ESSAYS are a key piece of every MBA application. They are the “tie-breaker” between excellent candidates.

Business school is mostly a logical, quantitative, rational kind of place. So you’d think that MBA admissions would be a logical, quantitative, rational kind of process — but you’d be wrong.

What really happens is that schools ask applicants to write between three and seven open-ended personal essays on their life, achievements, goals, motivations, failures and so on. These essays absorb an inordinate amount of admissions staff time in assessment and deliberations and introduce a large dose of subjectiv- ity into the applications process. To understand what’s going on, put yourself in the shoes of the admissions committee whose holy grail is to select the best applicants and balance the skills, aptitudes, backgrounds and experience of the incoming class.

Any decent school can take half the applications it receives and throw them in the bin. That’s the easy part. The challenge is what to do with the top half — that is how to distinguish between the quality candidates that remain.

The truly difficult thing is to distinguish between excellent candidates and super-excellent candidates when they know little about the people. Through the essays, the truly compelling candidates make themselves known.

Another reason the essays are important is that they balance the academic bias of the admissions process. It is a way for business schools to give candidates a chance to showcase their leadership potential.

The third key reason is that they test the candidate’s ability to communicate ideas and, in particular, to communicate them in English if he or she is a non-native speaker.

One of the tests of a good essay is the extent to which it adds value to your application, providing stories, insights and perspectives that turn you from a data set into a three- dimensional human being with values, passion and interesting qualities. You achieve this by selecting and sharing personal events and stories, and analysing and reflecting on them in an honest way, so they understand what you stand for, are interested in or are motivated to do and why.


Precis from MBA Admissions Strategy, by A. V. Gordon (£13.99).