Why You Can’t ChatGPT Your Way Into Harvard

In a world of AI-generated content, your humanity is your edge.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT have become an integral part of daily life – helping us draft emails, summarize reports, and brainstorm ideas in seconds. Unsurprisingly, MBA applicants are turning to AI, too – in the hope that ChatGPT can help write business school essays. Does it work?

It might help you start the process by getting your ideas into one place, but it can’t take you across the finish line – and that’s not just our opinion, either. It’s the stance of the admissions offices themselves. What they’re looking for is an authentic you – your lived experience, your reflections, your personal growth. And no AI can substitute for that.

So while AI can be a useful tool for brainstorming or editing, when it comes to the parts that matter most – the insights, the reflection, the meaning – those still need to come from you.

Why Schools Are Focusing On AI-Resistant Prompts

Admissions offices know that AI isn’t going away, and they aren’t trying to ban it outright. Instead, many of the world’s top MBA programs focus their essay prompts to ensure that the answers require something no chatbot can supply: human depth.

These essay prompts aren’t just questions about your resume or goals; they’re invitations to reflect on the moments that shaped you – the risks you’ve taken, the failures you’ve wrestled with, the growth you’ve experienced. They’re designed to elicit responses that go beyond the surface.

A typical essay might ask you to reflect on what you’ll bring to the school community, how you have made a team more collaborative, or how curiosity has manifested itself in your life. These are never formulaic questions with neat, factual answers. They require deep reflection, personal insight, emotional nuance, and the ability to connect the dots between experience and identity.

Essay Prompts That Reveal AI’s Limits

Look at the essay prompts top schools are asking today:

Stanford GSB: What matters most to you, and why?
Chicago Booth: How does one of four provided photos resonate with your values?
INSEAD: Give a candid description of yourself as a person and a leader.

These aren’t just essay questions, but rather they’re exercises in reflection. They ask you to grapple with complexity, explore vulnerability, and connect the dots between your past, your present, and your ambitions. ChatGPT can write something plausible. But it can’t access the inner stakes – the doubts, the turning points, the moments that reshaped you. It can’t show how you’ve grown as a person and leader. And admissions officers are highly adept at identifying canned versus authentic answers.

Why These Prompts Challenge AI:

AI can’t identify your lived experience or peer into your soul.
It lacks self-awareness, personal stakes, and emotional context.
It produces safe, generalized answers – not honest, specific ones.

When AI attempts to answer these questions, the results often seem vague or generic, lacking the authentic voice and vulnerability that admissions committees are trained to recognize. That’s why the most compelling applications are often deeply personal, and grounded in real reflection.

What A Coach Can Do That AI Can’t

While AI tools can help you brainstorm or smooth out a sentence, they can’t do the deep work of helping you understand what your story really is – or why it matters.

That’s where coaching comes in. At Fortuna Admissions, coaching isn’t about writing essays for you or perfecting your grammar. It’s about helping you mine deeply for the insights that make your application unique and meaningful.

A great coach doesn’t just focus on generating a polished application. We ask the right questions to draw out the experiences, values, and goals that have shaped you. We help you reflect on your career path, clarify your motivations, and identify the threads that connect your personal and professional life – the threads that make your story truly yours.

What Great Coaches Offer Beyond AI:

Personal discovery: Helping you understand why you made certain choices, not just what you did in the moment.
Honest feedback: Challenging vague answers and pushing you toward deeper clarity.
Story shaping: Helping you connect your experiences into a clear, authentic narrative.
Critical context: Insight into the application pool and how you can stand out within it.

This process isn’t always easy. It often means revisiting moments of uncertainty, failure, or doubt – and finding the meaning in them. But it’s through this work that you can craft an application that doesn’t just check a box but leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

At Fortuna, we’ve seen firsthand how this process doesn’t just strengthen an application – it helps candidates grow in confidence, purpose, and clarity about what’s next in their personal and professional journey.

In A World Of AI, Your Humanity Is Your Edge

In an era flooded with AI-generated content, authenticity is what sets you apart. Business schools aren’t just looking for candidates with the right credentials or polished essays. They’re looking for people who are self-aware, thoughtful, and real – future leaders who can reflect on their experiences, connect with others, and lead with purpose and empathy.

The real work of an MBA application is not about crafting perfect sentences or impressive turns of phrase. It’s about doing the hard, human work of reflection – looking at your own journey with honesty and asking: What shaped me? What challenges did I face? What did I learn, and how do I want to grow next?

At Fortuna Admissions, we embrace the nitty-gritty. We want the imperfections, doubts, and challenges. Getting admitted is the next step on your journey, but that journey doesn’t end at school. We understand that the application process is an opportunity for introspection and a catalyst for personal growth – and it’s that introspection that will really capture the attention of the admissions committees.

Ready to put in the work? Fortuna’s team of expert coaches is here to help you reflect, refine, and tell your story in a way that’s both powerful and true.

Judith Silverman Hodara is a Co-Founder and Director at Fortuna Admissions and former Head of MBA Admissions at The Wharton School. For more free advice from Fortuna Admissions in partnership with Poets&Quants, check out these videos and articles. For a candid assessment of your chances of admission success at a top MBA program, sign up now for a free consultation.

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