The Booth MBA has gained tremendously over the last five years, and has become a favorite of many financial services Firms. Here are our essay tips for the school's 2011 - 2012 essays.
What are your short and long-term goals, and how will a Chicago Booth MBA help you reach them? (600 words)
- Set the context of your past experience in a few short sentences; and then move on to describing your tactical and visionary goals; remember, the goals must be clear, specific and vividly imaginable for the reader
- While it's important to tie Booth's offerings to your goals, please don't overdose on this - this is not an essay on Booth, it's an essay on you and your goals; the Booth part should be supplementary.
At Chicago Booth, we believe each individual has his or her own leadership style. How has your family, culture, and/or environment influenced you as a leader? (750 words)
- This is a really important essay for Booth - do not try to copy / paste bits and pieces of other essays and force fit into this one - it won't work
- What is a leadership style? A leadership style is really your way of owning, managing and leading the way. How do you motivate people? Think about the different leadership styles of Steve Jobs and Apple's new CEO, Tim Cook. They are vastly different styles, and arguably both very effective. Do you see yourself as a rousing-the-troops by being out there, shaking hands and being-seen type of leader, or do you see yourself as a more quiet, reserved leader who leads through the lines? How much ownership and accountability do you delegate? Where do you sit on the "niceness" scale? These are tough questions to answer, but important to do so to truly describe your style.
- Pick no more than one or two themes and attributes, and one or two examples to support each attribute of your style
- The experiences or examples you select should naturally lead the reader to understand what leadership style you are describing, so you shouldn't have to state it explicitly - the story-telling of these experiences has to be strong
- Your environment also plays a big part - if you were an analyst in an investment bank for a few years, that has a different influence on your style than a consultant or a volunteer or a political staffer, etc.
Considering what you've already included in the application, what else should we know about you? In a maximum of four slides, tell us about yourself.
- This one is also a time-consuming essay. One word of caution here - you can never stop editing. Know when you are done and know when to stop, or you'll drive yourself crazy.
- The question clearly says, "what else?" - so avoid reiterating the things you said in the first two essays - try to cover the parts of your life and personality that may not have been discussed already
- In creating this deck or PDF, think about what's most important to you? If you were describing your life to a classmate, what would you say? What matters the most to you? What motivates you to go to work everyday? Who inspires you? These are the questions that you're trying to answer here.
- A good combination of words and pictures is ideal - think of it like a story book on your life - but keep the words succinct and engaging, this is not another essay.
- Follow the instructions and read the pointers - hyperlinks will not be clicked, so don't try to stick in your blog or your twitter feed into this, and remember, the document will be viewed electronically, but no videos or music is allowed.
