mba failure essay sample

• MBA>Application Tips

“Describe a Setback or Failure…” and Don’t Humble Brag

September 20, 2018 :: Admissionado

Just like the dreaded “What are your weaknesses?” question in job interviews, you might come across the “failure essay” during your MBA applications. An essay that asks you to reveal negative information about yourself…on a high stakes application?! That’s the worst kind, right? Wrong. This is actually a fantastic opportunity to STRENGTHEN your app. You know, as long as you totally crush the essay.

For starters, what the heck is the deal with this essay? What’s the POINT? Is this some kind of weird Mr. Miyagi test? Well, kind of, yeah. The truth is, the admissions committee (or adcom, as it’s known in the biz), isn’t all that interested in the failure itself. Really, they are interested in your ability to assess yourself, to be honest, humble, and, most importantly, to LEARN from your mistakes. Your ability to be vulnerable and the self-awareness you demonstrate by admitting to a failure show maturity, and the lesson you learned after the failure shows the adcom that you are a better applicant BECAUSE you failed.

So what are the basic elements of this essay that will take it from just admitting weakness to proving you are a badass? The most obvious, and most IMPORTANT, aspect is the failure itself. This is where most applicants go wrong—they choose a failure that is, well, not a failure, usually because they are afraid to admit something that really was a failure. Worse than simply not wanting to own up to a mistake, some applicants they think they can get away with the “humble brag” version of this essay—you know, where they present something as a failure while really showing off something they see as a strength. Like when your friend “complains” that his new car is so fast he keeps getting speeding tickets. Don’t be that guy, nobody likes that guy .

Back to the essay. For this to work, you can’t hedge and you can’t sneak in a win. There is simply no way around it, you have to own up to your screw-up, and it should be a doozy—a real flop. A case when you just totally missed the mark, screwed the pooch, dropped the ball…we could go on, but you get it. Let’s see some examples. Take a look at the “failures” below, and see if you can figure out which is the RIGHT kind of failure, and which is just … a fail.

Candidate A: It was 2 am and the whole team was in the office, a sense of panic filling the air as we scrambled to pull together weeks of research and data. Even worse, this was the fourth time this month we had been forced to stay late to finish a client presentation, and it was my fault. I had brought in 10 new clients for pitches in the last 8 weeks, and it was simply more than my team and I could handle. As we finally wrapped things up an hour later, I resolved not to push the team, and myself, so hard in the future—it was important to find a balance. I learned my lesson about taking on too much…

Candidate B: An hour before my presentation, I suddenly became overwhelmingly anxious. This was the first time I would be leading the pitch, and among the clients were c-suite execs from one of the country’s biggest pet food manufacturers—we stood to lose millions in business if they didn’t like my marketing strategy, or if they didn’t like me! In the days leading up to the meeting I had been cool, confident, and sure of my skills; after all, I was the best member of my college debate team, and had been part of hundreds of presentations before this one. I had done the legwork and knew the material was good. But still, my hands were sweating, and my voice began to shake as I started the pitch. It went terribly. The client was unhappy, and requested we re-do much of the work. My boss later told me they came close to putting us on notice.

Well? Which candidate would YOU prefer? Yep, we like the second guy better too, and so will the adcom. The failure he describes is hard-hitting, even a little embarrassing, and we know he probably learned A LOT from that experience (which he’ll tell us about in the rest of the essay). The first guy, on the other hand, while pretending to give us a failure, is really trying to tell us what a hero he is for winning SO much business the team couldn’t handle it. Just like that friend with the new car, nobody likes this guy. More importantly, he’s not demonstrating ANY of the qualities the adcom wants to see in this essay—he’s not self-aware, mature, willing to learn from his mistakes (or to even admit them), and he’s definitely going to get docked points for this.

Like the second guy, you want to admit a REAL failure—one that hit you hard and made you reassess. These are the moments where you learn the most, and therefore they make a much richer story for your application. Equally important here is that you OWN UP to the failure straight up—no hedging, no making excuses. This is not the time for “the dog ate my homework.” Adding explanations for WHY you failed, unless they are directly related to what you LEARNED from the failure, won’t help you. These are usually things like, “I was under a lot of personal stress” or “my boss probably shouldn’t have trusted me with that responsibility.” These come off as whiny more than anything else. Rather than explain your failure away, OWN it. Tell us straight up what you did wrong: “I should have prepared more, or prepared better,” or “I needed to learn to balance my responsibilities and manage my time more effectively.”

The final step in this failure essay, and equally critical, is showing us that you learned your lesson. The best way to do this is to provide a second, brief example that illustrates how you put that hard-learned lesson to good use. “For the next presentation, I prepared until I could say it backwards, used breathing exercises to calm my nerves, and crushed it, winning even more business for my firm.”

Alright, we know you’re convinced now, but we’ll say it one more time. The failure essay is an opportunity, and the best way to win it is by owning up to a straight up flop. So go forth, and write those failures up, my friends – the more humiliating the better.

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College admissions essay editing, mba essay on failure – how to write about my biggest failure.

Along with diversity, goals and ethical dilemma, MBA essays on failure are asked with an intention to learn about the maturity levels of the applicants. The intention of asking the failure question by B-schools has been summed up well below.

“No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person. Ever meet someone who’s always had everything work out for them with zero struggle? They usually have the depth of a puddle. Or they don’t exist.”

– Chris Hardwick

Business schools routinely ask on essay questions on failure in life:

• NUS MBA  prompt: My biggest failure was …
• Judge Business School, University of Cambridge: What did you learn from your most spectacular failure? (200 words)
• INSEAD France: Describe the achievement of which you are most proud and explain why. In addition, describe a situation where you failed. How did these experiences impact your relationships with others? Comment on what you learned (approximately 400 words).

MBA essays on failure are usually the toughest to write for a number of reasons. The difficulty starts with primarily, the self-acknowledgement part, then, the second is telling it or penning it down for someone else to read. People do not acknowledge failure that easily. It takes a lot of strength to acknowledge the fact that we have failed. Writing the essay is also a way of acknowledging that we can fail. It is a learning process in itself. It is from a failure that we learn our true strengths and our capabilities of bouncing back. The MBA essay on failure question usually does not limit to the incidence itself. It usually asks about your reaction and what you have learnt from that failure. The ways people handle their failure tell a lot about them.

When Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, asks you to mention your learning from the most spectacular failure, it means we fail more than we would tend to agree. Listing down all our failures and the learning of the failure and then selecting the most spectacular one out of them is a huge introspection process for the applicant. Spectacular here means the failure which gave you the opportunity to learn the most from.

MBA Essay on Failure  can be asked in a number of ways. Recount your failure, mention your reaction and what did you learn. The question can be any one or all three of the above.

1. NUS MBA prompt: My biggest failure was?

When you are asked to mention your biggest failure.

The admission committee wants you to mention the facts. They do not want to you to list your sob story. Mention the story in simple words with the least amount of emotions or in a matter of fact way with adequate detailing so that there is no confusion in the statements. Simply, what, where, when. Conclude it with why you think this is your biggest failure.

2. The second part of the MBA essay on failure or adversity questions deals with the ‘impact’. How did you respond?   Did you suffer any setback? Were you hurt? What did you feel? Did it change something? Were there any changes in your personal and professional relationships? Had you anticipated the failure or was it a shock? Mention your reaction to the incident, ashamed, shocked, hurt, etc.

INSEAD France asks: How did these experiences impact your relationships with others?

3. Learning

This is the final crux in which the readers are interested. What did you learn? Learn about yourself, learn about someone, or about the project, situation etc. Finally, mention an incident where you have applied the lesson learnt in the previous incident.

Failing to write the MBA essay on failure! Is it one of these?

1. Untruthfulness.

Honesty happens to be the key rule in writing the failure essay. First, be honest with yourself about the failure. The questions are direct and need a direct straight simple answer.

2. Scared of being judged.

Failure should be considered as learning experiences. The main misconception is that writing about an actual failure will result in being seen as a failure. On the contrary, writing about made up failures or fake failures or immaterial failures will cost heavily to the applicant.

3. Monetizing the failure.

Every failure is not about monetary loss. Monetary loss may be the result of the failure but not a lesson here. Failure in judging people and failure in pre-planning are more important to elaborate than mentioning the monetary loss. 4. Using too much floral language. While having good control over language is considered good, refrain from using words which would require opening the dictionary. State the incident as simply as possible. 5. Missing out on the lesson. The crux of an essay is the learning at the end. The learning should be substantial.

Examples of failure essays

Example 1: Losing the plot.

Parents never stop dreaming about their children, not ready to give up, always believing that their child is special and meant for greatness. Maybe my parents too were the victim of this folly, because despite my early brushes with failure they never lost hope. But when I fared poorly in my graduate exams, it was the last straw as it broke their heart. I can still feel the pain my result caused them, the agony they went through. I am still hoping one day I will prove them right, but till that day the pain will keep burning in their hearts and mine too.

Example 2: Realising and acknowledging

My biggest failure in life has to be my losing the plot completely during my higher secondary years and messing my exams. The failure haunts because it caused real damage to my future. The poor result meant I ended up in a second-rung college, with a gang of guys who despite their best intentions weren’t fully academically inclined. The failure also haunts because the tell-tale signs of an impending disaster were always there but I refused to acknowledge it and pushed things under the carpet like I was in pretty bad shape in Physics but I didn’t do enough about it. Looking back, a little more effort and a little more discipline could have solved matters. It is a life lesson that will always remain with me.

By:  Shivani Bhatt

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How to Discuss Failures and Weaknesses In Your MBA Essay

May 27, 2024

• Take advantage of failure
• Use STAR to demonstrate your strengths!
• Strengths and weaknesses complement each other
• Check out past examples!
• Nobody is perfect!
• Utilize personal failures, too
• Talk about failure – even when you don’t have to!
• Get expert help

UPDATE: This article was originally posted on July 18, 2022. It has been updated with new information and tips below. 

For your MBA admissions essay, you want to ensure you shine to stand out amongst thousands of other applicants. Does that mean you should avoid talking about negative experiences, failures, and weaknesses? Not at all. In fact, you should use past failures to your advantage to show how you have grown!

Utilizing failure in the appropriate places can even help you stand out from the crowd and land you a spot at your top bschool. To do so effectively, we have compiled our top tips for handling stories of failure and weaknesses below!

Tip #1: Take Advantage of Failure

The admissions committee for your top MBA program is looking for future leaders who seek to make a difference in their field. They want candidates who have experience making difficult, real-life decisions.  

Experienced professionals have most often made their share of mistakes. This doesn’t mean that admissions committees are looking for people who have never failed. Instead, they seek candidates who have grown from their past errors.

This perspective is particularly useful for writing MBA admissions essays. It allows you to frame a negative event positively by showing the admissions committee what you’ve learned from it.

Tip #2: Use STAR to Demonstrate Your Strengths!

The best way to talk about failures and weaknesses – and, more importantly, the lessons you learned from these experiences – in your MBA admissions essay is by utilizing stories . When using storytelling to discuss failures and weaknesses in your MBA essay, there are a few essentials to include. 

To effectively discuss a failure, the following elements must be clear: 

1) The problem: Why did the failure happen in the first place? Why did you act as you did in that situation from your perspective?

2) How you recognized the problem: How did you notice it was a problem? What further consequences did this problem have? 

3) How you overcome the problem: What did you do to solve this problem? What do you wish you would have done differently?

4) The lesson you learned from the experience: What was your takeaway from this story? How would you apply this lesson in the future?

It is important to include all of these elements to tell an effective story about failure or weakness. For example, take a look at how our client Paul concisely discussed a weakness in his Ross essay: 

“ I was humbled when I failed to implement a product’s preparation process at a retail store during a consulting project, leading to sales loss risks – besides client dissatisfaction. Later, the store’s manager eliminated parts of the process, completely redesigning it. His idea initially seemed like unfounded nonsense, as necessary data wasn’t being collected. However, the manager insisted on its success, so I tested his idea in two other stores: it was indeed agiler while maintaining effectiveness. I learned that listening to others is essential, even when our opinions diverge. The manager’s idea was subsequently shared with 300+ stores.”

As you can see, all of these elements must be present to tell an effective and compelling story about failure. If one or more of these is unclear or missing altogether, you may not be able to make an effective case.

Tip #3: Strengths and Weaknesses Complement Each Other

Sharing stories about your weaknesses or past failures can also highlight your strengths to the admissions committee. Here, weaknesses and strengths work together harmoniously.

In other words, discussing a negative habit, trait, or experience does not have to result in a negative perception. Instead, you can use these weaknesses, along with the lessons you’ve gleaned from them, to clearly demonstrate your strengths .

In this regard, you could present your tendency for being stubborn – which could be a problem in some situations – as a strength when it comes to knowing what you want. The decision not to go into the family business – which may have been seen as a failure from the family’s perspective – may have helped you find a job that revealed your true passion and opportunities for impact.

In this example, our client Lucas used his multicultural background characterized by culture clash to show how this led to both his greatest strengths and the need to overcome a weakness in his essay for INSEAD:

“The child of South Korean immigrants, I was born in France and raised in Argentina. Growing up between clashing cultures yielded important personal adaptability skills. These skills have shown me how I can serve a higher purpose, helping people and businesses through responsive empathy and a pragmatic approach. Nevertheless, my parent’s Korean heritage also reinforced a strong respect for hierarchy. I have, therefore, always avoided openly discussing their decisions or suggesting new ideas, focusing instead on delivering requests. However, effective consultants don’t just follow orders, they take the initiative to think like a leader. I thus began challenging myself to think critically to assess objectives.” 

This excerpt from Lucas’ essay clearly shows how traits he gained from his cultural background contributed both positively and negatively to his character. This way, he can use this theme to discuss both of these elements. 

Tip #4: Check Out Past Examples!

Some schools are explicitly looking for candidates to show how they have grown from failures or are improving on their weaknesses. This is because top MBA programs are looking for students with what is called a growth mindset . Take INSEAD, for example, whose motivational essay questions request you do both:

 “Give a candid description of yourself (who you are as a person), stressing the personal characteristics you feel to be your strengths and weaknesses and the main factors that have influenced your personal development, giving examples when necessary.” (approximately 500 words)

“Describe the achievement of which you are most proud and explain why. In addition, describe a situation where you failed. How did these experiences impact your relationships with others? Comment on what you learned. (approximately 400 words)”

INSEAD knows that you must reflect on failure to continue growing, and outright demands this skill from their candidates. 

Ross is another good example. They ask candidates to answer one of three prompts from two sets. One of the prompts reads: 

“I was humbled when…” (100 words or fewer)”

Like INSEAD, Ross wants to know how you reacted at a time things did not go exactly as you planned. Learning from a past failure would be a good choice for this prompt. Not sure if you’ve struck the right balance when writing about your failures and weaknesses?

If you are looking for help, don’t hesitate to check out our MBA Resource Center ! There, you can find dozens of past successful essays and detailed brainstorming worksheets to help you plan out a winning essay. 

Our library also includes guides for all top global MBA programs, interview tips and mocks, CV templates, and recommendation letter guides. Click to join!

Tip #5: Nobody is Perfect!

If you try to make a case to the admissions committee that claims you have a flawless record, this is unlikely to be successful. In other words, to allege perfection is likely to get your application set aside. This is because the adcom is looking for a pattern of success based on abilities of self-reflection, open-mindedness, and capacity for improvement.  

After all, universities – including top programs like Harvard , MIT , or Yale – are institutions of learning . All schools implicitly value growth, improving on one’s weaknesses, and intellectual appetite. High-profile MBA programs are specifically looking for these qualities in their candidates. 

If you claim that you are perfect, you indicate that there is nothing left to learn. This is definitely not the impression you want to give the adcom. By including failures and weaknesses, you can show the adcom that, even in success, there is still a way to get even better – and become even more successful. 

Remember, you are not trying to tell the adcom that you are perfect . Instead, you are trying to tell them how you use imperfection to your advantage to lead you to success.

Tip #6: Utilize personal failures, too

Not every failure or weakness you discuss has to come from your professional background. Personal stories about failure can be very effective, too . Similarly, not every failure has to be a huge one – some can be tiny mistakes that you wish you had done differently.

Personal weaknesses may range from disappointing a good friend to a tendency for tardiness. They could include not making time for someone in need, deciding not to take over the family business, or the fact that you have trouble negotiating compromise. 

Last year, our client Audrey wrote about a personal failure while leading her sailing team in a regional competition. In her answer, Audrey explains that her team consisted of her and her five teammates, all expert sailors. However, an inability to work together, despite careful planning, led to them losing their first race of the regatta:

“I learned that to have a successful team, it is not sufficient to focus only on high-performing individuals. Instead, it is necessary to create a unified mentality, aimed together at the same goal. If given a second chance, I would begin our planning by emphasizing how we were all skilled sailors but that we needed to form a united team. Some of us might disagree with aspects of the strategy, but we must derive a single plan and stick to it, knowing that focusing our efforts is the best overall option.”

Here, Audrey learned an important lesson about leadership, an important quality in MBA candidates . As you can see, strong professional lessons can also be derived from personal stories.

Failures and weaknesses can also include much larger personal challenges. You may even find that themes like coming to terms with your identity or overcoming loss are powerful – and authentic – solutions. This may be another way to creatively elaborate a change in industry or direction in your professional past. 

Tip #7: Talk About Failure – Even When You Don’t Have To!

Although schools like INSEAD and Ross explicitly ask their candidates to discuss past failures or their weaknesses, choosing to do so for another school is never a bad idea. Depending on the prompt, you can decide to discuss your failures and weaknesses for other schools as well. 

This will help demonstrate to other schools that you have a growth mentality, can reflect on your past failures, and see the need to improve on your weaknesses. Keep in mind that the admin board is looking for these traits – even if they are not explicitly asking you to talk about them!

For his LBS essay, for example, our client Dennis decided to tell the admissions board how working with the case-study format during a university exchange led to lower grades but ultimately helped him refine his communication skills. 

Whatever you choose, make sure the content you are sharing is relevant and adds value to your application. 

Make Sure Your MBA Essays Get You In

The extracurricular activities you decide to discuss in your MBA essay are completely up to you. They will depend on your personal context, your unique interests, and your motivation to contribute to your MBA community. 

Of course, discussing these in the right amount of detail or ensuring that you remain authentic to yourself is not always straightforward. Even the best writers struggle with these issues sometimes. 

At Ellin Lolis Consulting, we are here to help ensure that you make the most of your MBA admissions essays and how you can engage with your MBA community beyond the classroom.

So click here and put our expertise to work for your application!

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MBA Essay Tips: The 4 Admissions Essays You’ll Likely Encounter When Applying to Business School

It can seem like there are an infinite variety of MBA admissions essays. With famous examples, like the Stanford GSB application’s “What Matters Most to You, and Why?” or the Duke Fuqua application’s “25 Random Things”, it is easy to get overwhelmed thinking that you will have to write a completely different essay with a different subject for every question on every one of your business school applications. While each type of MBA essay does need to be tailored to each b-school, you can simplify and streamline the process of essay writing by embracing the idea that most admission essay prompts can be categorized into core themes.

Let’s get to know them below:

MBA Application Essay #1: The Personal Statement

MBA admissions committees care about your core values, your moral character, and the passions that motivate you. For example, UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School has four stated defining principles :

• Question the Status Quo
• Confidence Without Attitude
• Students Always
• Beyond Yourself

Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business is interested in accepting genuinely nice people . Duke’s Fuqua School of Business is interested in people’s “ decency quotient .” These business schools look to recruit people with worldviews that are compatible with these values and it is your job, in this category of essay, to make sure that comes across.

Luckily, you can talk about almost anything in these personal essays. Applicants will often discuss relationships with friends and mentors. Others might talk about the hardships they overcame or difficult experiences. However, there are some things to avoid which we discus here: 4 Mistakes Applicants Make when Writing the Personal Essay .

At the core, your business school personal statement should serve to illuminate who you are as a person and demonstrate that you live according to a code that is in line with your target business school’s own approach to education.

Yaron Dahan on the Importance of Your Story:

Mba application essay #2: the career goals essay.

Business school admissions committees want you to have a good job when you graduate from their MBA program. This is for three reasons:

• Business schools want their employment report to look good! That means that a very high percentage of graduates receive job offers (currently 98.4% at Wharton , for example), and those jobs have high compensation.
• Business schools want you to get not just “a job”, but a job that you really want. Satisfied students who achieved their goals are likely to promote the school to other potential students and speak well of the program.
• Business schools hope for (some of) their graduates to make enough money to eventually become donors.

Even though getting a good job is important, this isn’t everything. In order to stand out from other candidates, the job needs to be a bit inspiring as well. If you are not ambitious enough in outlining your goals and the impact you want to make in your future career, it is possible to come across as a boring candidate who is more or less content to stay in their current position with slightly better pay. Business schools will likely take a hard pass on those applicants. That said, if you are not somewhat realistic with what you want to accomplish, you can end up sounding naïve or unserious.

The goal here is to walk the line between the two. It is your job to convince the school that you have goals which are meaningful, but also grounded in your past experiences and considered enough that your success is assured.

To hear more on this, check out: Career Goals for MBA Essay Writing and More .

Demonstrating School Fit

After you state your goals, you’ll also need to explain how the MBA is a necessary part of achieving those goals. This is a chance to show that not only do you need an MBA , but that the particular program you’re applying to is exactly the right fit with your development needs.

What MBA programs really want to know is that you have done your homework and researched the school in detail. Admissions officers DON’T want to see copy/paste from the course catalogue. It is important to network with schools beforehand and then use what you learned to show that only their institution really has the resources to make your goals a reality.

Rebecca Heath Anderson on Researching Career Goals:

Mba application essay #3: school participation essay.

Business schools are selfish! They want to know that you will add something to their institution by attending. Schools rely on students to run many programs, such as professional clubs, and want to know that you will be an active participant in the campus culture. In fact, MBA programs tend to do almost every class and activity in groups.

In order to answer questions like these effectively, you will need to map out the kinds of school-sponsored clubs, conferences, and activities in which you are interested in participating. Consider where you can make helpful contributions to campus life: how can you benefit your classmates as well as the school as a whole?

MBA Application Essay #4: Behavioral Essays

An MBA program might ask about your previous experiences, both to gauge whether you’re ready to benefit from the school’s leadership development programs and to know your moral values as a leader. These questions can come in a number of forms.

They might prompt you by saying “Tell us about a time when you led a team” or even “Tell us about a time when you failed.”

What schools really are looking for, in this instance, is some sign that you are self-reflective. They want to understand that you have experienced some leadership setbacks that have made you interested in and prepared to take in the knowledge they have to offer.

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MBA Leadership Essays and How to Write Them

What makes you a strong leader? This can be a difficult question to answer. If you have a lot of leadership experience, your challenge is to tell your story in a compelling and authentic way. And if you don’t have a lot of leadership experience, your task is to be creative about how you answer the prompt, so that you can demonstrate to admissions committees the type of leader you’ll be.

In both cases it’s important not to exaggerate the truth. As soon as you inflate what your actual experience was, you call into question not only your response to the leadership question, but also the truthfulness of the rest of your application.

When shaping a response to the leadership question, you should first think about all of the people you interact with at your job: your manager, colleagues, team members of other departments, office staff, and HR. Consider your role on this team, and what your contributions were.

If you truly had a leadership role, reflect upon your experiences—good and bad—in leading a team. Admissions committees want to see not just your successes, but also your resilience and ability to learn from mistakes. If you weren’t the leader, you can pull from examples of good leadership that you have encountered, and demonstrate how you embody those skills, perhaps by describing non-work-related leadership positions you have held.

Questions to Consider for Leadership Essays

When developing your response to the leadership question, it is important to provide as many specifics as possible—particularly in your earliest drafts. Here are some questions that can help you make your essay convincing and engaging. (You don’t necessarily need to answer all of them; they are just a starting point.)

• What did you do in your role to fix problems?
• How did you handle situations where you had to escalate the issue to management?
• How did you work with people who weren’t members of your team? How did you get what you needed, even from people who couldn’t care less about you?
• If everyone in the office was down, what did you do to perk people up?
• Did you ever informally mentor junior colleagues?
• What fears or problems did you overcome in order to lead successfully?

Writing about Difficulties, Failures and Weaknesses

A common question in MBA essay prompts concerns a failure or setback in your career. These are a few examples of essay prompts that top MBA programs have used to ask about this topic:

• Tell us three setbacks you have faced.
• Describe a situation taken from your personal or professional life where you failed. Discuss what you learned.
• Discuss a time when you faced a challenging interpersonal experience. How did you navigate the situation and what did you learn from it?

These can be unpleasant topics to write about. How should an applicant respond to questions like these?

Pick a Genuine Failure or Weakness

Although it may seem tempting to tell a story in which your own failures are minimized, this type of response is unlikely to be effective, because it does not give you the chance to show self-reflection and personal growth. Moreover, an example where you give a ‘faux failure’ is much less likely to engage the reader than one where you describe a genuine failure of setback.

For example, imagine that you decided to write about an important project that failed due to an error by someone in the team you supervised. You may be tempted to write that “the team member was unable to take the responsibility and should have been monitored more closely.” Although this may be part of the story, a better response would include some reflection on your personal contribution to the problem. Instead of giving the trite insight that you should have monitored the team more carefully, you could write about the shortcomings in your management style and ability to motivate the team. By doing this, you show that you are honest and able to to reflect on failures, and you give yourself the chance to go on to describe what you have learned.

Don’t Turn a Failure Essay Into an Achievement Essay

For instance, in the above example, do not draw the attention away from your failure in managing the team by pointing out how hard you worked on the project yourself. You do not want to give the application committee the impression that you only want to talk about your successes, but are reluctant to reflect on your weaknesses.

Describe What You Learned

End your essay by describing what you have learned from your failure or setback and give an example of how you used your new insight. This is an expected topic even if it is not mentioned in the text of the prompt.

An average essay draws trite lessons. Sticking again with the example above, you might write that “each team member has a unique style and should be motivated accordingly.” A better response includes more details: Why did you fail to connect with the problem team member? Were there warning signs that you could have seen? A great response includes an example where you put your fix into action: you can mention, for instance, how you worked successfully with the same team member on a later project or were able to spot a potential problem early on in another team you managed afterwards.

By taking the courage to write honestly and directly about your failures, and then showing how you have put your learnings into action after the failure, you will have tackled this difficult essay topic successfully.

Now that we have looked at the main categories of MBA essays, let’s talk about one of the persistent myths about the MBA application process: using example essays and templates.

MBA Essay Examples and Templates–A Bad Idea

It is tempting to think that you can model your business school essay off of someone else’s successful essay. People spend time and money searching for “the perfect MBA essay sample” to use as a guide. First, you may hope to avoid the effort of having to write the essay yourself. Second, this is the sort of cargo cult thinking that says: if I copy what a successful applicant did, then I will also be admitted.

The truth of the matter is that sample essays don’t work. People get admitted to MBA programs for many reasons. Menlo Coaching has bought and reviewed several editions of the Harbus Essay Guide , which contains a number of successful HBS essays… and some of the essays therein are absolutely terrible. One essay spent its entire length bragging about the writer’s vast family wealth and all the celebrities the writer knew. Clearly, that applicant did not get in on the merits of their essay-writing skills.

Former HBS director of admissions Dee Leopold famously said that “Applying to Harvard is not an essay writing contest.” As per our MBA applications and admissions guide , people are accepted to MBA programs not on the quality of the writing, but on the quality of the thinking that went into the essay. As a result, “the perfect essay” is actually the one that answers the question based on your perspective and experiences.

By focusing on these broad categories, you can avoid some of the pitfalls of the essay writing process. Try to keep in mind what your overall MBA story is and don’t get lost in some of the things that don’t matter, such as “sample essays” or figuring out the exact language you are going to use.

Remember, the best application essay is the one that addresses the question in a way that is tied in to your personal experience.

Discover what sets standout MBA application essays apart from the crowd with expert guidance from our experienced MBA admissions consulting team .

Read more on MBA essays

• Taking the Stress out of the MBA Essay Writing Process
• Best strategies for the Harvard MBA Essay
• What Matters Most: Conquering the Stanford GSB Essay A
• Give & Take in the Wharton MBA Essays

Harvard MBA Essay Examples

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A soldier who served on the front lines in Afghanistan. A process engineer challenged by a long series of early failures. And a female consultant whose passion became healthcare.

Three MBA applicants to Harvard Business School last year. Three students in the newest crop of MBA students at Harvard this fall. All of them answered the question now being asked of 2017-2018 applicants to Harvard:  As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program?

The school provides minimal guidance for applicants trying to make an impression. “There is no word limit for this question,” advises HBS admissions. “We think you know what guidance we’re going to give here. Don’t over think, overcraft and overwrite. Just answer the question in clear language that those of us who don’t know your world can understand.”

Each of the three applicants above wrote a clear and compelling essay in their applications, essays that Poets&Quants is reprinting with permission from the MBA Essay Guide Summer 2017 Edition recently published by The Harbus , the MBA student newspaper at Harvard Business School. The guide contains 39 essays written by successful candidates who are now starting the MBA program at HBS. Proceeds from the sale of the guidebook go to benefit the non-profit foundation that supports The Harbus .

With application deadlines rapidly approaching at Harvard Business School and many other prestige MBA programs, these successful essays will, no doubt, give current candidates a bit of guidance. More importantly, the essays that follow are most likely to provide comfort, that there is no formula or singular way to craft a successful answer.

THREE SUCCESSFUL ESSAYS. THREE VERY DIFFERENT APPROACHES.

The latest edition of the MBA Essay Guide from The Harbus costs $61.49

In his 1,130-word essay, the U.S. Army applicant ties together his experiences of leading soldiers on the front line in Afghanistan together with staff postings in Army operations and logistics to paint a portrait of a dedicated and people-oriented leader.

Inspired by a selfless act from her nine-year-old mentee, this management consultant decided to challenge herself to make an impact in healthcare. In a 937-word essay, she uses a particularly difficult turnaround situation which she was put in charge of as exemplifying her strongest skills: building relationships and uniting people around a common goal.

In a 1,358-essay, a process engineer opens up to a long series of failures in his early life. By showing both vulnerability and honesty, he is able to transform this list of fruitless endeavors into a credible “badge of honor,” evidence of his resilience, determination and strength of character. It quickly becomes apparent that what appeared to be failures in the first half, actually proved to be successes or openings for new opportunities, given enough time and perseverance.

ONE APPLICANT DID 25 DRAFTS BEFORE COMING UP WITH ONE SHE LIKED ENOUGH TO SUBMIT

Behind every MBA application is a person and a story, and in this trio of representative essays the approaches taken by each candidate is as different as the essays they submitted to the admissions committee at HBS.

The engineer went through took eight drafts over two months. “I thought about what personal traits I wanted to share with the ADCOM and identified stories from my past that identified those traits,” he explains. “After two or three drafts, I’d figured out the right narrative and kept refining it, taking as much as a week to finalize each draft. My best advice is to be honest, start early, and have someone who knows what the ADCOMS are looking for to read through a couple of your drafts and give you pointers.”

The consultant estimates that she went through 25 drafts to get to her final version. “I think the most important thing with the essay is to iterate,” she advises. “Because the question is so open-ended, it is important to reflect as much as possible and give yourself the time (in my case two months) to go on the journey necessary to realize what you care most about communicating and how to do so in the most effective way. I also cannot overstate the importance of finding someone who will give you honest feedback.

(See on the following pages the complete and full MBA essays submitted to Harvard Business School)

Questions about this article? Email us or leave a comment below.

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How to Write a Powerful MBA Essay—With Examples

The MBA essay is critical to your business school application. Read our guide to writing the perfect MBA essay, with successful admit examples.

Posted July 4, 2024

Featuring Mike H.

5 Tips for MBA Applicants from Ex-Admissions Director @Stanford

Starting thursday, august 8.

11:00 PM UTC · 60 minutes

Table of Contents

What is the mba essay.

The MBA admissions essay.

Those words alone are enough to make most MBA candidates run screaming. Writing in general is hard enough. Writing about why you want an MBA? Your short-term goals and career aspirations? What matters to you most, and why? Forget it.

Of course, you still have to write these essays.

The MBA essay is perhaps the most important part of the business school application. Every other part of the application — your GPA, your test scores, your letters of recommendation — is quantified, cut and dried, or out of your control. The essay is your chance to show up as a fully realized MBA candidate, with hopes, dreams, and vulnerabilities. Admissions committees are not simply assessing your candidacy as a future leader — they're looking to admit human beings. That's where the MBA applicant essays come in.

That being the case, rather than being intimidated by it, treat the MBA essay writing process like the opportunity that it is — the chance for you to highlight your unique, iridescent self; the only moment in the MBA admissions process (prior to the interview) when you can speak directly to admissions officers; the time when you'll show them who you really are. It's not easy to write something that will do that, of course, but with the tips and tricks in this guide, and some help from one of Leland's vetted, world-class admissions coaches, we know you can do it. Give the essay the time, attention, and respect it deserves, and you'll be on your way to an offer of admission at your dream school.

Without further ado, let's dive in!

Ultimate MBA Essay Guide

See the MBA essay prompts, top tips from experts, and real examples from admits with this comprehensive guide.

How Long Will My MBA Essay Take?

First things first: let's talk about timing.

The MBA application is a behemoth; between exams, resumes, gathering your official transcripts, letters of recommendation, and the applications themselves, there's a lot to juggle. That being the case, we suggest you give yourself ample time to draft, write, and revise your essays. The last thing you want is to be rushed to the finish line.

So, give yourself at least three months to write your MBA admission essays. That should allow you enough time to draft, write, and edit. For more information on timing your entire business school application, click here for  A Comprehensive MBA Application Timeline--With Chart .

Now, on to the critical question:

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What Makes a Great MBA Essay?

At the highest level, the answer is the one that is truest to you. The whole point of an MBA application essay is to shine through as an authentic, vibrant human being, so the best essays are the ones that cut through the clutter, and allow you to do that.

Which begs the question — how do you cut through the clutter and shine through as a vibrant human being? Here are four critical tips to follow as you begin thinking about your essays.

1. Answer the Question

This one sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many applicants launch into their story, get carried away, and forget to answer the question. Follow the prompt, and answer the question the admissions committee has asked you. Those prompts can actually be very useful when writing MBA essays — it's a great deal harder to write when you have no guidance or guardrails. With these essays, you have a very specific question you need to answer. So answer it!

2. Be Specific

Another mistake some MBA applicants make is to stay at a high level in their essays, keeping their writing abstract and therefore inaccessible to the admissions committee. If at any point, an admissions officer could replace your name with the name of another applicant, then your essay isn't getting deep enough. It's not enough, for instance, to say that you suffered adversity in high school, or that you really, really want a Wharton MBA. You need to explain, in detail, the adversity you faced, and give concrete and unique reasons why you think Wharton is the right program for you. The best essays offer hyper-specific examples and anecdotes, with details and anecdotes that no other candidate could bring to the table. To get those anecdotes, we recommend using the STAR template, as explained below:

• Situation : What was the situation you were facing? Where were you? How old were you? If you were in a professional role during this anecdote, what was the role, and how long had you been in it? If you were volunteering, at what organization? How long had you been volunteering there? Why did you start? Offer all the relevant information that the admissions readers will need to understand your story.
• Task : What was the task at hand? What went wrong? In your professional role, what was the challenge you faced? In that volunteering experience, what were the hurdles you had to overcome? You can't have a good story without conflict or tension, so after you set up the anecdote, explain what that conflict or tension was (and remember, be specific!).
• Action : What was the action you took to resolve the problem? What did you have to do to fix that issue at work? How did you clear that hurdle in your volunteer experience? Again, be specific about how you came through on the other side of that conflict/tension — and while you're doing it, highlight your leadership capabilities as much as possible! Remember that top MBA programs are looking for future leaders who can assess a situation and decisively take action. (We'll say a bit more about this below, in the Personal Statement section.
• Result : What was the result of your action? If you were facing a growth problem at work, were you able to increase sales? If so, by what percentage? If you were advocating for diversity and inclusion at your local charity, what new programs did you implement to help with that effort, and what was the enrollment like in those new programs? Detail what happened in your anecdote with as much specificity as possible — and quantify, quantify, quantify!

If you want to learn more about how to master the STAR Method, read our article How to Nail “Tell Me About a Time…” Interview Questions .

3. Get Vulnerable

Most MBA admissions essay prompts are written with the goal of getting to know as much about you as possible in the shortest number of words. To do that, you're going to have to share real things from your life — to get personal, intimate, and vulnerable. Do not shy away from this. If you're starting to get emotional during the reflection, drafting, and writing process, good — that means you're on the right track. Keep going.

Pro tip: If it’s making you cry, it will make them cry.

Another good rule of thumb is to put something real and true on the table. Admissions officers have to read thousands of applications from thoroughly qualified individuals, some of whom might come from similar roles to yours, with letters of recommendation from equally impressive supervisors. In order to cut through that noise, you'll have to share something honest.

If you're doing it right, this can feel risky. At some point, you’ll likely think to yourself: “Can I say that?” The answer is: “Yes.” Of course, there is a line, you don’t want to be crass or offensive but always err on the side of being open and authentic.

The very worst thing you can do is be overly cautious and write something you think will please the admissions committee. These poor people have to read thousands of essays. If yours is just like everyone else’s, they’ll fall asleep. Don’t let that happen. Wake them up by putting yourself —your true, bright, vibrant, quirky self—on the page.

4. Don't Exaggerate

Finally, do not exaggerate, over-inflate, or lie. This goes without saying, but admissions committees are looking for honest candidates. The surest way to get rejected is to lie about something. (Business schools do a background check on you before you're properly admitted, so they will find out.) Don't be the person who over-inflates on their essays and then has their offer letter rescinded.

The Types of MBA Essays

All right — since we've covered high-level approaches to the MBA essays, it's time to dig into the various types.

There are three general categories of MBA essays you'll see across the board.

1. Personal Statement

These questions ask you to offer up something sincere about yourself. They'll often touch on such things as your values and your character. In these, you'll want to be as authentic as possible, while also highlighting attributes like leadership, intellectual vitality, and teamwork that business schools are looking for.

Here are a few examples of previous personal statement essays:

• As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program? (HBS)
• What matters most to you, and why? (Stanford GSB)

2. Why an MBA/Why This School

In these, schools first want to hear about how an MBA will fit into your career, both short and long term. Top MBA programs are looking for candidates who will: first of all, be gainfully employed upon graduating, second of all, have an illustrious career that will make their institution look good and encourage future generations of applicants to apply, and third, be consistent and generous donors. That being the case, they want to know about your career trajectory, and how an MBA will fit into it.

Pro tip: Here, you want to be ambitious and inspiring in laying out your future career, but not naïve. Walk the line between shooting for the stars and sounding dreamlike and uninformed.

In this set of questions, you'll also encounter questions geared at figuring out why you would want to attend a specific school. MBA programs want to know that you're serious about attending their school — yield, or the percentage of admitted candidates who accept their offers of admission, is an important metric for them — but they also want to envision how you'll contribute to their admitted class. What will you uniquely bring to the table, the things that you'll do that the other candidates wouldn’t be able to offer?

We've heard former deans of business schools say that, in choosing a class, they're curating a world-class dinner party, and that each person invited to the dinner party has to bring something different. What will you bring to the dinner party?

Another Pro tip: To demonstrate that you've done your research, and to help the admissions committee envision you in their program, indicate which classes you might take when earning your MBA and why, which professors you might hope to study with, and in which clubs you might participate.

Here are a few examples of "why MBA / why this school" essays we've seen before:

• How is a Columbia MBA going to help you? (Columbia)
• What do you hope to gain professionally from the Wharton MBA? (Wharton)
• Why Stanford? Describe your aspirations and how your Stanford GSB experience will help you realize them. (Stanford GSB)

3. Behavioral/Other

Finally, most other essays will be behavioral in the sense that they’ll ask you about experiences, traits, strengths, weaknesses, and achievements. There's a wide variety of topics here, but all the guidelines from above apply, with the final note to always prioritize authenticity (as mentioned in the Personal Statement section) and leadership ability (remember, business schools are choosing future leaders).

Here are a few examples of behavioral/other essays from the past:

• Describe the biggest commitment you have ever made. (Yale SOM)
• Tell us about your favorite book, movie, or song and why it resonates with you. (Columbia)
• Think about times you’ve created a positive impact, whether in professional, extracurricular, academic, or other settings. What was your impact? What made it significant to you or to others? (Stanford GSB)

Top MBA Program Essay Prompts (Updated 2024)

To help you get started, we've compiled the required prompts from a few top MBA programs below:

1. Harvard Business School (HBS)

• Business-Minded Essay: Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (300 words)
• Leadership-Focused Essay: What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (250 words)
• Growth-Oriented Essay: Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (250 words)

For more information, visit A Guide to the HBS Essay .

2. Stanford Graduate School of Business

• What matters to you most, and why? (650 words)
• Why Stanford? (400 words)

Read: What Matters Most When Writing the GSB Essays.

• How do you plan to use the Wharton MBA program to help you achieve your future professional goals? You might consider your past experience, short and long-term goals, and resources available at Wharton. (500 words)
• Taking into consideration your background – personal, professional, and/or academic – how do you plan to make specific, meaningful contributions to the Wharton community? (400 words)

For Wharton-specific advice, visit A Guide to the Wharton Essays .

4. Columbia Business School

• Essay 1: Through your resume and recommendation, we have a clear sense of your professional path to date. What are your career goals over the next three to five years and what, in your imagination, would be your long-term dream job? (500 words)
• Essay 2: The Phillips Pathway for Inclusive Leadership (PPIL) is a co-curricular program designed to provide students with the skills and strategies needed to develop as inclusive leaders. Through various resources and programming, students explore and reflect on the following five inclusive leadership skills: Mitigating Bias and Prejudice; Managing Intercultural Dialogue; Addressing Systemic Inequity; Understanding Identity and Perspective Taking; and Creating an Inclusive Environment. Describe a time or situation when you had the need to utilize one of these five skills, and tell us the actions you took and the outcome. (250 words)
• Essay 3: We believe Columbia Business School is a special place with a collaborative learning environment in which students feel a sense of belonging, agency, and partnership--academically, culturally, and professionally. How would you co-create your optimal MBA experience at CBS? Please be specific. (250 words)

If you’re looking for more tips on the CBS essays, read our Guide to the Columbia Business School Essays .

5. Chicago Booth

• How will a Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals? (250-word minimum)
• 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)

*Pro tip: Some essay questions such as these will say “no maximum.” While it’s certainly a good thing that you’re allowed to write more, keep in mind to never write too much. Our rule of thumb for things like this is to never go over 200 words past the “minimum” count.

Read more at A Guide to the Booth Essays .

6. Northwestern Kellogg

• Intentionality is a key aspect of what makes our graduates successful Kellogg leaders. Help us understand your journey by articulating your motivations for pursuing an MBA, the specific goals you aim to achieve, and why you believe now is the right moment. Moreover, share why you feel Kellogg is best suited to serve as a catalyst for your career aspirations and what you will contribute to our community of lifelong learners during your time here. (450 words)
• Kellogg leaders are primed to tackle challenges everywhere, from the boardroom to their neighborhoods. Describe a specific professional experience where you had to make a difficult decision. Reflecting on this experience, identify the values that guided your decision-making process and how it impacted your leadership style. (450 words)

For more on Kellogg’s essays, read How to Nail Your Kellogg MBA Application Essays .

7. MIT Sloan

MIT Sloan doesn’t use traditional essay prompts; instead, applicants are required to submit a cover letter, video, and short answer questions, as well as the other traditional application materials.

Cover Letter

MIT Sloan seeks students whose personal characteristics demonstrate that they will make the most of the incredible opportunities at MIT, both academic and non-academic. We are on a quest to find those whose presence will enhance the experience of other students. We seek thoughtful leaders with exceptional intellectual abilities and the drive and determination to put their stamp on the world. We welcome people who are independent, authentic, and fearlessly creative — true doers. We want people who can redefine solutions to conventional problems, and strive to preempt unconventional dilemmas with cutting-edge ideas. We demand integrity, respect, and passion.

Taking the above into consideration, please submit a cover letter seeking a place in the MIT Sloan MBA program. Your letter should conform to standard business correspondence, include one or more professional examples that illustrate why you meet the desired criteria above, and be addressed to the Admissions Committee (300 words or fewer, excluding address and salutation)

Video Question 1

Introduce yourself to your future classmates. Here’s your chance to put a face with a name, let your personality shine through, be conversational, be yourself. We can’t wait to meet you!

Videos should adhere to the following guidelines:

• No more than 1 minute (60 second) in length
• Single take (no editing)
• Speaking directly to the camera
• Do not include background music or subtitles

Note: While we ask you to introduce yourself to your future classmates in this video, the video will not be shared beyond the admissions committee and is for use in the application process only.

Video Question 2

All MBA applicants will be prompted to respond to a randomly generated, open-ended question. The question is designed to help us get to know you better; to see how you express yourself and to assess fit with the MIT Sloan culture. It does not require prior preparation.

Video Essay 2 is part of your required application materials and will appear as a page within the application, once the other parts of your application are completed. Applicants are given 5 seconds to prepare for a 60-second response.

Short Answer Question

How has the world you come from shaped who you are today? For example, your family, culture, community, all help to shape aspects of your life experiences and perspective. Please use this opportunity to share more about your background. (250 words)

For top-notch advice on the MIT Sloan question prompts, read our articles Expert Guide to the MIT Sloan Short Answer Question and MIT Sloan Video Statement: Overview, Advice, & Common Mistakes .

How to Start Writing Your MBA Essay

So you've read about the types of essays, and seen some of the prompts from top MBA programs. Now it's time to actually start diving into the essay.

The very first thing to do, before putting pen to paper, is to look inward .

Why do you want an MBA? What role will this degree play in your professional growth? How do you imagine it will shape your life? What do you want out of your career? What is the most important thing in the world to you?

Yes, these are life’s deep-end questions, but you’ll need to tackle them in these essays, so before you start all of your writing, take the time to think through them. Go for a run, swim some laps, bake a cake—however you get into the flow — and start a dialogue with yourself. Put down your work, turn your phone off, and give your mind permission to go to the places it usually avoids. That’s a good place to start. That’s where the answers are.

Pro tip: The first sentence is the hardest one to write. When you're starting out, it can be intimidating and anxiety-producing. The trick is to simply put anything down — and don't look back. Keep putting one sentence after the other. You can edit later: let whatever comes to you out onto the page. If you’re struggling with self-critique, dim your computer screen until you can’t even see the words you’re typing. Then keep going.

Additional Tips & Tricks

Once you've started your essay, it's a matter of persistence: keep writing, then keep drafting and editing until you have something you're really proud of.

To help you write a successful MBA essay, here are a few more tips and tricks:

Take Breaks

When you hit the wall — and you will hit the wall — stop and take a breather. This is your brain telling you it needs to do something else. Walk your dog. Take a lap around your room. Eat some cheese. Your body needs sleep every night to function; your mind is the same way. That next leap of inspiration will come exactly at the moment when you’re least expecting it.

Read it Out Loud

When you finally have a draft, print it and read it out loud to yourself. Your ear will catch things your eyes miss. Reading out loud is the best way to pick up on spelling errors, clunky transitions, and paragraphs that still need ironing out. It’s also a good way to envision how the admissions committee will experience your essay.

Don’t be precious with your essay. Send it to anyone willing to read it. Solicit as much feedback as you can. If you don’t like what people have to say, you don’t have to incorporate it, but you need an impartial third party to give notes on what they’re seeing, thinking, and feeling. (You’re too close to things to do it for yourself.) This is where a Leland coach comes very much in handy!

Complete Everything Early

This is more of a timing consideration, but you do not want to trip at the finish line because your internet went down the night before the deadline, or your credit card was denied when paying your application fee (it's happened before). Don't let that be you!

Here is another article to get you started, written by an expert essay coach: 7 MBA Essay Tips to Make You Stand Out in 2022 .

Example MBA Essays

Finally, here are two essays to help inspire you. The first, a personal statement essay, was submitted by an admit to Berkeley Haas' Executive MBA program; the second, a career goals / why MBA essay, was submitted by an admit to Chicago Booth's deferred MBA program.

Haas Admit:

A person’s identity is shaped by many different aspects, including family, culture, personal interests, and surrounding environments. Please share a facet of your identity or story that is essential to who you are. (300 words) My upbringing in India, filled with countless myths and legends, had a profound influence on me. The most formative tale was about a sage who prays for years to the goddess of knowledge, but in vain. In the end, the goddess didn’t appear for the sage because he was turning his prayer beads the wrong way! As a child, this story upset me: the sage worked so hard and had the right intentions. As an adult, though, I’ve come to realize that the goddess of knowledge was right: you can’t succeed unless you do things the right way.

Seven years ago, two friends and I started a company, XXXX: a digital health platform that would allow patients to store medical records online and consult doctors remotely. We had early success—we brought on 2,000 patients at XXXX, a gynecology clinic in XXXX—but ultimately we didn’t have the resources to properly scale, and had to shut the company down. Among the many lessons I learned, the most valuable was that ideas and hard work are common; businesses succeed or fail based on execution—on doing things the right way. Two years ago, I relearned this lesson in the most painful way possible: when my marriage ended. My wife and I loved each other, but we weren’t there for each other when it mattered most. Our feelings weren’t enough—we had to back them up with the right actions.

It’s disheartening when you have good intentions but still fall short. When this happens, though, you have to keep trying—because eventually you will do things the right way. I carry the story of the sage with me always, not as a harsh lesson, but as a motivating goal: one that keeps me striving towards doing things the right way.

Booth Admit:

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

I want to start a geothermal company that will help lead the energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy—by targeting existing oil wells as sites for geothermal plants. Oil fields are close to electric grids and have high nearby subsurface temperatures, making them ideal sites for geothermal plants. By building geothermal infrastructure nearby, my company will produce cleaner, cheaper energy, making it more profitable for operators to switch from oil to geothermal. As oil companies decommission their wells, I’ll negotiate for their land rights, so I can use their existing wells for new geothermal vents. I want my company to prove the case for economically viable, carbon-neutral energy production.

After getting an MBA, I want to start a geothermal company which will help me lead the energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. I plan to target developed oil fields in Texas, where, in many places, producing wells are flowing enough hot fluid to generate clean energy. Using this geothermal heat, the carbon footprint of oil and gas extraction will decrease as fewer fossil fuels are utilized to power surrounding infrastructure. As the wells approach their economic life, I will negotiate the lease from various operators, saving them millions in plug and abandonment costs, and retrofit the wells for direct geothermal energy production via closed-loop binary fluid systems, bringing emissions to zero. To accomplish this goal, I need to shore up my knowledge of energy economics and entrepreneurial finance, develop a strong sense of leadership, and build a network of like-minded individuals that will help me lead the transition and I believe I can get those things at Chicago Booth.

My immediate career goal is to develop my first co-production site in Shelby County, Texas at the Blanton well site, which produces abnormally heated fluid from the flanks of an active salt dome. Before investing in capital expenditures, developing a strong sense of energy economics and broader markets is necessary to verify financial feasibility. The University of Chicago, through the Graduate-Student-At-Large: Business program, is already allowing me to accomplish this goal with my enrollment in “Microeconomics” with Professor Andrew McClellan. His instruction helped me understand the impact taxes and subsidies have on market equilibrium, an important aspect of renewable energy as green energy tax incentives continue to change on a yearly basis. As my company continues to grow, having a strong finance and accounting foundation is imperative to building and sustaining a healthy company. Electives such as “Accounting for Entrepreneurship: From Start-Up through IPO” will provide the skills I need to be successful by following the life-cycle of a business that originates as a start-up and covers topics such as building an initial accounting infrastructure. I understand that the execution of the business is as important as developing the idea and proof of concept, and Booth is the best place for me to develop financial fluency.

Leading the energy transition will require a strong sense of leadership. Not only will I need to lead those I get to work with over my career, but to lead the energy transition, and reverse the impact fossil fuels have had thus far, I must have the emotional intelligence to inspire others to join me in my journey. The “Interpersonal Dynamics” course at Booth will allow me to develop my communication skills and better understand the emotions and perceptions of my colleagues. These skills, synthesized with leadership development acquired in “Leadership Practicum” will prepare me to act as a relational leader, who understands the needs of others. As a relational leader, I hope to foster an environment which promotes happiness and maximizes efficiency, not only to make our efforts in changing the world more successful, but to excite other people to join our cause.

To find the greatest chance of success in leading the energy transition, I will need a network of like-minded individuals who can provide a diversity of thought. Chicago Booth provides the opportunity to develop that network through different community experiences. The Energy Club’s “Energy Forward” conference, which designates time to topics in oil and gas and renewable energy will allow me to hear from industry leaders, build meaningful relationships with peers, and contribute my sector experience to the public forum as I learn from those around me. Opportunities through the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Group such as “SeedCon” will help me connect with successful entrepreneurs and early-stage investors whose ideas and funding might change the course of my venture’s trajectory. Even in the GSALB program, I have had the opportunity to connect with other students in various sectors, including the energy industry. I hope to continue to strengthen those connections and continue building new ones with matriculation into the full time program.

Connect with an Expert for all your MBA Essay Questions

We know that a lot goes into the process of MBA essay writing. Research, planning, and execution all are major stages that take a lot of time. If you’re looking to fast-track your essay writing process while still blowing away the admission committee, try looking at some of our all-star MBA admissions consultants . We have a wide array of experts ready to give you as much help with MBA essays as you need, just check out some of our top-rated coaches below!

FAQs for Writing Your MBA Essay

What is the most important aspect of an MBA essay that admissions committees are looking for?

• The most crucial aspect of an MBA essay is authenticity. Admissions committees want to see the real you, so be honest and genuine in your responses. Highlight your unique experiences, values, and aspirations to stand out.

How long should my MBA essay be?

• The length of your MBA essay will depend on the specific prompts and guidelines provided by each school. Generally, essays range from 500 to 1,000 words. Always adhere to the word limit specified in the prompt. In the event that there’s no limit, we recommend floating within 200-300 words of whatever posted word count there is.

Can I use the same essay for multiple MBA applications?

• You can use similar content, but it’s essential to edit each essay to be about the specific school and prompt. Schools are looking for personalized responses that demonstrate your understanding of their program and how it aligns with your goals.

How do I figure out what to write about?

• Select experiences that showcase your leadership, problem-solving skills, and personal growth. Focus on stories that highlight your unique qualities and align with the values and culture of the MBA program you're applying to.

What should I avoid doing in my essay?

• Avoid clichés, generic statements, and exaggerations. Be specific and detailed in your responses. Also, steer clear of overly technical jargon that might be hard for the admissions committee to understand unless it’s directly relevant to your story.

Who can I ask for feedback on my essay?

• Seeking feedback from trusted friends, family, or mentors can be very helpful. In addition, consider working with one of our admissions coaches who can provide professional insights and help refine your essay to make it more compelling.

What should I do if I don’t have a traditional business background?

• If you don’t have a traditional business background, focus on transferable skills and experiences that highlight your leadership, analytical abilities, and teamwork. Demonstrate how your unique perspective will contribute to the MBA program and your future career.

How do I handle multiple essay prompts for the same school?

• Approach each prompt separately and ensure that each essay provides new insights about you. Avoid repeating the same information across essays. Instead, use each essay to highlight different aspects of your experiences, skills, and aspirations.

Here are several other articles that you may find helpful as you put together your MBA application:

• The Most Frequently Asked Questions on MBA Applications
• How to Answer the "Why an MBA?" Essay Question
• My Top Piece of Advice for MBA Applicants
• How I Nailed My MBA Interview and Gained Admission to Top 10 Business Schools
• 4 Expert Tips on Paying for Business School

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7 Common MBA Essay Questions and How to Tackle Them

There are a handful of business school essay questions that seem to capture the heart and imagination of many an MBA program.

It seems that, across the board, admissions committees feel these queries offer the best insight into the minds of their applicants. You are likely to see a version of one or more of these common MBA essay questions on your b-school application . These tips will help you craft the perfect answer.

1. Describe your specific career aspirations and your reason for pursuing an MBA.

This may be the most important essay question you tackle. You must convince the admissions committee that you deserve one of their few, cherished spots. Reference your background, skills, and career aspirations, demonstrating how this degree is a bridge to the next step in your professional life. Be sure to speak to how this particular program will help you realize your potential.

It's okay to present modest goals. Deepening your expertise and broadening your perspective are solid reasons for pursuing this degree. If you aspire to lofty goals, like becoming a CEO or starting your own company, be careful to detail a sensible (read: realistic), pragmatic plan.

Read More: Find Your Business School

2. What are your principal interests outside of work or school? What leisure and/or community activities do you particularly enjoy?

There's more to b-school than the library. The best programs buzz with the energy of a student body that is talented and creative and bursting with personality. These students are not just about case studies and careers. Describe how you will be a unique addition to the business school community.

B-school is also a very social experience. Much of the work is done in groups. Weekends are full of social gatherings or immersion experiences, and the networking you do here will impact the rest of your career. Communicate that people, not just your job, are an important part of your life.

3. Who do you most admire?

The admissions committee wants to know the qualities, attributes and strengths you value in others and hope to embrace. Drive, discipline and vision are fine examples but try and look beyond these conventional characteristics. Tell a story and provide specific examples. If you choose someone famous (which is fine), remember that you risk being one of many in the pile. Instead, consider a current boss, business associate, or friend. Know that your choice of person is less important than what you say about him or her.

4. Describe a situation in which you led a team. What challenges did you face, and how did you overcome them?

The committee isn't looking to see how you saved the team through your heroic efforts (so put yourself on ego alert). They want to see how you helped foster an environment in which everyone contributes, illustrating that the sum is greater than its parts. B-schools like leaders, but they like leaders who can help everyone get along and arrive at a collaborative solution.

You should shift gears for this question. Almost the entire application process thus far has asked you to showcase "me-me-me." Now the focus of your story needs to be on the "we" and how you made the "we" happen.

5. Our business school is a diverse environment. How will your experiences contribute to this?

This essay gets at two concerns for the admissions committee: (1) how will you enrich the student body at this school and (2) what is your attitude toward others' diverse backgrounds?

Diversity comes in many shapes. If a grandparent or relative is an immigrant to this country, you can discuss the impact of his or her values on your life. Perhaps you are the first individual in your family to attend college or graduate school. Maybe you are involved in a meaningful or unusual extracurricular activity. Whatever you choose to write, it's vital that you discuss how it contributes to your unique perspective.

6. Describe a personal achievement that has had a significant impact on your life.

Don't pull your hair out just because you haven't founded a successful start-up or swum across the English Channel. Smaller accomplishments with a lot of personal significance are just fine if they demonstrate character, sacrifice, humility, dedication, or perseverance. A good essay describes how you reached a personal objective and what that meant to you. Maybe you didn't lead a sports team to a victory. Maybe the victory was that you made it onto the team .

Read More: 20 Must-Read MBA Essay Tips

7. Discuss a non-academic personal failure. What did you learn from the experience?

Many applicants make the mistake of answering this question with a failure that is really a positive. Or they never really answer the question, fearful that any admission of failure will throw their whole candidacy into jeopardy. Don't get crafty. You should answer with a genuine mistake that the committee will recognize as authentic.

Write about a failure that had some high stakes for you. Demonstrate what you learned from your mistake and how it helped you mature. This is a chance to show b-schools your ability to be honest, show accountability, and face your failures head-on.

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MBA Applications: How to Approach the "Weakness" Question

By QS Contributor

TopMBA.com looks at the "criticism-weakness-failure" questions often asked during MBA applications , and offers tips on how to answer them. 

The ‘criticism-weakness-failure’ essay is common in MBA admissions essays because it is a test of an applicant’s maturity, self-knowledge, honesty, and ability to learn from mistakes. It is, in other words, the biggest indicator of real leadership ability and potential.

Sample questions are:

Tuck 3. Discuss the most difficult constructive criticism or feedback you have received. How did you address it? What have you learned from it?

Wharton 3. Describe a failure that you have experienced. What role did you play, and what did you learn about yourself?

HBS 2. What have you learned from a mistake?

Columbia 3. Please provide an example of a team failure of which you’ve been a part. If given a second chance, what would you do differently?

Applicants to business school often struggle with these essays because they feel that admitting a weakness erodes their candidacy.

In fact, it does just the opposite. Successful leaders are able to admit their weaknesses to themselves and others, so they can work on them, or work around them.

MBA admissions: Being able to identify your weaknesses

No one is comfortable talking about their weak spots and failure. But nobody is perfect or has not failed, being able to admit your weaknesses, shows self-insight and points to seniority.

Stating that you have no weaknesses, just tells the admissions committee that you don’t know what they are yet or that you’re too immature to face up to them.

It says you don’t know yourself, therefore you don’t yet know where you will make mistakes and nor do you know how you can improve.

Take a tip from George Soros, self-made billionaire, philosopher, philanthropist, social reformer, and fund manager extraordinaire – famous for ‘breaking the Bank (of England)’ by shorting the pound sterling in 1992 – who shares this candid account of his weaknesses:

“I’m a very bad judge of character. I’m a good judge of stocks, and I have a reasonably good perspective on history. But I am, really, quite awful in judging character, and so I’ve made many mistakes.

"It took me five years and a lot of painful experiences to find the right management team. I am pleased that I finally found it, but I cannot claim to be as successful in picking a team as I have been in actually managing money.

"I think that I’m very good as a senior partner, or boss, because I have a lot of sympathy for the difficulties that fund managers face.

"When they are in trouble I can give them a lot of support, and that, I think, has contributed toward creating a good atmosphere in the firm. But I’m not so good at choosing them.” (Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve, 1995).

Even the greatest business leaders have weaknesses and they have also made significant mistakes in their careers and their lives.

And note his tone - Soros is candid, straightforward, and objective in his self-analysis. He shares measured self-insight with the reader.

He doesn’t try to slip in softening or deflecting phrases, or hide behind humour; nor is he self-excusing or whining and looking to blame others, the mark of a too-junior applicant.

The point is not to prove that you don’t fail, or won’t fail. It is to prove that you have the insight into yourself to be able to recognize and compensate for your weaknesses.

The admissions officers do not want to know how you avoided failure, but how you managed it, what you learned, what insights into yourself you gained, and how you grew from there.

They want to see that you have the will and the insight to locate and understand the source of your mess-up – the underlying weaknesses that caused it – and that you have the maturity to face and work on the issue. This is a significant test of your readiness for senior leadership.

This article was originally published in November 2012 . It was last updated in March 2021

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Tag: failure essay

Turn failure into a great b-school essay.

This post originally appeared on Stacy’s “Strictly Business” MBA Blog on U.S.News. It’s the dreaded failure topic: “Describe a situation taken from your personal or professional life where you failed.” MBA applicants often freak … →

Tuesday Tip: Make it a Good One

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1V0_MvRk8A[/youtube] It’s always nice to be promoted, appointed or acknowledged in some way.  But too often, I read essays from applicants who essentially restate their resumes without helping the reader understand all of the activity … →

Tuesday Tip: The Failure Essay

I decided to get personal this week.  Every day, I ask my clients to spill their guts and get very, very personal with me – that’s how we build the best applications.  It’s a privilege … →

Tuesday Tips – Columbia Business School January Program Essay Tips

Essay Tips for the Columbia GSB January program, which allows candidates to complete a full time MBA program in 16 month. →

Tuesday Tips – UVA MBA Essay Tips

UVA MBA’s admission essays for the class of 2011 are a departure from the themes of the last two years. Due to a relatively small set of questions and brief word limits, you will need … →

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February 14, 2024

The Resilience Factor: How Flaws and Failures Can Strengthen Your Application

A speaker recently told a story about traveling in Asia, where he saw a stunning emerald. Enchanted by the stone’s beauty, he decided to buy it on the spot.

He returned home and took the emerald to a jeweler for appraisal. The jeweler began examining the stone through his magnifier, and as he did so, his face went pale.

“What’s the matter?” asked the proud owner of the emerald.

“I can’t find a flaw,” said the jeweler.

“Wonderful!” said the stone’s owner.

“No, it’s not. If it’s flawless, it’s a fake. A phony. Nothing in the natural world is flawless,” replied the jeweler.

“Then find a flaw!”

After a few more tense moments, the jeweler discovered a small flaw, and the owner of the stone stopped worrying that he had been taken in by a piece of plastic masquerading as a gem.

What does this have to do with admissions? Just this: When the adcoms ask you to write about a flaw or weakness in your essays, and you either fail to offer any or the ones you come up with sound like you are just checking a box – mentioning something vague and generic and not of much significance – you will seem like a fake in their eyes.

Everything in nature has an imperfection or two (or three), including human beings. Don’t misunderstand: we’re not suggesting that you cop to every weakness you know that you have and say, “This is me. Take it or leave it.”

But if you have learned and grown from your weaknesses or succeeded in overcoming obstacles , you are well positioned to flip those shortcomings into strengths in your essays. It takes honest self-reflection, a desire to improve, and hard work to break an unhealthy habit, pattern, or way of thinking. The ability to demonstrate self-awareness by working to minimize your flaws and develop new skills or talents to compensate for weaknesses will prove your maturity while also building your resilience. These are qualities that adcoms especially want to see these days. 

How can failures and flaws really build resilience? 

Recently, we worked with a client who was applying to MBA programs and had once made the type of mistake that could have not only gotten him fired but also destroyed a lucrative business relationship between his employer and a major customer. 

Here’s the story: “Sami” was working in an analytics department and played a role in the incorrect interpretation of some key data. This incorrect reading led his employer to recommend a business strategy to the firm’s customer that was the exact opposite of what it should have been. What a disaster! Sami didn’t discover this catastrophic error until after the new strategy had been implemented. 

He could have watched from afar as the strategy failed and things fell apart. Instead, he came clean and waited for the blowback. Sami expected the worst and nearly began clearing out his desk.  

Instead, he was rewarded for his integrity, despite the risk to his reputation. Not only did he keep his job, but the relationship between his employer and the firm’s customer actually flourished. This experience clearly positioned Sami to write about a “failure” and the lessons he learned about owning up to one’s mistakes and accepting responsibility. He didn’t look smaller because of his mistake – his stature grew because of his honesty.  

“Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”

Essay questions that ask you to discuss failure, risk, mistakes, conflict, difficult interactions, or overcoming obstacles often make applicants cringe. After all, you’re on a mission to show the admissions committee that you are on top of your game and ready to conquer the world. The last thing you want to do is wave a flag that calls attention to the gory details of when and where you’ve fallen short. 

As Sami’s experience proves, however, questions about failure provide a window into your character. How resilient are you in the face of a setback? How did you respond to the situation? Did you shrink from the impact of your actions, or did you muster the courage to try to set things right, as best as you could, under the circumstances? What did you learn about yourself, about the world of business, about relationships, and/or about communication? What wisdom did you gain that you have applied in your life since then? Can you show convincingly that you view your stumble as an inevitable, vital, even transformative step on the road to achievement?

Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden once said, “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.” So take heart: writing about your flaws and setbacks is an opportunity for you to shine by showing your humility, commitment to growth, and determination to apply lessons learned. Reading about your setbacks allows the admissions committee to understand what you’re really made of. 

Follow these four steps to transform your setbacks into achievements.

1. demonstrate how your failure led to success..

The mistake you made might have led you to discover a new idea, strategy, or invention that you otherwise would not have discovered. Or, it might have given you the determination to strengthen your skills or knowledge base. Be specific when you present your examples. A mistake you made in the lab might have cost you weeks of work. However, as a result, you learned something important about lab techniques, and now you’ve adopted more fastidious research practices. (Note: this needs to go way beyond the normal trial-and-error nature of research.) If you are discussing a personal failure, maybe you neglected an important relationship to the point where the relationship died. Feeling this loss keenly, you now make a point of treating people with greater respect. When writing about professional or personal failures and lessons learned, you cannot simply claim that you’ve changed without citing evidence. Clearly spell out what you learned and how you have changed. Offer true, believable examples of times when you behaved differently, more purposefully and sensitively, as a way of investing more deeply and wisely in your relationships.

2. Show that you truly understand why something went wrong.

Explaining what went wrong is only half the game in these essays. You must also explain why it went wrong. Doing so will show the adcom that you have taken time to really think about and reflect on your role in the situation and your understanding of the dynamics that led to the problem. Don’t play the blame game. Explain the process you went through to get real answers and solutions. Relate some of the steps you have taken to avoid making similar mistakes since. Perhaps you caught yourself about to repeat the mistake, but realized that impulse was not the “new you” and saved yourself from making the error again. Let’s look at an example. You pushed your colleagues hard to complete a work project, but your hard-driving nature made them resent you, and with no benefit to the project. Having realized your mistake – even though your sole intention was to get the job done on time – perhaps you could write about the focused attention you now pay to your colleagues’ suggestions, efforts, and capabilities. In other words, from that error you have learned to turn lemons into lemonade. Offer at least one specific example of how your efforts have paid off.

3. Focus on what you’ve learned on a personal level.

Mature applicants view and consider situations and people differently – and make decisions more deliberately – after making mistakes. Prove that you are this kind of applicant. Show how you grew by, for example, taking a course in time management to help better juggle all your responsibilities without dropping the ball, starting therapy to help with your anxiety when work pressure feels overwhelming, or another tangible step forward. Add power to your explanations by describing “before and after” situations: the “before” stressed-out, not-well-organized person staying up till 3 a.m. to get everything done and delivering haphazard work, and the “after” person practicing time-management and mindfulness skills, and coping with responsibilities more calmly, deliberately, and competently. Demonstrating these changes through real-life examples presents you as more grown-up and emotionally intelligent. And you can bet the admissions committee wants to see these valuable traits.

4. Show the adcom how you’ve become more resilient.

“Resilience” has become a cliche, but it’s critical to appreciate the concept: it is the building of inner strength and fortitude in the face of conflict, pain, or disappointment. Successful adults must be resilient to cope with life’s rocky patches. Naturally, colleges and universities want to see evidence that you have this important quality. 

Earlier in this article, we said that a weakness or failure could be flipped into a strength, given the right attitude and effort. Similarly, a weakness can also be the flip side of a strength. For example, perhaps your tendency to be “too detail oriented” resulted in your discovering a critical error before it triggered a larger problem. Identifying your weakness and giving it careful thought might have prompted you to take steps to correct or minimize it.

Be thoughtful in your responses to questions about weakness or failure, and don’t shy away from them. Successful leaders must have honesty and integrity as part of their DNA and be able to identify and admit to failures and weaknesses. As motivational speaker Zig Ziglar pointed out, “It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.” 

Nobody’s perfect, but a “perfect” answer to questions about flaws and failures just might get you admitted! To make sure your essays reflect you at your best, work with us . Every consultant at Accepted has years of experience in admissions and guiding applicants to gain coveted acceptances at top schools worldwide. Let them do the same for you!

By Judy Gruen, a former Accepted admissions consultant. Judy holds a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University and is the co-author of Accepted’s first full-length book, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Acceptance at Top Business Schools . Want an admissions expert to help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch!

Related Resources:

• From Example to Exemplary: How to Use Sample Essays to Make Your Essay Outstanding! , a free guide
• Three Ways Writing About Obstacles Strengthens Your Application Essays , a short video
• Strategy for Writing an Accomplishment Essay (with examples)

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ISB Essay 2024-25 Analysis (with examples)

The change in the ISB essays underscores the school’s commitment to encouraging deep self-reflection by applicants before they apply. ISB is clearly striving for a more interactive and dynamic assessment process, which is a commendable and progressive step forward.

Let us now dive into a comprehensive analysis of each question and explore a holistic approach to brainstorming and effectively addressing these essays.

Essay 1. Provide an honest portrayal of yourself, emphasizing your strengths and weaknesses. Highlight the key elements that have shaped your personal journey. Give relevant illustrations as needed. (400 words)

The striking resemblance in wording between this question and the first prompt of INSEAD’s motivational essay is hard to overlook. Give a candid description of yourself (who are you as a person), stressing the personal characteristics you feel to be your strengths and weaknesses, and the main factors which have influenced your personal development, giving examples when necessary.”

This is proof that ISB is looking for profound thinkers and seeking to bring forth a dimension in applications that goes beyond a mere recitation of professional achievements. ISB has placed significant importance on the development of one’s character and attitude, considering these qualities to be central requirements.

In essence, this essay is a portal to your life story, offering the admissions committee a glimpse into the person behind the academic credentials, test scores, and resumes. It provides a valuable opportunity to gain a deep understanding of your distinctive identity and the influences that have contributed to your personal development, aspirations, and passions.

Beyond that, the essay revolves around the concept of “self-awareness,” a quality that plays a crucial role in personal development. Individuals who lack self-awareness often struggle to progress and adjust, resulting in a state of stagnation. Conversely, those who possess self-awareness are regarded as authentic, empathetic, and receptive to learning, earning them respect and fostering likability.

Your response should revolve around your values and how they have influenced your character, encompassing both strengths and weaknesses. Sources of value formation may include childhood experiences, moments of triumph, events that reinforced certain values, or the guidance of mentors and role models.

When you talk about your weaknesses, it is important to exercise caution. Choose a weakness that you are aware of and are actively working to improve. Avoid highlighting weaknesses in communication or cross-cultural understanding, as these skills are critical in a global business school environment. Instead, focus on specific areas where you may have had limited opportunities or challenges due to your socioeconomic background. A weakness you address should be something you can overcome. Also, emphasize the personal qualities you consider strengths and weaknesses, and provide insight into the key factors that have influenced your personal development. Show how you are actively addressing the weakness or have already made significant progress in overcoming it. Finally, read and understand the question carefully to provide a good answer.

Here is my own example of a compelling story about a weakness:

In my pursuit of perfectionism, I often develop anxiety stemming from the fear that I may not succeed. In such cases, I have found that I can become impatient with my team or friends. In the past, I have regrettably experienced a situation where I was overly harsh with a team member who I felt was not doing his best to meet a critical project’s timeline. This not only negatively impacted our professional relationship, but also caused discomfort within the team. When my mentor in my US team, who understood my ambitious nature, recognized the discomfort within the team and how it was affecting me, he gave me invaluable advice and taught me the life lesson of prudence and forbearance. Overcoming this weakness was a transformative experience for me as a team leader. I now make a conscious effort to respect each team member’s inner clock for self-realization and understand their unique pace of growth.

Every individual’s story is unique, and schools want to know what you have to say about your own experiences. This personal narrative essay is an opportunity to breathe life into a one-dimensional file and offer the B Schools a more personal and vivid picture.

Essay 2. Contemplate two distinct situations—one where you experienced success and another where you faced failure. Delve into the personal and interpersonal lessons you learned from these instances.

(400 words max).

Stories are often hidden in the everyday challenges of life, and real knowledge comes from exposure to different experiences.

ISB’s Essay 2 presents a fascinating shift, urging applicants to

• Reflect on themselves
• Meaningfully discuss about their own experiences- successes and failures in various situations

This highlights ISB’s desire for interactive and collaborative individuals with real-world exposure and the ability to tackle management problems head-on. When the admissions team reviews your application, they will assess whether you can actively contribute to the class discussions and case study method.

We encourage you to draw meaningful insights from both professional and personal experiences as this essay also revolves around the theme of “self-awareness.”

Some applicants measure success through their professional accomplishments, while others find triumph in overcoming personal challenges. Remember, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Articulate why certain values and specific accomplishments matter to you. Describe the obstacles you faced and the transformative journey that led to your success.

When discussing failures, recall moments when you confronted adversity head-on. Failure can be a catalyst for self-reflection, revealing hidden circumstances or information that you overlooked or group dynamics that you did not understand at the time.

A tall order for 400 words, but most importantly address your interpersonal relationships during and after these incidents. Show what you’ve learned and how you’ll apply these insights during your ISB journey and after. Embrace the opportunity to showcase your self-awareness, growth, and resilience.

Here’s a winning personal failure story from me as an example:

 One failure I recently experienced was missing the deadline for an important project to bring metro rail tires to market. The project team I led moved from the France office to the India office, and an experienced product designer handed over responsibility to an inexperienced colleague. As a project manager, I did not realize the impact of this geographic change on our tight launch schedule. In my haste, I rushed my team members and inadvertently overlooked critical risk factors in our product quality checklist. We proceeded to deliver the design for production according to the original schedule and naively assumed success.

Unfortunately, the quality team soon discovered the tests we had overlooked. Several tires had already been produced but were deemed unsaleable, resulting in significant losses. It took us several additional days to rectify the situation and perform the required quality testing before the product design could resume production. While my team was understanding of my oversight, I felt deeply embarrassed. This setback was a wake-up call for me to be more realistic and vocal about project deadlines and to exercise caution when assessing risks at every step. I consciously employed strategies to improve my attention to detail, such as taking meticulous notes, using comprehensive checklists, and diligently following up when needed. Although I learned this lesson the hard way, it has undeniably made me a more diligent and organized manager.

Essay 3 (optional) Given your previous experience and future aspirations, how do you plan to use the PGP at ISB to fulfil your professional goals?

Note: it is not necessary for you to write this essay. please use this space only if there is something really significant that you would like us to know.(250 words max).

ISB’s decision to make the foals essay optional adds an interesting twist to the application process. However, a solid MBA/PGP application is not just about showcasing your past accomplishments, but also about painting a vivid picture of your vision for your future.

I strongly recommend that you seize this opportunity to write this essay with enthusiasm, because failing to articulate your expectations for a fast-paced, rigorous, and very intense one-year ISB PGP program could come across as lackluster and lacking a motive.

When answering this question, it is important to focus on your desired industry, function, and post-PGP geography, keeping in mind the limited space available. Avoid general statements that may cause disinterest from the admissions committee. Instead, captivate them with well-researched details and a firm commitment to your career goals.

Even if the ISB doesn’t ask for an in-depth essay about your goals, make no mistake: you need to be prepared for a comprehensive interview with alumni. Expect a comprehensive assessment of your profile that includes your resume, work experience, volunteerism, extracurricular activities, and most importantly, your motivation. The interplay of these components will determine the viability of your intended goal strategy. To convincingly showcase your skills and sway the admissions committee in your favor, it is critical to skillfully organize your entire PGP application and skillfully integrate these factors to support your target plans.

By carefully tailoring your application materials (essays and resume/professional experience section) to your goals, you can unleash a flood of compelling reasons why ISB is the perfect launching pad for your career.

Want to get personal feedback on your profile. Speak with us today!

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IMD MBA Failure Essay - Tips and Sample Essay

Describe a situation in which you failed as a leader. What did you learn from it? (Word limit 300)

Because IMD is primarily a leadership development program, as Sean Meehan mentions, they want to know you are ready for what they deliver.

Regarding the failure part, they want to know you have enough self-awareness to observe where you might have failed, which makes you coachable and more receptive to change. Regarding the leader part, they want to know you have worked at a high enough level to benefit from a leadership program. If you haven’t worked in a leadership capacity in some form, you won’t have a frame of reference and there isn’t much for their curriculum and experiential exercises to “hang on.”

Don’t hesitate to be forthright and vulnerable in this essay. Always remember that avoiding speaking about a failure doesn’t fool them into thinking you are perfect it just means you are unwilling to be honest about it. Transparency about the failure creates a bond with the admissions committee, where they see you as a real person and root for you.

"The company owner at XXXXX wanted to continuously add projects, even though several project managers had quit the company. I was already in charge of two projects when my CEO assigned me two more. He presented them as simple and straightforward, which was far from reality upon further investigation.

Reflecting back, I was in a codependent relationship with my boss, enabling his motivation to make more money even though we could not handle more work. I was raised in a home where I had to be perfect and so I forced myself to create the impression everything was fine. This made me feel weak and depressed on the inside. But I was more afraid that rejecting his proposals would anger him and he would give me a bad recommendation.

Clients pressured me for updates, but I was skipping operational meetings, making me out of the loop with my projects and employees. I felt guilty for letting things slip and was scared of being exposed. Even with this burden I could not bring myself to confront him, explain my position, and ask for help. After discovering the new projects were fraught with problems, maybe I could have provided my boss with convincing justifications to refuse the additional work.

After 8 months of this, it became clear that I had to find a new job because I would most certainly fail; the situation was impossible. Since then, I always give myself time to assess things before committing to a deadline or a project. I have replaced “yes” with “I will see and get back to you.”

I learned that keeping quiet is not the best way to preserve relationships and had I confronted him, maybe I would have received some relief instead of having to quit to find that relief."

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