This will be a four part series of blog posts on the essays and rest of the application for admission to the Harvard Business School Class of 2028:
-This post focuses on overall strategy. It will provide the basis for thinking about what HBS wants to know about you and why. It will discuss the the three main essays and goals statement. The objective is to give the reader the big picture and on helping you brainstorm and develop your content.
-The second post focuses on the application form questions. It will focus on helping you brainstorm and develop your content.
-The third post focuses on the reapplication essay.
-The forth post is on the joint degree application essays.
My three-part HBS interview prep series starts here.
My comprehensive service clients have been admitted to HBS for the Classes of 2027, 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, and 2009. My clients' results and testimonials can be found here. In addition to providing comprehensive application consulting on HBS, I regularly help additional candidates with HBS interview preparation. Since I started my own counseling service in 2007 (worked with many admits from 2001-2007 when I worked for a company), I have worked with 100 successful applicants from Canada, Europe, India, the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, other parts of Asia, and the United States on HBS application. I think that this range of experience has helped me understand the many possible ways of making an effective application to HBS. l I can tell you is that HBS takes a truly diverse range of people. Some had high GPAs and a great GMAT or GRE scores, others had GPAs and scores well below the 80% range for HBS, but what they all had in common were strong personal and professional backgrounds that came out in their essays.
The History of the HBS Essay in the 21st Century
SKIP TO PART 2 IF YOU ARE NOT THAT MUCH INTO HISTORY BUT YOU SHOULD PROBABLY READ THE PART ABOUT READING HARBUS ESSAY COLLECTIONS. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND GETTING THE Harbus HBS Essay + Interview Guide (2025 Edition) AS IT CONTAINS CLASS OF 2027 ESSAYS. USE ADAM10 to get 10% off the guide, you can purchase it here.
I have been an admissions consultant since 2001 and started doing in-depth analysis of HBS application essays on my blog since 2007 when I started my own business. That 2007 post was done at a time when HBS asked multiple questions and not a single major question. From the time I started in 2001 until 2013 (HBS Class of 2016), HBS had always asked multiple specific questions requiring word limited answers.
In 2007 (Class of 2009), the prompts were:
1. What are your three most substantial accomplishments and why do you view them as such? (600-word limit)
2. What have you learned from a mistake? (400-word limit)
3. Please respond to three of the following (400-word limit each):
a. Discuss a defining experience in your leadership development. How did this experience highlight your strengths and weaknesses?
b. How have you experienced culture shock?
c. What would you like the MBA Admissions Board to know about your undergraduate academic experience?
d. What is your career vision and why is this choice meaningful to you?
e. What global issue is most important to you and why?
f. What else would you like the MBA Admissions Board to understand about you?
TOTAL WORD COUNT: 2200 words
By 2012 (Class of 2015) and the last time they had such short-answer fixed questions before this year, the questions were:
Tell us about something you did well. (400 words)
Tell us about something you wish you had done better. (400 words)
Introduced 500 character goals statement that admissions cycle. This is the only part of the "essay" content that has not changed in a meaningful way since the Class of 2015 essay.
This fixed prompt short-answer approach changed in 2013, when HBS switched to the open-ended format question that they used for entry to the Classes of 2016-2026. While the question and its length was modified during that time, HBS had created a rather open-ended prompt. For the Class of 2016, the question was You’re applying to Harvard Business School. We can see your resume, school transcripts, extra-curricular activities, awards, post-MBA career goals, test scores and what your recommenders have to say about you. What else would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy? No word limit. For the Class of 2026, the question had become: 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? 900 words maximum.
What does the above tell us? HBS has a history of changing its questions from specific prompts to a general question open-ended question and also changes the length they want to see from applicants.
The biggest change in the essay set prior to June 2024 occurred under admissions director Dee Leopold in 2012, who had been in her position for many years. The current change is taking place under a new admissions director, Rupal Gadhia (HBS, Class of 2004), who started her role as Managing Director, Admissions and Financial Aid, in October 2023. However the first version of the new HBS questions had already been tested in the 2+2 deferred MBA program and were released in December 2023, so we should not necessarily think that having a new MD has a direct connection to this change. 2+2 Applicants had to write on 2 out of the following 3 topics with a maximum of 300 words:
- How have your experiences shaped who you are, how you lead, and how you will contribute at HBS?
- What intellectual experiences have influenced your approach to learning and have led you to pursue an MBA?
- What communities have you been engaged with that have defined how you invest in others?
We can conclude that HBS was happy with the change they made from 900 words to fixed prompts for the 2+2 program. Usually HBS would release essays in May (For example in 2023, it was announced on the Director's Blog on May 18, 2023 that there would be no change to the essay, but this year they did not release the questions until June 25th. My assumption is that they wanted to fully analyze the 2+2 essay responses, modify further, and then get organizational alignment on them. Given the massive change, this makes sense. Hence the result of that process are the Class of 2027 questions:
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. (up to 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? (up to 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. (up to 250 words)
The first two questions have been further modified for the Class of 2028:
Business-Minded Essay:
Please reflect on how your choices have influenced your career path and aspirations. (300 words)
Leadership-Focused Essay:
What experiences have shaped how you invest in others and how you lead? (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)
What is clear from both changes to the Business-Minded and Leadership-Focused questions is that they have been simplified and have less structure around what is expected to be answered. Frankly I think these two questions are now easier to answer and less daunting to communicate in the limited word count that is available.
Conclusion: HBS has a history of changing its essay questions. While no major change in the prompt had occurred between the Class of 2016 and Class of 2026, it is not out of character for HBS to change its essays.
Old Successful HBS Essays:
If you are trying to understand the diverse range of essays that gets someone admitted to HBS, I do recommend getting your hands on Harbus HBS Essay + Interview Guide (2025 Edition) AS IT CONTAINS CLASS OF 2027 ESSAYS. USE ADAM10 to get 10% off the guide, you can purchase it here.. I do highly recommend reading this book because it will give you a really good idea about the range of possible answers and dispel any myths about needing to submit something that is professionally written. While you will be dealing with different questions, you will encounter many different stories within these essays that will help you understand what has appealed to the HBS admissions office.
I would also recommend the old that contained HBS admits essays to the kind of fixed prompt questions asked prior to the Class of 2016. That collection is still a good read for understanding how to put together an MBA essay though the specific questions are no longer being asked by HBS. This will give you an idea of how one might properly address a fixed prompt question with very limited word count, which now again applies to HBS essays. In a real sense these short essays are good guides to telling stories in as few words as possible, which is especially useful for the new HBS questions.
Part 2: Understand the value of fixed versus open-ended essay questions
Changes in essays reflect the way in which an admissions committee wants to evaluate applicants. Open-ended questions (Example: Tell us something about you not covered in the rest of the application) have the advantage of maximizing the range of answers and giving applicants the chance to provide extremely unique answers. In so doing, admissions offices maximize the possibility of recognizing a truly unique applicant. Open-ended questions, especially those with generous word count make it possible for an applicant to really tell their story in great detail. This advantage is also a disadvantage because open-ended responses can generate a vast number of answers that don't relate to the criteria that a particular admissions office may care about. In other words for every super unique applicant that you might find through such a process, you might end up dealing with a large amount of useless responses. Now it can be said that open-ended responses also would seemingly have the advantage of being less likely to be gamed, but honestly consultants like me can help an applicant game any question. And there are a lot of us. Any question can be gamed if you understand what possible range of answers will please the asker.
Open-ended prompts favor those who can write in an extended manner and are generally speaking better writers (or receiving better advice). They tend to require someone to build a very specific structure and then populate it with appropriate stories designed to fit what the school is looking for. So while this can sound creative, let me tell you, as someone who has helped many clients put their HBS essays together that got interviews and also does interview prep only for many HBS invitees, these open-ended prompt essay structures can become formulaic. One such common structure:
- Discuss something about past.
- Identify value or meaning from past event.
- Apply that value or meaning to something more recent.
- Repeat 2-3 more times
- Add an intro and conclusion.
So, frankly it would not surprise me if the admissions team at HBS got tired of applicants using these kind of structures. They admitted applicants using this structure all the time, but after a while reading the Xth essay about how a transformative childhood incident enabled this applicant to successfully assist their company's Go-To-Market strategy, they might have gotten tired. I know I did and I don't read nearly as many essays as they do.
Fixed prompts like the three short essay (300, 250, and 250 words) questions HBS is now asking don't require building a huge structure. They require building very specific ones. It can become a bit of an essay contest when the prompts are open-ended, after all, you are comparing things that may very well be unlike each other. With fixed prompts, you can compare like things. And if you connect your fixed prompts directly to your admissions criteria, as HBS is now doing (see below), it becomes even easier.
Imagine you are an admissions officer, what is easier to evaluate a short answer to a fixed question or a long answer to an open-ended one? The answer is obvious. Comparing relatively like things is always easier. And kids, not to destroy any myths you have about the ivory tower, but an admissions office is an application and applicant evaluation factory. The more standardization, the easier it is to make the sausage (In the case invite for an interview, defer (HBS R1) or ding an applicant). Imagine you are an MBA admissions office faced with an increase in applications (HBS and the rest experienced this in R2 for 2024 entry and can assume that will be true for 2025 entry), so your costs are going up (you need more admissions readers) but finding great staff is a problem. What to do? Make the time required for reviewing an application more efficient. What takes the least time? Short fixed question responses. This is just conjecture on my part. I have no inside information on this but I have enough of an organizational imagination and sufficient years in the admissions industry to draw my own conclusions.
At this point, I should mention something about AI (ChatGPT and company), as some will no doubt conclude that maybe HBS is reacting to AI by changing its prompt. I doubt it but if that was the case, I think it would be an error to change questions on that basis. I don't think it matters whether the question involves a fixed prompt or an open-ended one because AI will initially generate a coherent answer to any prompt. One can certainly use AI to provide a structured response to any question of any kind. An applicant can then rewrite the AI response to make it personal and get human feedback on it to make sure it actually answers the question effectively. The result may be sufficient for admission. Lazy morons will no doubt have an AI generate a response and just use the output without considering whether it is actually effective or not. In this sense, an AI initial answer will functionally the same as any first draft: The basis for something great, something just OK, or garbage. We will discuss the potential value of using ChatGPT and its friends as a tool for brainstorming answers but that will be in the second post in this series.
While some may mourn the passing of the open-ended HBS essay question, I don't. Simple reason: I AM HAPPY TO KNOW WHAT HBS IS LOOKING FOR AND I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO GUESS ABOUT IT. For any analyst of anything, whatever ego boast when can get from correctly guessing in a situation of ambiguity, it is much better to actually know something. We don't have to guess what HBS is looking for! So thank you HBS for being direct and helping applicants understand what you really care about! So what do they care about? Let's use these three new essay prompts plus the goals statement to figure that out.
Fortunately for us these three essays align directly with their admissions criteria as stated on "Who Are We Looking For?" I will quote this at length.
"While it’s important to us that our students' perspectives vary, they all share three characteristics. Our students are: business-minded, leadership-focused, and growth-oriented.
Business-Minded
We are looking for individuals who are passionate about using business as a force for good – who strive to improve and transform companies, industries, and the world. We are seeking those who are eager to solve today’s biggest problems and shape the future through creative and integrated thinking. Being business-minded is about the interest to help organizations succeed, whether in the private, public, or non-profit sector. This business inclination can be found in individuals with a variety of professional and educational experiences, not just those who come from traditional business backgrounds.
In Your Application: We will look for evidence of your interpersonal skills, quantitative abilities, and the ways in which you plan to create impact through business in the future.
Leadership-Focused
We are looking for individuals who aspire to lead others toward making a difference in the world, and those who recognize that to build and sustain successful organizations, they must develop and nurture diverse teams. Leadership takes many forms in many contexts – you do not have to have a formal leadership role to make a difference. We deliberately create a class that includes different kinds of leaders, from the front-line manager to the startup founder to the behind-the-scenes thought leader.
In Your Application: Your leadership impact may be most evident in extracurriculars, community initiatives, or your professional work.
Growth-Oriented
We are looking for individuals who desire to broaden their perspectives through creative problem solving, active listening, and lively discussion. At HBS you will be surrounded by future leaders from around the world who will make you think more expansively about what impact you might have. Our case and field-based learning methods depend on the active participation of curious students who are excited to listen and learn from faculty and classmates, as well as contribute their own ideas and perspectives.
In Your Application: We will look for the ways in which you have grown, developed, and how you engage with the world around you."
As you will see each of three essays relates directly to one of these characteristics. Other parts of your application will also relate to these criteria, which I will discuss in subsequent posts.
WHAT MAKES YOU STAND OUT?
The discussion that follows is for the purpose of building essays that will really showcase what makes you stand out as an applicant. Everyone has their own unique life story and the point is to get your reader interested in your story. When I am working with an applicant, especially in the initial stages of writing I am focused on this question because I know that great applications are based on great self-marketing campaigns and the heart of such campaigns is applicant differentiation. Good differentiation will be based on good stories. Think about about the hard and interesting moments in life. What has challenged you in your life? How have you suffered and grown stronger? What has made you rethink your decisions or view or career? Why do excel at what you do? Who or what motivates you? These are just some of the questions you need to consider.
Part Three: The Business-Minded Essay: Be Motivated & Impactful
The "Business-Minded Essay: Please reflect on how your choices have influenced your career path and aspirations. (300 words)." As HBS says "Being business-minded is about the interest to help organizations succeed, whether in the private, public, or non-profit sector. This business inclination can be found in individuals with a variety of professional and educational experiences, not just those who come from traditional business backgrounds." However, it is not the actual HBS Career Goals statement. If you just look at this question in isolation, you will be making a mistake because the HBS application includes a 500 character goals statement:
Post-MBA Goals
| Instructions |
|---|
| Please enter your Intended Post-MBA goals below. |
Before even writing either the goals statement or the Business-Minded Essay, you need to figure out what your career goals are because they will be the basis for the goals statement and inform what you write in Essay 1. You need to have a future plan that you can successfully sell in the application and an interview. This plan must be realistic (short-term), intuitively justify doing an MBA, and be ambitious (both in the short and long-term). You most likely will spend more time thinking about what you are going to write in 500 characters than writing it. Since this question does not ask about HBS, you should not necessarily include any why HBS content here but you certainly might explain in either this goals statement or the Business Minded Essay why need an MBA now, like a one-sentence explanation (20-25 words max).
If you are still having difficulty with your career goals, see my analysis of Stanford Essay B for another (and more structured) method for thinking about goals.
I frequently work with my clients on their goals. My objective is to help clients formulate goals that will be convincing to an MBA admissions office and interviewers. A key test of goals beyond being believable and ambitious is that you can sell them an interview. In the case of HBS that would be a 30 minute intense interview with a member of the MBA Admissions Board who has read your application very carefully and knows what they want to ask you. And part of what they might ask is about goals, so make sure whatever you write in the goals statement and Essay 1 is something you will be able to defend.
Now let us turn to the "Business Minded Essay." By "business," in this context HBS is referring to "a person's regular occupation, profession, or trade." Whatever your work has been or you want it to be is the business that is the subject of this essay. We can divide Please reflect on how your choices have influenced your career path and aspirations. (300 words) into two distinct parts:
HOW HAVE YOUR CHOICES INFLUENCED YOUR CAREER PATH?
HOW HAVE YOUR CHOICES INFLUENCED YOUR ASPIRATIONS?
HOW HAVE YOUR CHOICES INFLUENCED YOUR CAREER PATH?
Is this part you need to provide an explanation for the reasons behind your career to date. I think it is important to understand that these reason(s) for your career must go beyond the absolute minimum considerations of making money. You are telling a story about your past that renders explainable to a reader. Clearly given limited word count one can likely only provide one or two underlying explanations for your career. Some choices to consider:
- Personal factors in your family or life that have influenced your career choices.
- Role models, whether experienced personally or otherwise, including real and fictional people.
- Educational interests.
- A passion for something.
- A long held belief or mission.
- Opportunities that arose as result of a professional or personal experience.
HOW HAVE YOUR CHOICES INFLUENCED YOUR ASPIRATIONS?
Whatever the choices you have made in your life, how to do they impact your professional aspirations? Have you always had the same aspirations (continuity story) or have your aspirations changed during the course of your career? For most people what they wanted to be age 10 probably will not need to be discussed here. That said, sometimes aspirations do get set at a relatively young, whereas for others, it is something that might be changing over time.
While this essay is not focused on your future goals in detail as the goals statement will handle that, you should be discussing how your aspirations relate to your future career objective. In other words, what do you aspire for? The details of that can be handled in the goals statement, but the idea of it should be clear from the essay.
Think of your aspirations as either a story of continuity or discontinuity:
The advantages of a continuity story is that it is simple to tell: A continuity story is one where there is consistent or relatively consistent motivation connecting your past and your future. Given limited word count this is easier to do then telling a more complex story. For those seeking to simply enhance a professional career and not change their career it often will make sense to tell a continuity story. Such a story is ideal for a career enhancer. Career enhancers include those who are coming from family businesses, company sponsored, and those who seek management roles in the same industry/function.
A disadvantage of a continuity story is that it can be rather dull if the intended impact is not significant. In other words continuity stories can often become extremely careerist to the point of boredom. The best way I know of to avoid this is to make sure that the aforementioned impact is ambitious, which we will address in greater detail below.
The advantage of a discontinuity story is that it is a story of change. My motivation in my career so far has been X but due to some kind of experience/self-realization it’s now Y. This can make for drama. If you are a career changer post-MBA, you most likely telling a partial or total discontinuity story. That is to say whatever motivated your career so far is being altered or completely changed with respect to what you want to do in the future. The reason for this change would be the result of experience or experiences or observations about yourself that have helped you understand the need for change. The motivation for this change may be an internal reflective consideration such as realizing you enjoy one kind of activity more than another, excitement about a future career direction and/or opportunity or other based external commitment to an issue in the world such as climate change.
One difficulty to telling a discontinuity story is that is more complicated and likely to require more word count at least the writer will think so. Another difficulty in telling a discontinuity story is that the explanation for change maybe unconvincing if the writer is not careful and if there are insufficient evidence in the rest of the application pointing to the viability of this change.
To think about this a bit less abstractly, we will imagine a hypothetical entrepreneur. His name is Warren Gates. If Warren's entrepreneurial focus is not changing from being an agricultural tech entrepreneur because he wants to attend HBS in order to learn how to scale in that same sector, he is likely to be telling a continuity story. However, if Warren has been an agricultural tech entrepreneur but now wants to build his next start-up in operations, he is likely to find that he is telling a discontinuity story. Something is motivating continuity of focus in one case and change in the other. Whatever that something is part of what he needs to discuss in this essay.
THE HIDDEN CONSIDERATION FOR BOTH THE GOALS STATEMENT AND THE BUSINESS MINDED ESSSAY: WHAT KIND OF IMPACT DO YOU HOPE HAVE IN THAT FUTURE?
"We are looking for individuals who are passionate about using business as a force for good – who strive to improve and transform companies, industries, and the world. We are seeking those who are eager to solve today’s biggest problems and shape the future through creative and integrated thinking"
I have for very long time recommended that applicants have strong ambitious future visions. While it is important to be realistic that is to say believable. It is equally important to be ambitious in the specific sense that you should highlight how you will have impact.
HBS Wants to turn out future leaders heads of companies, great entrepreneurs, public sector leaders, and world class business thinkers. They rejected Warren Buffett, but they don’t want to reject the next Warren Buffet! They want to identify and admit such people. They want to admit people who will truly imbibe their mission statement: The mission of Harvard Business School is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. This mission requires impact. The impact you have in the future may relate to an impact you had so far. For example you may have had an impact on CO2 emissions based on your work or volunteer activity but now want to play an even bigger role in addressing climate change. Alternatively the impact you have in the future may relate to something you never done before. It may relate to a problem you see in the world that you are passionate about solving. It may relate to a future opportunity that you hope to bring into this world: For example you might have a hypothesis about building ethical AI to solve problems in the future. Whatever sort of story it should have direct impact on society, your organization, your industry, and or the people you work with.
When we consider future impact, we are considering the future. One thing that puzzles me is when I talk with a client and they lack even the ability to think 5 or 10 years in the future. This is not helpful when you are thinking about long-term impact or even the medium term. The world is changing fast and if all you can do is imagine the most linear and obvious sort of changes in this age of disruption and challenge, I think you need a crash course in future-focused thinking. Learn about the ideas of Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Harari, watch Black Mirror, read some Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash would be a good start) or other SF writers who focus on the near-term future, listen/watch the Lex Fridman podcast (I am too lazy to insert hyperlinks). "We are seeking those who are eager to solve today’s biggest problems and shape the future through creative and integrated thinking." Make them believe you are the one they seek!
PART 4: Be a leader
Habit of Leadership
As just mentioned, the mission of HBS is to educate leaders. All my clients admitted to HBS had a diversity of educational, extracurricular, and professional backgrounds, but were united by one thing: In one or more aspects of their lives, they demonstrated this habit of leadership. HBS takes a very broad view of what they are looking for: "Leadership takes many forms in many contexts – you do not have to have a formal leadership role to make a difference. We deliberately create a class that includes different kinds of leaders, from the front-line manager to the startup founder to the behind-the-scenes thought leader."
Leadership is no easy thing. Nor is it always obvious. If you leadership is fully obvious from your resume you are lucky, but the worst possible thing is to conceive of leadership as simple formal responsibility or a title because this conveys nothing about the person in that position. While some applicants will have held formal leadership positions, many will not. Formal leadership positions are great to write about if they involve the applicant actually having a significant impact, making a difficult decision, being a visionary, showing creativity, or otherwise going beyond their formal responsibility, but the same is true for those showing leadership without having a formal title. If you are having difficulty really understanding leadership, one great place to read about leadership, and business in general, is Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.
This essay requires you to identify what kind of leader you are and what kind of leader you are
Leadership-Focused Essay: What experiences have shaped how you invest in others and how you lead? (up to 250 words).
We can divide this essay into two questions:
What experiences have shaped how you invest in others?
How do you lead?
Lets actually start with the second question first because the way you lead is something that will inform how you invest in others. Since you need to consider your experiences of leadership in order to identify what kind of a leader you are, I think it is helpful to have a clear concept of different types of leaderships. While there are number of ways to describe leadership, I particularly like this formulation of eight leadership types that INSEAD Professor Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries has used in one of his Harvard Business Review blog posts (I am a graduate of the INSEAD Executive Masters program that he established):
- The strategist: leadership as a game of chess. These people are good at dealing with developments in the organization’s environment. They provide vision, strategic direction and outside-the-box thinking to create new organizational forms and generate future growth.
- The change-catalyst: leadership as a turnaround activity. These executives love messy situations. They are masters at re-engineering and creating new organizational ‘‘blueprints.’’
- The transactor: leadership as deal making. These executives are great dealmakers. Skilled at identifying and tackling new opportunities, they thrive on negotiations.
- The builder: leadership as an entrepreneurial activity. These executives dream of creating something and have the talent and determination to make their dream come true.
- The innovator: leadership as creative idea generation. These people are focused on the new. They possess a great capacity to solve extremely difficult problems.
- The processor: leadership as an exercise in efficiency. These executives like organizations to be smoothly running, well-oiled machines. They are very effective at setting up the structures and systems needed to support an organization’s objectives.
- The coach: leadership as a form of people development. These executives know how to get the best out of people, thus creating high performance cultures.
- The communicator: leadership as stage management. These executives are great influencers, and have a considerable impact on their surroundings.
Applicants who are having difficulty really understanding their leadership can find out what kind of leader they are by taking this quiz based on Lewin's classic framework. While leadership is more complicated than Lewin's framework, the quiz is a great way to get you started thinking about yourself, a key part of answering any leadership essay question effectively. However, I think the 8 archetypes above provide a much better guide for those who both have extensive leadership experience and those who think they lack it. Think of these 8 archetypes as aspirational images of certain kinds of leaders. You may fit into more than one category. You may find you don't feel like you are really good at any of the above in comparison to the descriptions above, but that is OK because you are trying to identify your potential even if it seems based on relatively little "objective evidence." If leadership is not obvious from your resume or likely to be a topic your recommenders will focus on, you should certainly consider how you show your leadership potential. I have never worked with anyone who could not demonstrate potential in at least one of the categories above.
Some types of leadership experiences that make for effective content in this and other essays as well as recommendations and interviews:
-A time you convinced someone or some group.
-A time you led others.
-A time you demonstrated courage.
-A time you made a difficult decision.
-A time you were innovative.
-A time you formulated and executed a strategy or tactics.
-A time you turned around a situation, overcame an obstacle.
-A time you reformed something.
-A time you changed something.
-A time you effectively negotiated with someone.
-A time created something.
-A time you managed or organized something.
-A time you mentored or coached someone.
Experiences
These experiences could be professional or otherwise. Given that the essay is asking for experiences, you should at least mention two experiences. In 250 words, getting more than 3 experiences in a meaningful way will be difficult and even 3 will be hard to do well.
-Volunteer or social activities outside of work or school, whether it is actually organizing them or participating in them.
-A volunteer activity related to your post-MBA goals
-A volunteer activity that allowed for the development of leadership and/or teamwork experience
-A volunteer activity that put you in contact with people who are quite different from you in terms of race, gender, religion, nationality, income level, educational background, and/or some other factor
-An international volunteer or social activity
-Active involvement in an alumni organization
-Active participation in a sports team, debate team, or some other kind of team
-Active political involvement (Not just voting or knowledge of politics, but actual activities)
-Participation in an orchestra, band or other musical groups
-Participation in drama or dance or other types of group performance
-Organizing trips or other activities for a group of friends
-Serving as the leader, organizer, or active member of a team-based educational activity such as a seminar, project, or overseas trip
The above are just some possibilities.
how you invest in others: What you do and how it impacts them
Whatever example or examples, you use you are required to highlight through at least one such example, the impact it had on others. The others in questions are not defined. They might be:
- Your team.
- People in your organization (Colleagues, seniors, and/or juniors)
- Your clients/customers/end-users.
- Your mentee.
- Your students.
- Your family or friends.
Whatever the case, your concept of leadership has to involve being sufficiently other-directed. This is reflected in what HBS says about leadership: We are looking for individuals who aspire to lead others toward making a difference in the world, and those who recognize that to build and sustain successful organizations, they must develop and nurture diverse teams.
How much of your essay will actually focus on this part of the question will really depend on what kind of leadership experience(s) you write about. That said, it must be included and a good version of this essay will showcase your ability to invest in other people.
The HOW here is important. This requires discussing actions taken, decisions made, and the result. The how of investing in others should reveal something about the way you think and behave as a leader.
Part 5: Be Curious and Reflective
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. (up to 250 words)
YOU WANT TO GO TO HBS? DEMONSTRATE THAT YOU HAVE CURIOSITY. IT IS A PRE-REQUISITE: Our case and field-based learning methods depend on the active participation of curious students who are excited to listen and learn from faculty and classmates, as well as contribute their own ideas and perspectives.
Hence, if you can't demonstrate curiosity go to a school where you sit in class and don't have to participate all that much. There are plenty of schools where one can be passive. HBS ain't that place. Lack of class participation is the basis for kicking someone out after the first year at HBS and they do it.
Whatever you write about has had to have influenced your growth. While that might be relatively recent growth, it is entirely possible that you might be discussing something occurred even in childhood.
That said, most of the best essays I have seen on this question focused primarily (though not necessarily exclusively) on something related to work or an activity that was highly impactful. HBS is a place for using curiosity to make an impact. Hence all the admit essays (both my own clients and those I just do HBS interview prep for) focused on harnessing curiosity to make impact. The impact was both for a greater professional purpose and also resulted in personal growth.
Hence we are looking for story with the following characteristics:
- It highlights your curiosity.
- It has influenced your subsequent growth.
- It shows your potential for being an active curious student at HBS. (You don't need to be explicit about that but you should make sure the reader would be able to easily see why you exhibit the kind of curiosity that might apply at HBS).
Some ways of thinking about curiosity:
- Curiosity is about asking "Why?" The incurious accept the world as it is and don't try to understand it, they simply take it granted. Curious people want to understand why things are the way they are.
- Curiosity is dangerous and disruptive, it questions the status quo and is this basis for undermining existing systems.
- Curiosity may be expressed very analytically (STEM), creatively (art, literature, music, idea generation), or even physically (travel, adventure sports, sports in general-How good can I get?).
- Curiosity can to lead understanding and change of the self, others, organizations, and systems.
Another consideration for writing this essay is the balance between the example and how it subsequently influenced you. I think an effective answer will balance these aspects but the actual balance will vary great. For example, if the experience that you are writing about occurred when you were young, you might very well devote 50% or more of the essay to focusing in its subsequent impact on you. While telling an example is important don't get into the trap of providing excessive story telling descriptive detail at the cost of really helping HBS understand the impact of this experience on you. On the other hand, if you are writing about something recent that you were curious about, you can still highlight how it has influenced your professional growth, vision for the future, realization about your own skills or abilities, and/or how others perceive you.
PART 5: WRITING
When it comes to telling stories, I think it is most important to think about your audience. You are not writing these essays for yourself, you are writing them to convince your audience. How to convince them?
The following grid connects the parts of an essay (the first column) to three core aspects of writing an effective essay. The table should help you see the relationship between the components of a story and what I would consider to be three major questions to ask about any story.
| Essay Outline | What was your role? | What does it mean? | Why will this essay sell them on you? |
| Situation: When? Where? Who? What? How? | Effective answers to when, where, who, what, and how should all relate directly to your role in the situation. You are the hero or heroine of your story. | Your reader should have a clear understanding of the situation. They are not reading a mystery story, a poem, or some other form of writing where withholding information will be valued. | The situation needs to be one that the reader will believe, consider to be important, and hopefully be impressed by. |
| Action Steps: What actions did you take?Action Step 1: Action Step 2: Action Step 3: | Stories break down into steps. For each step, make sure you are clear about what you did. | Each action step should be meaningful and demonstrate your potential. This is the core of the story and it is important the rationale for your actions be stated as clearly as possible. Effective essays involve both description and interpretation. | If you are actions are clear and their value is clear in terms of the criteria for Esssay 1, 2, or 3 you will be on a firm basis for selling your story to admissions. |
| Result | Results should be stated as clearly as possible. Your relationship to the results should be clear. | Explain the significance of results clearly. | Make your results meaningful so that they will be impressive. |
The grid above is based on the following assumptions, which I consider to be basic for writing effective essays:
Your reader must understand you. Provide a clear interpretation of what you have done. Write in simple language, even about complex things. Assume your reader has a basic business background, but don't assume any expertise. Cause-effect relationships should not be merely implied where possible. Showing your actual action steps is critical. A full explanation might be impossible because of word count, but if you tell things in sequence, it usually provides that explanation.
Your reader must believe you. If your reader is not convinced by your story, you are dead. I am all in favor of telling the best version of a story that you can, provided it is also believable. Bad self-marketing is frequently based on lies that can be seen through. I have met many admissions officers and while not all of them were brilliant, all the good ones had finely tuned "bullshit detectors." If your essays have a seemingly tenuous relationship with reality, you are likely to be setting yourself up for a ding.
Your reader must be engaged. If a reader does not become interested in what they reading, there is a problem. The problem may be that the essay is simply generic or it might be the way a story is being told is boring or it maybe a lack of passion in the writing. Whatever the case, it needs fixing. One of my roles as a consultant is to coach my clients on writing essays that will be engaging.
You must sell your reader on your high potential for admission. Great essays don’t just need to be believable and interesting, they have to be convincing. You are trying to get admissions to take a specific action after they read your file: admit you or invite you for an interview. Thus, essays must convince them to take action, they have to see why you should be admitted. I help my understand how to do this and give very specific advice on how to do so.
Your reader should be interpreting your essay the way you intend. In writing, there is always room for misinterpretation. If you have not effectively interpreted yourself, there is always the possibility that your reader will draw opposite conclusions from what you intended. I help my clients make sure that they understand and correct for all such negative interpretations.
If your essays succeed based on the above, you will be well on your way to being amongst those who get an HBS interview for the HBS Class of 2028. My three-part HBS interview prep series starts here.
Best of luck!
