In this post, I will be analyzing the essay question and key components of the HBS Application for the Class of 2024. In addition to discussing overall HBS application strategy and the required essay, I will discuss key parts of the application form, resume, and transcript. I also provide some advice for HBS reapplicants and for Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Kennedy School Joint Degree Applicants and the new MS/MBA. For my posts on recommendations, please see my Key Posts section on recommendations. For my post on HBS interviews, please see my series of three posts that begins here. While the new application is not out until mid-June 2020, HBS has already indicated that there will be no change to the essay, so I am posting this on May 11, 2021. Should any significant changes to the app form occur, I will alter this post when the application opens online.
My comprehensive service clients have been admitted to HBS for the Classes of 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2005. 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, I have worked with 71 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 great GMAT 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 ESSAY
"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?
There is no word limit for this question. We think you know what guidance we're going to give here. Don't overthink, overcraft and overwrite. Just answer the question in clear language that those of us who don't know your world can understand."
Based on the above, you should be asking yourself: Given the question, what do HBS admissions need to know in order to offer me an interview and then admit me? My answer would be to take a deep dive into HBS' criteria for admission and consider how they can apply to you. You will need to take two deep dives. One into HBS and another into yourself. HBS introduced this more open style of question for the Class of 2016.
Regarding length, most of my clients admitted to HBS have written between 800 and 1500 words with 1000-1200 being most common. A couple of years ago, I did interview practice with someone who was admitted with an essay of almost 2000 words (I thought that essay could have used a trim, but hey the applicant was admitted, so who cares what I think!). The key point about length is that it should be as long as you need it to be in order to convey what you think HBS needs to know to invite you for an interview and ultimately admit you.
If you are trying to understand the diverse range of essays that gets someone admitted to HBS, I do recommend The Unofficial Harvard Business School Essay Book. In fact, one of my clients admitted to the Class of 2016 contributed his or her essay to the first edition to it, which made me really happy. I can't tell you which one. 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. I would also recommend the old book that contained HBS admits essays. 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. Such books are really great guides for someone looking to see successful MBA essays.
THE BOTTOM LINE: WHAT MAKES YOU STAND OUT?
The discussion of the categories below is all for the purpose of getting to the story or stories 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 actually 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.
Four Ways HBS Evaluates Applicants
My objective when working with each of my clients is to help them identify the best content in their essays, resume, interview and other application components to show fit for each school they apply to. My approach is to understand the audience that is being communicated to because the only objective of your application is to communicate effectively to your audience, the admissions committee. We can summarize what HBS is looking for in terms of three stated values-Habit of Leadership, Analytical Aptitude and Appetite, and Engaged Community Citizenship- plus Diversity. These four core ways, which I discuss in detail below, that HBS evaluates applicants need to be communicated in your application and one or more of them should be used in your essay. The following summarizes what HBS is looking for in terms of three stated values (Habit of Leadership, Analytical Aptitude and Appetite, and Engaged Community Citizenship) plus Diversity and the possible places where you can demonstrate these in your initial application (Interview and post-interview not considered below):
These four core ways that HBS evaluates applicants need to be communicated in your application and one or more of them should be used in your essay.
In addition to those four elements, other possible common topics for inclusion here would be:
-Your wider post-MBA career vision that you could not explain in the 500 character answer on the Employment page. Some applicants will not touch on this topic in their essays, while others will discuss it at length. One thing I thing I help clients figure out is to what extent they need to elaborate on their post-MBA objectives and longer term vision in this essay. If you are strongly mission/values focused, most likely you will be discussing this in the essay.
-Why you want an MBA in general? Again, some will address this, others will not. Since there is no place in the application to indicate this otherwise, it would reasonable to explain your rationale for doing an MBA, whether you state this in general and/or terms of HBS in particular is your choice, but my bias is certainly for being HBS specific though typically brief.
-Why HBS? I don't think one has to necessarily write in detail about why you want to go to HBS, but providing your overall rationale for why you want to go HBS now is certainly reasonable. If your career vision is something you are writing about and there are particular aspects of HBS that really relate to it, feel free to mention them.
For a discussion of career vision, why an MBA? or how to explain why you want to attend a particular program, see my analysis of Stanford Essay B.
Now I will discuss those four ways in detail in order to elaborate how you might utilize them in your essay:
Habit of Leadership
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:
HBS does not explicitly ask you to show your potential for leadership in your essay, but it may very well be something you decide to write about, ask one or both of your recommenders to write about, and certainly show in your resume and application form. Leadership is no easy thing. Nor is it always obvious. If you leadership is fully obvious from your resume and then perhaps your essay need not discuss it, 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.
Some clients I have worked with have never really considered themselves as leaders. I think it is critical that if you are applying to HBS that you have an idea about what kind of leader you are. While there are number of ways to describe leadership, I particularly like this formulation of leadership types that INSEAD Professor Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries has used in one of his Harvard Business Review blog posts (Disclosure 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.
I have previously suggested that applicants who are having difficulty really understanding leadership 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 leader. 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 essays, 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.
So much of our MBA experience - including the case method, section life, and student-organized events - requires the active collaboration of the entire HBS community. That's why we look for students who exhibit the highest ethical standards and respect for others, and can make positive contributions to the MBA Program. The right candidates must be eager to share their experiences, support their colleagues, and teach as well as learn from their peers.
HBS and other MBA programs are looking for students who will make a contribution. This really makes sense because of the collaborative nature of MBA education. While professors play an important role in the classroom, students learn from each other on a continuous basis both inside and outside of class. An MBA education is very much one based on relationship building. One of the chief functions of an MBA admissions committee is to select people who will be good classmates. The director and the rest of the committee have done their job properly if they have selected students who can work well together, learn from each other, and if these students become alumni who value the relationships they initially formed at business school. Given that two of the major takeaways from an HBS education are the relationships that a student forms during the program and access to the alumni network, HBS is looking for candidates who will fully engage with others. It is important to show engagement with others in your HBS essay, in your interview, in your post-interview essay, in your application, and/or in your resume. You should also make it a point to get your recommenders to discuss how you add value to the team, to whatever “community” (A workplace is a community) they worked with you in.
-Volunteer or social activities at work or school, whether it is actually organizing them or participating in them.
-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.
-Solving a complex problem at work, school, or elsewhere
-Discussing the successful completion of complex analytical tasks
-Breaking down a complex problem that you solved and communicating it a very brief and clear way
- Demonstrating great personal insight into one's weaknesses, failures, and/or mistakes
-Showing the ability to learn from weaknesses, failures, and/or mistakes
-Showing the ability to learn and master something highly complex
-Demonstrating a high level of creativity
Those with truly outstanding academic background and test scores need to likely focus less attention on this area. If you think you have weaknesses in this area, consider how to use the essay and Additional Information section to mitigate them.
Some ways of demonstrating diversity that my clients have used successfully include the following:
-Being the first person or kind of person to do something
-Being the youngest person to do do something
-Making an original contribution to something
-Having an unusual family, academic, personal, or professional background
-Unusual skills or talents
-Extensive international experience
-Receiving prestigious awards or scholarships
Keep in mind that diversity is a matter of interpretation and presentation and it is each applicant's responsibility to best demonstrate how they will add value to their classmates. One of my jobs as a consultant is to always help my clients identify ways that make them distinct even if they think they are not special. I operate on the assumption that everyone is unique.
WRITING
So far I have discussed on topic selection. I think it is useful to think about what makes for a good essay and in particular, I think about stories. 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 your leadership, analytical, engaged community citizenship, or unique background, 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.
And finally...
My final point is that HBS is looking for people who want to be leaders, not mere managers. They are looking for people who will use their "one precious and wild life" to achieve great things, not those who will be satisfied at being mediocrities. If you can't show the potential for that now, when will you?
HBS REAPPLICANTS: Reapplication as a topic in the Essay
OR
Essay Question: The MS/MBA program is focused on design, innovation, and entrepreneurship within a technical/engineering context. Describe your past experiences in these areas and your reasons for pursuing a program with this focus.
(Recommended: 500 words)
Enrollment Services, Degree Programs) is a really open and genuinely nice guy who provides great advice to applicants, which can be found at http://hksadmissionblog.tumblr.com/ and is required reading for anyone applying to HKS.
Keep in mind that your overall personal background should be in the main HBS MBA essay and not here. Make sure you effectively align the MBA essay, the SEAS essay, and the 500 character goals statement so that they support and don't overly duplicate each other, though some overlap (see below) is inevitable. The SEAS essay consists of two parts:
- Discuss past experiences with design innovation, and/or entrepreneurship within a technical engineering content. If you don't have any past professional, academic, or other experience in any of these areas, the program is not for you. Assume that you should be spending at least half if not more of the essay providing an analysis of those experiences. Your resume and application form should back-up what you write about in the essay. My suggestion would be to highlight 2-4 specific ways your past experience demonstrates your fit for the program.
- Discuss reasons for pursing the program. The reasons would relate directly to your post-MBA objectives, so there should be some inherent overlap between this essay and what you write in the 500 character goals statement (see below regarding that). You should certainly justify why the program is right for you based on what you can read about on the program website. I would also suggest reading a Q&A with the program's co-chair. When explaining why you want to attend a program, do not just make a series of dumb lists of classes or tell the program about itself, but explains what you want form the program. You need not mention the names of particular courses as long as it would be clear to your reader that your learning needs align well with curriculum. If you have a particular interest in a more specialized course or studying with a particular professor, it might be worth mentioning it as long as it is an explanation of why you want to study the subject and not based on circular reasoning;An example of circular (tautological) reasoning: "I want to take Integrated Design because I am interested in learning about integrated design."This kind of circular reasoning is so common. Usually, it takes place within a paragraph consisting of many such sentences. They actually convey nothing about the applicant. They are just abstract needs and will have limited impact on your reader. The admissions reader wants to learn about you, not about their own program.An example of an explanation for why: "While I have been exposed to some user design issues, I presently lack the kind of comprehensive understanding of design issues that are critical to my future goals...." A complete explanation would include additional details about the kind of issues that the applicant is interested in learning about and/or specific ways the applicant intended to apply what he or she would learn at Harvard to those goals. By focusing on very specific learning needs and explaining those needs in relationship to one's goals and/or past experience, the admissions reader will be learning about you.
RESUME
"Instructions: Please provide a current resume or CV. Ideally, this would be about 1-2 pages in length and include dates and locations of your employment."
The resume has always been an important part of any HBS application. You can find a resume template I have linked to on my blog here. That resume template can also simply serve as a checklist for what to include. While many schools prefer a one-page resume, HBS really does not care. Depending on a client's background, I will recommend 1 or 2 pages. I think it best to think of a resume as a record of accomplishment. If you have sufficient accomplishments, 2 pages is fine. Some applicants try to a use an MBA student's recruitment resume format as the basis for their own resume, but I generally don't consider this a good idea as such resumes serve a very different purpose. An MBA resume should really designed to focus on you overall, that is your academic, professional, and personal accomplishments and key facts. A recruiting resume is meant for a different kind of audience, recruiters, and typically focuses on a much more narrow range of information.
When I first start working comprehensively with any client, whether they are applying to HBS or not, I always start with the resume for a couple of reasons:
1. It is a great way for any applicant to summarize the most important information about them and their accomplishments. It sometimes helps applicants actually remind themselves of what they have done.
2. For me, it is a way I learn about a client so that I can better understand their background.
One key thing to remember about what you include on your resume: Anything that is there, just like any component of the application, may become the basis for a HBS interview question. Therefore if you don't want to talk about it and don't need to write about it, leave it off the resume.
EMPLOYMENT
There is also an Employment Section of the application that provides space for you to discuss three positions in detail including providing brief descriptions of your professional accomplishments and challenges. To some extent this information will overlap with the resume. This is nothing to worry about. That said the challenge question ("Most Significant Challenge" 250 characters) in particular is very possibly something you would not be covering in your resume. I assume HBS does as well, so just as with the resume, make sure your answers in the application are as effective as possible. Don't treat it like some form you do at the last minute.
ACADEMIC TRANSCRIPTS
First, keep in mind that admissions officers read transcripts and are trained to know what they are reading. They don't just look at GPA (If your school calculates it). If there is something really bad on your transcript (a fail, a withdrawal, etc) or odd, you really do want to explain it in the 500 character (not word) Additional Section. If is just a C and you have no specific excuse, don't bother trying to explain it. If your academic performance varied greatly from year to year (or semester to semester), was there a reason for it? Is it one that you want to provide? I don't recommend discussing how you became depressed after your boy/girlfriend broke up with you, but if, for example, you were taking a major leadership position in a student organization, running a start-up, working a lot to pay for school, doing major research, experienced a major illness or misfortune, or playing a varsity sport, you do have a topic worth discussing. Finally, If your transcript, GMAT/GRE, or resume don't indicate that you have solid quantitative skills, you should explain why you do if you can. The proper place to provide that explanation is in the additional section or the essay.
EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
Given HBS' instructions on this, I do highly recommend including your best extracurricular activities that showcase your leadership (primary) and community engagement (secondary) and/or unique experiences/interests (tertiary). If you have done nothing impressive extracurricular-wise after graduating and have 3 good activities from university, feel free to just use use this section for those activities. If you did nothing but study during college or university and really have no activities, hopefully you have three post-college things to include. If you have any activities that are directly relevant to your professional goals or to your personal story and you really want to emphasize them, use this space accordingly. While I would surely emphasize the most impressive activities in terms of leadership or community engagement, if you need to focus on personal interests that were not group focused (running for example) because you simply don't anything better, put it here. Activities that show you are well-rounded, civically engaged, artistic, athletic are all possibilities here.
Keep in mind that extracurricular activities can (and usually should) also be fully accounted for on the resume and given the fact that you can submit a two-page resume, there is no reason that can't account for an activity. Also, if you are not using the space for anything else, the 500 character additional information section could be used for elaborating on anything you consider really important, but could not include in this section or in the resume.
AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
"Instructions: List any distinctions, honors, and awards (academic, military, extracurricular, professional, community) in order of importance to you (i.e., list the most important first). You may list up to three awards."
For some applicants this section is really easy to fill out because they have won a number of awards, distinctions, or honors and just need to prioritize them. Other candidates will freak out about this section because they never won anything that they think fits. While, it is sometimes really the case that I will have perfectly great applicant who has nothing to report in this section, most applicants are actually likely to have something. HBS is not asking you a narrow question here, so think broadly. It is possible that this section will overlap with the resume, employment, essay, or extracurricular section of the application.
THE POST-MBA GOALS PAGE
"INTENDED POST-MBA CAREER GOALS
Briefly tell us more about your career aspirations:
"Please share additional information here if you need to clarify any information provided in the other sections of your application. This is not meant to be used as an additional essay. Please limit your additional information to the space in this section.We know you'll be tempted, but please don't send us any additional materials (e.g., additional recommendations, work portfolios). To be fair to all applicants, extra materials won't be considered."
