The essay requirements of MBA applications are well documented as extremely time consuming and utterly crucial. With high effort and high stakes, it’s no wonder that many candidates spend swathes of time and effort attempting to simplify the application process, hunting for explanatory resources and poring over clarifying analysis. With some of the essay questions for the 2024-2025 season released and since analyzed, perhaps your mind has already been eased and preparation is already underway. Perhaps you feel as if you have a firm grip on what schools are likely to ask you, but would like a little more guidance as to where to begin your preparation. Or, perhaps, you have read through the proposed questions for the upcoming application season and balked at their scope and variety, found yourself faced with lists of question after question and stuck before your next step.
If that applies to you – if you’re awash with sample questions and don’t know where to start – we’re here to help. We’ve trawled through the 2024-2025 MBA essay requirements, plucked and grouped common ideas and gathered evidence as to what your dream business schools really want to ask you. We’ve delved into the five most common question types across the schools and presented our findings for you here, grouping the questions we have found by theme and nudging your answers in the right direction.
| Leadership Exp. |
Career goals | Achievements/ values/ challenges | Diversity | Image or video | Motivated | Optional | Impact during MBA | Reapplicant | Change maker or curiosity | Learning styles | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Haas | y | y | y | y | y | ||||||
| Chicago Booth | y | y | y | y | |||||||
| Columbia | y | y | y | y | |||||||
| Cornell Johnson | y | y | y | y | y | ||||||
| Dartmouth Tuck | y | y | y | y | y | ||||||
| Duke Fuqua | y | y | y | y | y | ||||||
| Emory Goizueta | y | y | y | y | y | y | |||||
| Georgetown McDonough | y | y | y | y | y | y | y | ||||
| Harvard | y | y | y | y | y | y | |||||
| Indiana Kelley | y | y | y | y | |||||||
| LBS | y | y | y | ||||||||
| Michigan Ross | y | y | y | y | y | y | |||||
| MIT Sloan | y | y | y | y | y | ||||||
| Northwestern Kellogg | y | y | y | y | y | ||||||
| NYU Stern | y | y | y | y | y | ||||||
| Stanford GSB | y | y | |||||||||
| Texas McCombs | y | y | y | y | y | ||||||
| UCLA Anderson | y | y | y | y | |||||||
| UVA Darden | y | y | y | y | |||||||
| Washington Foster | y | y | y | y | |||||||
| Wharton | y | y | y | y | |||||||
| Yale SoM | y | y | y | y |
As of the publication time, the following schools’ MBA essay requirements were not yet available: Carnegie Mellon Tepper, INSEAD, UNC Kenan-Flagler.
A quick note before we begin – the rankings of question popularity exclude the optional question, which provides a chance to add context, explanations or missing information, which is included in the essay section for almost every school. Most if not all programs also allow re-applicants to explain their progress since their last application.
Career Goals: 18 Business Schools
MBA applicants may, on reading the essay questions, believe that every one is a thinly veiled attempt to extract from their minds the very essence of their motivation, is a test of the significance of their lives so far, is a somewhat murky request for a chronicle of their career’s achievements. “What do you want from me?” they might wail, as they wade through word counts and sample answers.
The essay questions that focus on applicant career goals, however, are something a little different. It is a chance for the schools to flip that question on its head, to place it in a speech bubble emanating from the MBA itself, as if the program asks the incoming students – “what do you want from me?”
The career goals question challenges students to get specific about what this MBA might do for their future. Who are they going to be working with, where and what on? No resume repeats here, please – this is a chance to really reveal the substance of the future. Columbia Business School even asks for the inclusion of your “dream job,” a green light to detail your wildest aspirations and get creative with your answer. The career goal question was beyond all doubt the most popular question across the essays, proposed by the vast majority of schools; for some, a look at the immediate post-MBA future is the priority, while for some the next 10 years intrigue them most. For all, one thing is clear: schools want to know what impact your goals will have on the world of business, not just on you.
Your Achievements, Values and Self: 16 Business Schools
Somewhat of a broad category, questions that fall under the umbrella of this section include enquiries as to values, conquered hurdles (past and present), proudest achievements or even personality quirks. The approach of different schools varies wildly, but all these questions aim simply to get to the bottom of what makes you tick. What do you really care about? How do you overcome obstacles? What are you like, outside of the MBA?
No school makes this last question clearer than Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, whose “25 random things” section requests a detailed rundown of everything and anything – as long as it’s not relevant to an MBA. Emory’s Goizueta, on the other hand, gets straight to the point, asking for details on the most impactful person, place or thing to grace your world so far. Varying levels of intensity, it’s fair to say, but aligned in their goal of applicant discovery. Meanwhile, Northwestern Kellogg invites candidates to define their values and MIT Sloan offers values to highlight in their cover letter essay.
It’s worth noting that there is some crossover here with the similar, but more rousing, questions from Michigan Ross and Berkeley Haas, both of whom want to know such things as what “gets you out of bed” and “makes you feel alive.”
Diversity and Inclusion: 6 Business Schools
Columbia, in its question on diversity, highlights five specific skills of inclusive leadership. “Mitigating Bias and Prejudice” the question begins, then “Managing Intercultural Dialogue; Addressing Systemic Inequity; Understanding Identity and Perspective Taking; and Creating an Inclusive Environment.”
Columbia, just like the five other schools–Berkeley Haas, Dartmouth Tuck, Georgetown McDonough, Washington Foster (optional question) and UVA Darden–including this topic in their required or optional essay questions, wants to know what students know about these skills. When did they use them? How did it go?
Each of the schools concentrating on diversity ask their applicants one specific thing: that their answer draws on personal experiences. Not for theory, this one, this is a question that asks what you contributed, what you learned, and what you think.
How Will You Lead? 6 Business Schools
For six business schools, the MBA essay requirements’ enquiries into past challenges and future goals collide in one topic: the question of leadership. They want to know what you attempted, where it worked, where it didn’t, and what you learned. They want to know, in short, where your leadership might be going. The uniting factor across the questions on leadership in different schools is the focus on personal experience, with schools asking for examples, anecdotes and evidence from your career, studies or personal life.
For Harvard, this split between past influence and future hope in leadership is clear, and demonstrated through one of their short answers that asks what what has shaped you and who you want to become.
Calling Curious Applicants and Change Makers: 3 Business Schools
NYU Stern’s approach to the question of change is catchy. It sets up, for its students, a tagline, daring them to fill the gap in “Change:…… it”, urges them to create their own manifesto and asks them to explain how they will “dream,” “drive” or “dare it.” “Change,” they write, is “the only constant.”
The embrace of the new is echoed in the MBA essay requirements of Texas McCombs School of Business and Harvard, too – the former asking applicants how their MBA will be the “launch pad” of that students change; the latter approaching from the angle of curiosity, asking its applications how curious they can get. Both perspectives share a common goal, delving into how students will use their new found knowledge to shape and respond to the mutability of the business world.
