating proper motivation for what they wanted to do after graduation.

We recommend the same two-pronged structure to this first essay:

Short-term (immediate) goals and how

We need to draw the connection between what you are looking to accomplish in the next 2-5 years after school and how Booth will be used as a launching pad for you to reach those goals. This means talking about specific programs, courses, or offerings to showcase you have done your work, as well as evidence that you can achieve those goals. In other words, if your goal is to build a new sustainable manufacturing facility to combat climate change, but you have never worked in energy, operations, or climate resilience, you have a long road to bridge to help the reader get comfortable with the viability of that goal.

Long-term goals and why

The key here is clarity. As usual, it is easy to get bogged down when talking about 10-20 years in the future. The clearer and more succinct you can be in articulating your vision and why it matters to you, the better it will read for the audience and easier it will be for them to get on board with your candidacy.

Essay Two: An MBA is as much about personal growth as it is about professional development. In addition to sharing your experience and goals in terms of career, we’d like to learn more about you outside of the office. Use this opportunity to tell us something about who you are

Whenever an admissions committee asks a question about your personal life, they do want to know. It will not be enough to recite the skills listed on your resume or credentials achieved through training. They are looking for clues and insights into your passion and why you made the big decisions in your life. The committee understands that you are sitting at a natural inflection point in your life and if you cannot offer to Admissions why you are truly applying and what drives you, then most likely you will not be the type of student the Booth is seeking for its immersive, forward-thinking program. What you should think about in terms of the committee’s assessment of culture fit is how your background, motivation, or personality fits with the school’s risk-taking theme. In other words, does your candidacy embody values such as collaboration, open-mindedness, and respect? We recommend tackling these more qualitative aspects to your candidacy in this essay prompt.

As a practical matter for strategy, we recommend starting by looking at the choices you have made and working backward to figure out why you made them. This is the time to think about organizations or institutions you have been a part of for a long time. What drew you to them? What impacts have they had on your life and on other big decisions you have made. Remember, one of the hallmarks of Booth is its flexible curriculum. It is a format for an MBA that means students are forced (or free, depending on your perspective) to create order out of chaos and make difficult choices to choose what to pursue. You cannot do it all and Booth knows this. So in your application, you want to confidently state why you have made the choices that you did and what aspects of Booth you look forward to exploring, with the conscious idea in mind that that means you are choosing to leave other things behind.

A simple reiteration of the skills listed on your resume is not going to suffice, especially at competitive schools. They want to hear about the passions that have led you to make big life decisions.

What Not to Write

Booth’s second essay prompt is a direct question regarding your personality outside the office. Do not use this opportunity to explain why you are a good fit for Booth or how you will make contributions to the Booth community. Rather, with sincerity as your touchstone, explain a little further about material that exists outside your résumé. Are you a sportsman? A devout missionary? A first generation college graduate? Here is your opportunity to explain unique challenges you’ve overcome and unique characteristics that will enrich the student body.

Example Booth #2 Essay

“In addition to my professional life as a businessperson, I am a keen reader and thinker. Although I do read business books as a pastime, I consume both mass-market and literary fiction in my spare time. From Michael Crichton and John Grisham on one end of the spectrum to John Fowles, Hemingway, and Margaret Atwood on the other, I live the motto “all of us live at least one life, readers live a thousand.” My reading habit serves as both stress relief and a source of knowledge regarding how my colleagues are dealing with unique experiences and how a person’s life story might unfold.

My love of reading extends to foreign countries I someday wish to visit. Haruki Murakami’s “Cool Japan” books have been a lifelong source of interest, whereas authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and José Saramago attract me to the liveliness of Latin culture. To me there are few pleasures that exceed taking a trip to a country I first encountered in a book, and I love sharing works with friends both close and professional. We are brought together by books, and we never cease learning from them.”

Commentary

The applicant added to his candidacy subtly, not throwing in the reader’s face his capabilities, but introducing an aspect of his character that will serve him well. His list of authors covered both general interest and intellectualism, meaning that he won’t be limited to self-help and business books. His love of erudition gives him academic skills to tackle difficult materials and provides him a hobby that adds meaning to his life.

University of Chicago Booth School of Business