3 Valuable Lessons from Sample MBA Essays

The goal of your essay should be to provide a clear, engaging snapshot of who you are to the admissions readers. When they’re done reading your essays, you want them to think, “Wow – this is a person I want to get to know better!” How do you achieve this? One way is to look at sample successful essays.

Video Transcript:

Are you applying to top MBA programs, worried about the competition, and nervous that your MBA application essays won’t be good enough to secure you an interview invitation?

Keep watching for 3 valuable lessons you can glean from sample MBA essays.

If you’re worried about the competition at top MBA programs, you have good reason to be concerned. At many top programs, rejection rates soar to over 80%. The essays provide you with the opportunity and the challenge to differentiate yourself from the many applicants superficially like you. And you certainly don’t want a short essay or two to stop you from getting into your dream school.

First of all, those essays may be short, but most are not at all easy. They are completely different from a memo or report or research paper. Really a genre you may not have encountered since you applied to college way back in high school.

As the founder and president of Accepted, I’ve been guiding MBA applicants in writing MBA application essays for 20+ years, and our clients have been accepted to Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Columbia, Chicago Booth, Haas, Kellogg, MIT, INSEAD, Yale, and all the other top programs.

At Accepted, we understand how hard it is to write these essays with their tight word limits and enigmatic questions, not to mention your own busy life and lack of time.

Many of you will turn to sample essays to stimulate your own writing juices. I’d like to encourage you to review our sample essays at accepted.com/mba/sampleessays and in the meantime, I’m going to share my 3 takeaways from our collection of sample MBA essays:

1. Individuality comes through. You feel like you’re meeting or glimpsing different people in these essays. They are revealing because the author is not someone trying to be somebody else or hide themselves behind complex sentences and flowery verbiage or unintelligible jargon.

2. They’re engaging. They balance anecdote and analysis to hold your attention. You want the admissions committees to read out of interest, not just obligation.

3. Clarity. They may not be Shakespeare, but they are well-written. Not gimmicky, but cogent and compelling.

So what are the secrets of these authors? How did they create these powerful essays? More importantly, how do you create an equally potent essay that reveals you at your best?

1. Go to accepted.com/exemplary.

2. Download the free guide From Example to Exemplary: How to Use Sample Essays to Make Your Essay Outstanding.

3. Learn how to write engaging, revealing, persuasive essays that will introduce you to the admissions readers as a compelling candidate. A candidate they will want to interview and ultimately admit.

Follow these 3 steps to avoid the rejection-causing essay quagmire. Take away these lessons from this video and then implement them in your essays by following the advice in From Example to Exemplary. Go from confusion and anxiety to clarity and confidence. Not to mention acceptance.

Get the individualized assistance you need to bring your essay from good to great to out-of-this-world fantastic when you work with an Accepted consultant. Check out our MBA Essay Services for more information.