How To Write Stellar Booth MBA Essays

Chicago Booth is one of the M7 business schools, quite famously known for its flexible curriculum. The curriculum is customizable to the point that there’s only one compulsory class that’s called LEAD: Leadership Effectiveness and Development course. Apart from this, you bid for classes and customize your curriculum as you go along with the MBA. 

The school is also known for its rigorous curriculum and typically admits applicants who showcase an academic mindset. Booth is also celebrated for its analytical and data-driven approach to decision-making. 

The school has fantastic opportunities for aspirants hoping to develop a career in finance. And therefore they’re quite aware of the fact that if you’re applying for a Booth MBA, you probably are also submitting applications to Columbia Business School and The Wharton School. Therefore, you need to proactively signal your interest in the school and the opportunities it offers. This means that your research about the school should not only include insights gleaned from their website but also from conversations with current students and alumni. 

The culture of the school is grounded in The Chicago Approach, which essentially prioritizes and values debate and discussion. During classroom discussions, the faculty encourages students to voice their diverse data-backed perspectives, even if contrarian in nature, and challenge the perspective of the faculty themselves. 

Now, let’s dive into the essays the school asks, their analysis, and how you should frame your answers. 

Essay 1: 

How will the Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals? (250-word minimum)

The first essay in your Booth MBA application is a typical career goals essay. Unlike most Business Schools, Booth doesn’t give you a maximum word count. On the contrary, Booth gives you a minimum word count, and therefore, you can choose how detailed you want to be. There are varied opinions different admissions consultants hold, but we believe that 600 words is a good reference point for the length of this essay, allowing you enough space to be detailed, specific, and yet succinct. 

Approach to drafting the essay:

Start the essay with a personal hook/connection to draw the interest of the reader. This could be a quote, a statistic, or a challenge you uncovered during your professional trajectory that leads to a defining moment in your path and put things in perspective. Connect the hook with the passion you hold for solving the problem. For example, the lack of quality education in your hometown sparked your interest in launching an education-focused VC fund to help improve quality and employability within the Indian education system. 

Once the hook is established, look at the problem from a wider lens. Identify statistics on how many people suffer from the same plight as you did on a country or global level and bring compelling statistics to back the need to develop innovative solutions to solve the problem. 

Now that you’ve generated the interest of your audience, you need to establish credibility. You need to highlight the work you’ve done in the space, the skills and knowledge you’ve developed so far, and earn the confidence of the AdCom in your ability to solve the problem. Conclude this paragraph with some of the challenges you learned while working in the space which would then directly connect with what you hope you learn during the MBA program and how your short-term goals would prepare you to reach your long-term vision. 

Next, articulate your goals, short-term and long-term, specifically and succinctly. We recommend applicants choose goals that are ambitious yet realistic. Also, establish the connection between your short and long-term goals to show how your career progression over the next 10-15 years will enable you to be fully prepared to realize your vision. 

Sample Framing of Short-term & Long-term Goals: 

Post-MBA, I will join the “x” team at “(name of organization)” to “(mention purpose, i.e., what you seek to do and learn).”

My long-term goal is to “(establish/lead/head/etc.)” to “(mention larger vision/end goal).”

In the next half of the essay, you must focus on how you’d utilize the resources available at Booth to achieve this mission. We’d recommend you develop pillars that focus on skills you need to build through the program. For instance, to launch a VC fund specializing in education, you must develop entrepreneurial, operational, organizational, investment, and leadership skills. 

Once you’ve identified the pillars, you need to research the school extensively through the internet and conversations with current students and alumni. Deep dive into some of the things we’ve shared about the school, coupled with things alumni recommend. Signal to the school the level of investment you’ve made in understanding their offerings and showcase them your fit with the school. 

To make your answer more impressive, quote alumni and current students and discuss how Booth’s focus on analytical thinking, data-backed decision-making, and Economics would enable you to be successful. Lastly, write a conclusion that reinforces your mission statement. 

Essay 2

An MBA is as much about personal growth as it is about professional development. In addition to sharing your experience and goals in terms of career, we’d like to learn more about you outside of the office. Use this opportunity to tell us something about who you are. (250-word minimum)

In this essay, Booth is looking for anecdotes that can illustrate to them who you are and the values you embody. In this essay, we’d advise you not to use a single-story example. Since the school clearly highlights that they want to learn more about you outside of the office, we recommend applicants resist using any work stories, with the exception of writing a story from an extracurricular that you extensively pursued at work and could use to showcase large-scale impact. 

Start writing this essay by creating a list of extracurricular activities you’ve pursued to get a sense of the more prominent themes and areas where you’ve doubled down over the years. The reason why we’re creating this list is because even though values are inward, core values have a way of reflecting through our actions. Without action, you can never substantiate your values, and you’d end up writing about “who you think you are and not how your actions reflect who you are.” 

Typically, we recommend highlighting 5-6 values to showcase the multi-dimensional aspects of your personality. If you perhaps don’t have extracurricular interests that you could talk about here, then you can think about the DEI work you might have done at work or efforts towards organizational building, basically the impact you’ve generated outside of your roles and responsibilities. 

It is also critical that you demonstrate alignment with the school’s leadership values of self-awareness and purposefulness. However, this shouldn’t be a force fit, i.e., you shouldn’t reverse engineer your essays to match these values. We’d also recommend you deep dive into the school’s values, mission, and leadership principles, a cornerstone of successful leadership, to identify your fit. 

The school is not asking for contributions, but given that it’s a business school, it’s good to add what you will bring to the school. Whether you weave in the contributions after each paragraph or at the end, is your choice. So, choose to add the contributions based on how your writing flows through the essay and how you’re able to build transitions. 

While writing stories, we’d recommend you to show and not tell, ensure that each value ties back to how it’s impacted the people around you and don’t be afraid to be vulnerable. Most of our learnings come from failure, and therefore, when you write stories about how you failed and what you learned, you signal to the school your ability to objectively evaluate a failure, not get crestfallen, take learnings, and grow as a person. 

In terms of writing this essay, build each of your paragraphs in STAR format, starting with the experience. Then go into the actions that were inspired by this experience and how you’d contribute to Booth, leveraging this experience. Once you’ve got this framework ready, start putting it together into an essay. 

Additional Information:

Is there any unclear information in your application that needs further explanation? If so, please use this section to clarify. (300 words)

Typically, this additional information question is used to add any additional information about your profile that impacts your chances of admission. This may include gaps in your education or professional experience, a career break, unconventional career transitions, underwhelming undergrad or GMAT/GRE performance, an unusual grading system followed by your undergrad school, different choices of recommenders, etc. You could also use this space to highlight some significant experience of your life that’s not been covered so far in the application; however, the chances of this happening are next to none. So, unless there are any extenuating circumstances you need to highlight, we’d recommend you leave this section blank. 

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