MBA essays – how should you decide the content?

All your essays together must convey one main broad theme and one or two side attributes at most. After reading your essays the adcom should be able to grasp the theme you are trying to convey. Consider a person who has an IT background but works in a small Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) group where he/she learns a lot about finance, M&A and their business. He/She also has great negotiation skills.

So the theme that should be conveyed is:

Great at IT + understanding of company’s M&A business/industry + negotiation skills

Now the goals essay should mention goals in relation to this theme like, to become an M&A analyst where you can use your IT experience to develop tools that would help you do your work so much better, analyze all data etc and long term become an M&A person yourself (doing the deals etc) and use your negotiation skills to find success. All this would make sense as it is related to the experience he has had plus it strengthens the theme again. Having a goal like this is more realistic and would make your story more believable. Assume the above person to have a goal let’s say, to become the director of marketing research at a top marketing company in US. Now it’s ok to have a goal like that but you would need a lot of supporting arguments to mention why you have a goal like that.

Accomplishment essays: Ideally he/she should give an example where the project was successful because he/she could use his IT, M&A business/industry experience and possibly negotiation skills altogether to achieve success; the theme of our essays. He/she might have another example of a project where the success was bigger and more glorious probably but the main reason for success was applicant’s creativity. Ok, it’s a great accomplishment but it’s conveying your creativity, which does not tie with our theme and therefore does not strengthen your application. One does not need to be good at 20 different things. So in a situation like this chose an example of accomplishment which portrays the theme as strongly as possible.

It’s ideal if all your essays collaborate with each other trying to convey 1 MAIN point. Inside the essay all paragraphs should collaborate and convey essay’s main point. Inside the paragraph, all sentences should collaborate and convey paragraph’s main point.