Emory Goizueta MBA Essay Topic Analysis 2024-2025
The following essay topic analysis examines Emory Goizueta’s MBA admissions essays for the 2024-2025 admissions season. You can also review essay topic analyses for all of the other leading MBA programs as well as general Essay Tips to further aid you in developing your admissions essays.
Emory Goizueta MBA Essay Topic Analysis 2024-2025
The essays are an important part of your MBA application because they are an opportunity to tell the MBA Admissions Committee more about yourself. To go beyond your resume bullet points and share more of your story and goals. Please complete the required 3 short answer questions and 2 essay questions below and follow the word limits provided. Your essays should be written in 12-point, Arial font and spaced at 1.5; please do not include the essay title on the page. Upload your essay answers, numbered and in order, as one pdf document in your application portal.
Short Answer Questions
Answer all 3 of the short answer questions below. Each response should be no more than 40 words.
- What are your short-term post-MBA career goals?
- How will your professional experience and the Goizueta MBA help you to achieve those goals?
- What’s a fun fact about you that you would like the committee to know?
The first two inquiries make for a fairly straightforward career goals essay, with an explicit emphasis on the short-term. Candidates should address the first short answer with a clear statement of their short-term post-MBA goal, i.e. the position they plan to seek immediately after graduating from Goizueta. Applicants should name a specific job title/functional role, and might even consider naming 1-2 firms that they plan to target.
Then, for the second short answer, applicants should highlight how their experiences and strengths (functional skills such as communication or quantitative knowledge) are aligned with this short-term goal. You also need to include commentary on how a particularly appealing element of the Goizueta MBA program or community would also support your work in your short-term role. Such comments should be highly specific (focusing on a specific course or student organization) in order to demonstrate your knowledge of the program while making the most of the brief Emory-focused remarks.
Regarding the fun fact, though there are myriad potential topics to discuss here, applicants should consider the balance of subjects they have covered across their other essays and choose a fact that provides new insight into their overall candidacy. For example, if the majority of content in your other essays is focused on your professional life and accomplishments, this would be an opportunity to showcase and highlight your extracurricular passions or interests. It also invites something interesting about your background or unusual international experience. You may also consider what matters most to you or what feels like defines you as you decide what may be missing from the other application materials.
Essay Question 1
Goizueta Business School’s mission is to prepare principled leaders to have a positive influence on business and society. Identify a personal account of a time you effectively demonstrated your leadership skills. Respond to one of these two prompts:
- What about this experience made you feel proud of your leadership abilities?
- What did this experience teach you about leadership? (300-word limit)
The primary task of this essay is to recount a leadership experience and comment on what you learned in the process. In selecting a topic, however, it will be important to key in to the preamble and its emphasis on the concepts of principled leadership and positive influence that involves both business and social impact.
Note that the example in this essay can come from the personal or professional realm (though all things being equal, a professional experience will likely be preferable here). Your highest priority should be to identify an example that will allow you to showcase your strengths.
Once you have identified your example, we recommend a simple STAR structure for this response. Begin by describing the situation, the players, and stakeholders involved before moving into the task: what you needed to accomplish in your leadership role (as well as any challenges or barriers that you anticipated). You should then move into the action, providing a chronological account of how you moved through the project or process. Finally, you should comment on the result — the positive outcome of your leadership efforts and the resolution of the story. In a concluding section, you will then want to address the prompt you chose. You can either reflect on the strengths you applied or summarize the lessons you learned in the course of this leadership experience. You may also include a comment on how these reflections have served you since and/or how they position you to add real value to the Emory MBA community—space permitting.
Essay Question 2
Our lived experiences shape who we are and the aspirations we have. As a values-driven community, we care about what has shaped your life. Please share what or who has had the biggest impact on your life. (300-word limit)
This question essentially asks you to introduce yourself to the admissions reader, with reflections on an influential figure or experience(s) in your life. Keep in mind that the information you introduce should be relevant to your candidacy for the MBA program.
Open with who or what has influenced you the most. The prompt invites reflection on a more personal relationship, given the references to lived experiences and big impact. With this in mind, writing about figures such as Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, or Bill Gates might be challenging. First, the reader will likely have seen many essays on the same person before and also, in the case of famous leaders, it’s likely you would not be able to draw on personal experience with them. So, consider your personal relationships—perhaps you have a mentor at work who has inspired you, or you’ve met someone through your community involvement that has informed a better sense of who you want to be. Of course, if you’re passionate about a certain career path like impact investing and you admire someone who has made significant strides in that area, you could make it work. The key will be in the connections to influencing who you are and aspire to be.
Parents can easily be the most influential figures in a person’s life, but should generally be avoided discussing in admissions. On one hand, Emory is looking for people who display innate maturity and leadership capacity. If your chief role model is your mother or father, this may indicate that you haven’t fully “left the nest,” and it could raise questions about your ability to think independently. On the other hand, there are exceptions to every rule. Consider what your relationship allows you to tell about your own story. If you grew up in a single parent home and that parent sacrificed a lot to get you to university or enable your opportunities, there’s a chance to shed light on your unique background and experience here.
When sharing the requested example(s), be sure to include how you have acted as a result of the respective influence(s). Show the adcom the values you embody as a result of this relationship or situation.
Video Essay
Telling your story through written essays is an important part of the application, but the video essay lets us hear your words in your own voice. In the required video essay, every candidate will answer a “small talk” question to help the MBA Admissions Committee get to know you. The video essay instructions and link are located in your application portal.
Before pressing the “record” button, it would be worth reviewing our advice on video essays to understand the broader goals of a video prompt. As this is a visual presentation that will be recorded live, ensure you are dressed in appropriate professional attire. In terms of a background, clean and steady may work best—you do not want to make the adcom dizzy by taking them on an unsteady walking tour with your laptop. While many applicants will be tempted to introduce props into their video, such as signs, souvenirs, or any prized possessions, we would like to urge caution in this domain. A focused response to the question (while looking your audience in the eye) may be far more effective than a distracting string of props, signs, charts—each requiring valuable time to make transitions—not to mention careful attention to readability/visibility on screen. As the question can change and because the adcom is looking for an “unscripted” view of you, you will not want to be hampered by trying to work in materials that may or may not be relevant to the prompt. Take the preview period to gather your thoughts and then speak genuinely and clearly.
Optional Essay
Still have more to share? This optional essay is your opportunity to share something you couldn’t find a place for on your application. This is also where you should address anything the committee may question (e.g., gaps in employment, academic challenges, choice of recommender). You can use essay format or bullets. Please identify topics if more than one is addressed. (500 word limit)
It’s possible that there are other elements of your background that would be appropriate and not covered elsewhere in your application, for example an anticipated promotion or an element of one’s identity not covered in the program’s data forms. While applicants should make an effort to fully represent their candidacies within the required elements of the application, this leaves a bit of room for short exceptions. For those who need to address potential liabilities or inconsistencies in one’s application in this prompt, adopt a humble tone, acknowledge the issue without making excuses, and gently suggest other aspects of his or her candidacy that may help to compensate for this weakness.
Clear Admit Resources
Thanks for reading our analysis of this year’s Goizueta essay topics! As you work on your Emory MBA application, we encourage you to consider all of Clear Admit’s Goizueta offerings:
- Emory / Goizueta Profile on the Clear Admit website: up-to-date advice and admissions information
- Clear Admit LiveWire: admissions updates submitted in real time by applicants to Goizueta
- Clear Admit DecisionWire: school selections in real-time by admits to Goizueta