You need to clearly convey to the Mendoza adcom that you have what it takes to be an effective leader—an integrated mind, a broad perspective, tenacity, and heart. Use your career experiences, your career goals, and your personal values to help you demonstrate these key elements.
Your response to the essay questions is extremely important in the selection process. Create a file for your essay and include your name on each page. Your essay should be typed, double-spaced, and no longer than 2 pages.
1. Your responsibility as a lifelong member of the Mendoza community is to Ask More of Business – to exemplify individual integrity, organizational excellence, and a concern for the greater good. How do you plan to do this in your professional career?
This is a question asking you to show that you belong in the Mendoza community with the emphasis that it puts on service and ethics, as well as organizational leadership. There are different ways to approach this question. Here are two possibilities:
1. Present an experience that shows you demonstrating managerial ability, integrity, and a concern for the greater good or a commitment to service. Tell that story and then analyze what you learned from the experience. How did your understanding of these essential (for Mendoza) values evolve as a result of this event. How do you intend to apply that understanding and those lessons in the future?
2. Use three different experiences to show each of the qualities that Mendoza is looking for and weave them together with a unifying themes. Then again, take the lessons you learned from these different experiences and show how you intend to use them going forward.
With the first the first approach is you can go into greater depth, both about the experience and what you learned, but you may have trouble defining such an experience. With the second approach, you risk a travelogue type of approach, but it may work better in terms of the three values.
In both cases, make sure you answer the question about how you intend to fulfill your responsibility as a member of the Mendoza community in the future.
2. Slideshow Presentation
• Effective business communication is a central skill for managers and visual presentations are an important and frequent method of communication. Demonstrate your ability to clearly, concisely and persuasively communicate important information by telling us about yourself using a short slide presentation.
• Please consider the following guidelines when creating your presentation.
• You are free to cover any material about yourself that you think would be of value to the Admissions Committee.
• Please use whatever software programs you like to develop your presentation but note that the only acceptable formats for upload in the online application system is Adobe PDF.
• There is a strict maximum of four slides, though you can provide fewer than four if you choose.
• The slides that you submit will be printed and added to your application file for review by the Admissions Committee. As a result, only text and static images will be seen. Videos, music, hyperlinks, etc will not be conveyed and should not be included. Color may be used.
• Your goal is to clearly, concisely and persuasively convey key information. Slides will be evaluated on these dimensions and not on graphic or presentation elements.
• Notes pages will not be accepted. You should plan to convey your entire message on the actual slides themselves.
• To assist MBA Applicants with the development of their slide presentation, please consult this PowerPoint Guide.
Think strategically here. What do you want the admissions reader to know about you that isn’t found elsewhere in the application and can be presented well visually. Usually hobbies and non-professional experiences are good topics for this kind of question, but the key is that the experience or achievement can be presented graphically in four slides.
3. Supplemental Essay Instructions
The Notre Dame MBA Admissions Committee will accept supplemental essays from applicants who wish to provide additional information that has not been captured within other areas of the application.
For example, applicants with low undergraduate GPA’s may address any circumstances surrounding their performance or applicants who have been dismissed from school may want to consider addressing that issue. Also, if you want to explain your work history in greater detail, please use the Supplemental Essay to provide us with a chronology of your work history.
If you are a re-applicant, you must complete a Supplemental Essay outlining your activities since you last applied.
Ultimately, we will accept supplemental essays on any topic that you feel is important to the Committee and not explained fully within other portions of the application.
Please keep all submissions to one page, typed and double-spaced.
Again, the response to this MBA essay should complement the other essays and information found in your application. In my view, this essay is optional in name only. If you are impressive enough to get into Notre Dame, you should have more to say than can be captured in the required goals essay and the slide presentation.
If you are a reapplicant, the key question to address: How has your candidacy improved since you last applied? An improved GMAT is easy to point to, if you have it, but don’t limit it to that. Be sure to discuss increases in responsibility on and off the job, a sharpened career goal, a community service initiative, or anything else that reflects well on you and hasn’t been discussed in the other essays.
If you would like professional guidance with your Notre Dame Mendoza MBA application, please consider Accepted’s MBA essay editing and MBA admissions consulting or our MBA Application Packages, which include advising, editing, interview coaching, and a resume edit for the Notre Dame Mendoza MBA application.
Notre Dame Mendoza 2015 MBA Application Deadlines:
| Application Deadline | Decision Notification | |
| Early Action | September 8, 2014 | October 10, 2014 |
| 1 | October 13, 2014 | December 5, 2014 |
| 2 | January 12, 2015 | February 20, 2015 |
| 3 | February 23, 2015 | April 2, 2015 |
By Linda Abraham, president and founder of Accepted.com and co-author of the new, definitive book on MBA admissions, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Acceptance at Top Business Schools.
Related Resources:
• How to Prove Character Traits in Essays
• Leadership in Admission
• From Music to MBA: IV with a Notre Dame Mendoza Student
