How To Write Stellar Wharton MBA Essays

The Wharton School is famously known for its highly collaborative culture, where while you push your intellectual boundaries in the rigorous academic environment, you also stand your ground and support your peers to reach the same heights. So, if you’re someone who thrives in an environment that prioritizes collaboration over competition, then this is the school for you. 

The school, with its 100,000+ alumni across the world, boasts about having one of the largest alumni networks amongst all business schools. This provides you an opportunity to connect with successful alumni from diverse backgrounds working in varied fields, to gain industry insights, and oftentimes even internship and full-time job interview recommendations. 

The school’s inclusive atmosphere and global mindset also attract applicants from diverse personal and professional backgrounds, enabling you to explore varied business landscapes. 

Wharton is also known for its emphasis on analytics and equips its graduates with strong data-backed decision-making skills. 

While the McNulty Leadership Program at Wharton provides experiential learning opportunities, initiatives like the Wharton Leadership Ventures push students to lead in challenging environments, developing on-ground leadership skills. 

The school’s academic rigor and flexibility, with options to choose from 19+ majors and hundreds of electives, allow students to customize their degree depending on their professional aspirations.  

Lastly, if you’re someone who aspires to build a career in finance, you should definitely explore Wharton given their excellence in Finance. Their unparalleled depth in corporate finance, investment management, private equity, and fintech, dominance in fields like banking and financial services, and strong alumni base working in leadership roles in finance would definitely give you the right exposure, as well as opportunities to develop a successful career in the field. 

Now, without further ado, let’s dive into how you need to write the essays for the Wharton MBA application. 

Essay 1

How do you plan to use the Wharton MBA program to help you achieve your future professional goals? You might consider your past experience, short- and long-term goals, and resources available at Wharton. (500 words; Required)

The first essay in your Wharton MBA application is akin to a typical career goals essay. Given the school has set a 500-word limit, there’s a standard format you’re expected to follow and the essay has to be within the word count. 

To draft this essay, you need to deeply reflect on what it is you want to achieve in life. This dream/mission/vision should be in an area where you’ve already worked so far in your career trajectory, because business school might consider it a risky bet if you share that you’re hoping to make a triple jump: role, geography, and industry. So, for instance, if you’ve been working in the climate tech space in a VC fund, perhaps short-term goals could be taking on an operations and strategy role in a climate tech firm to gain deeper on-ground experience and operational insights and then start your own VC fund that would heavily invest in innovative solutions in the space back in your home country. 

In terms of writing this essay, we recommend you use the following structure: 

Begin the essay with a personal anecdote or a meaningful connection that will captivate the reader’s attention. This could be a thought-provoking personal quote from a pivotal moment in your personal life or a professional challenge, something that stands for what hooked your interest in developing a career in your choice of role or industry. It could also be a striking statistic that highlights the scope of the problem in a particular space, offering insight into your decision to build a career in the space. For instance, if you were inspired to start an education-focused venture capital fund due to inadequate educational resources in your hometown, explain that connection.

After establishing your hook, cast a wider net to showcase the scope of change in the space on a larger level. Identify statistics regarding how many individuals experience the same challenges, either nationally or globally, and incorporate compelling data to illustrate the necessity for innovative solutions or investment to create meaningful change.

With your audience engaged, it’s important to establish your credibility. This means showcasing the experience you have gained in the relevant field so far and the skills you’ve developed to earn the admissions committee’s trust in your potential to tackle the issue. Conclude this paragraph with some challenges you uncovered over the course of your career trajectory, which can then be tied directly to what you aim to learn during your MBA program, as well as how your short-term objectives will prepare you for your long-term aspirations.

In the second half of the essay, concentrate on how you intend to leverage the resources at Wharton to realize this mission. We recommend developing pillars that enable you to outline key areas of focus regarding the skills you wish to develop through the program. For example, if you aim to create a VC fund centered on climate tech, it is crucial to acquire entrepreneurial, organizational, investment, policy, and leadership skills.

Once you have outlined your pillars, conduct thorough research on the school, including setting up conversations with current students and alumni to get a deeper perspective and more unique insights from their lived experiences. By investing your time into understanding more about the school and writing specific and succinct points on how the school would enable you to reach your mission through the academic, extracurricular and experiential opportunities, you’d not only be able to convince them on your plan of action but also showcase your investment and efforts towards comprehending your alignment with the school. Finally, conclude with a statement that reiterates your mission.

Essay 2

Taking into consideration your background—personal, professional, and/or academic—how do you plan to make specific, meaningful contributions to the Wharton community? (400 words; Required)

The contributions essay is the school’s way of understanding what you bring to the table. The phrasing of the essay highlights how they do not wish for you to focus on only one aspect of your background. Typically, a successful essay touches upon three to four areas in which you can contribute to the school. 

Before diving into actually writing the essay, we’d recommend you enlist all the different engagements from your personal, professional, and academic life. Whether you had a penchant for writing and wrote plays during college, or are a trained dancer who provided dance therapy, or developed innovative products in college and then at work, launched a non-profit, created inclusive environments through clubs in college or at work, or led sustainability initiatives to achieve carbon neutrality, just make a list. 

Then, go through the list and think about your motivations to pursue these interests. For example, since you were the first woman in your village to pursue a career, you wanted to develop pathways for others to follow suit. It could be that when a mentee came out to you about his identity, you helped them feel safe, showcased acceptance and validation, and supported them in coming out to their parents, and getting sensitized to struggles faced by the LGBTQIA+ community, you became an ally in some community to help others facing similar struggles.  

Apart from it, work-wise, given your specific field of work, you can think about what it is that you’ve learnt in your trajectory so far that could be helpful for others. For instance, working for a climate tech fund might reveal insights about investors’ opinions and biases, which would be useful for a peer who’s got operational experience in climate tech and is looking to launch their own platform. 

In terms of writing this answer, you need to pick the three-four areas and then dive deeper into the on-campus opportunities, clubs, societies, affinity groups, career treks, small group discussions, simulations, and conferences. By understanding the opportunities where you can contribute, you can specifically share how you can add value by making meaningful contributions to the Wharton community. 

Wharton MBA Reapplicant Essay

Please use this space to share with the Admissions Committee how you have reflected and grown since your previous application and discuss any relevant updates to your candidacy (e.g., changes in your professional life, additional coursework, and extracurricular/volunteer engagements). (250 words; required for reapplicants)

If you’re reapplying to Wharton, you are expected to write a 250-word essay here that focuses on the aspects of your application that have evolved over the course of the time passed between the last time you applied to the school. What that means is basically, you must discuss the changes with respect to your profile since your last submission, based on deeper reflection and ding analysis. A couple of things applicants must discuss in this essay are changes to their job title, role, and responsibilities, career transitions or pivots, and how the transition has brought you closer to your desired goals, a deeper understanding of your goals and vision, strengthened leadership and/or managerial acumen, and/or improved GMAT/GRE score. In essence, you need to share that when you reflected deeply on your rejection, these were the steps you took to strengthen your candidature. 

Optional Essay

Please use this space to share any additional information about yourself that cannot be found elsewhere in your application and that you would like to share with the Admissions Committee. This space can also be used to address any extenuating circumstances (e.g., unexplained gaps in work experience, choice of recommenders, inconsistent or questionable academic performance, areas of weakness, etc.) that you would like the Admissions Committee to consider. (500 words)

The optional essay is truly optional. Since applicants tend to want to utilize all the real estate they can get their hands on, we’d like first to reinforce that you need to write an optional essay if there are any extenuating circumstances you need to shed more light on. You should use this space to address issues such as gaps in your education or work history, career breaks, unconventional career paths, less-than-stellar undergraduate or GMAT/GRE scores, any unusual grading practices at your undergraduate institution and/or an unusual choice of recommenders. 

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If you found this advice helpful, reach out to us at admissionsgateway.com or email us at info@admissionsgateway.com.