Harvard Business School Essay Tips, 2024-2025
For the first time in more than ten years, Harvard Business School (HBS) has changed the essay questions for its MBA application. This year’s essays veer away from the open-ended, 900-word “What more would you like us to know?” and toward three shorter essays. In these essays, HBS seeks evidence that applicants are business minded, leadership focused, and growth oriented. In this post, we offer our tips on how to approach these essays.
Business-Minded Essay: Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations and communities you plan to serve. (Up to 300 words)
Here, HBS is looking to understand both why you want to do what you want to do and how you will make your impact in the world. HBS wants to know what big problem you want to solve and what your plans are for doing so. With only 300 words, you’ll need to be succinct and clear when you explain what led you to the career goals you have, in both the short and long term. For example, if your field is health care, and your goal is to lead a hospital where all communities have access to excellent care, you could share experiences you’ve had of seeing patients in underserved communities be turned away from hospitals or clinics, or otherwise not having adequate access to information and quality care. These experiences could be personal anecdotes, professional experiences, or anything else from your past that caused this spark or aha moment.
Continuing with our health care example, you could use the remaining portion of your essay to discuss how you will improve the lives of patients in underserved communities. Explain how the roles you have identified for after your MBA experience will allow you to help patients in these communities. What skills, relationships, and knowledge will you gain through HBS and your career that will put you in a position to help individuals by providing better access to quality care?
Leadership-Focused Essay: What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (250 words)
This short essay seeks specific examples from your background of times that have informed both your impact on other people and how you show up as a leader. These examples often stem from communities you have been a part of, whether in college, at work, or in your personal life. For example, participating in clubs as an undergrad can help form your views on the world, how you collaborate with others, and what leadership traits you exhibit. Other examples of influential experiences include a formative event during childhood, a tragedy you have overcome, and an ongoing difficulty you must navigate.
You might find it helpful to mention specific people you have had an impact on as part of the experiences you share. That specificity helps bring color and depth to how you have invested in other people and how you have grown as a result. For example, if you trained someone in a student club to take over the organization after you graduated, you could share how the person has since grown the club by X%, illustrating your amplified impact.
Through these experiences, you can reflect on the leadership traits you exhibited that allowed you to find success, as well as the traits you want to continue developing to make an impact on other people and the world. Remember that you can develop leadership qualities without being in an official “leadership” position. For example, if you were an integral member of a successful team and proposed ideas that positively influenced the team’s trajectory or result, you showed leadership. HBS is looking for applicants with these qualities to fill its case method classrooms – people who can ask questions or provide insight that can change the course of a discussion.
Growth-Oriented Essay: Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (250 words)
HBS, like all MBA programs, seeks individuals who are curious about the world and want to learn from their diverse classmates. This question asks you to offer an example of a time when you showed a growth mind-set. One way to demonstrate this is by sharing an example of a time when you changed your mind about something as a result of talking to someone, experiencing something, or learning new information that broadened your perspective. People who can’t, or refuse to, change their mind won’t thrive in either a case-method classroom or their career. Your example could come from your work, an extracurricular activity, or your personal life.
Another example of showing curiosity could be taking college classes in which you learned or discovered something that ultimately altered the career trajectory you’d been on or how you viewed the world. You could discuss how the experience has shaped your growth as a person, a leader, or both. You might tie your growth in this area to growth you want to continue having as an MBA student and throughout your career.
Tying It All Together
We encourage you to look at your three essays for HBS together to make sure you have demonstrated the qualities the school seeks in its students: interpersonal skills, quantitative skills, leadership, and a willingness to learn from others. You also should consider whether the stories you share in your essays come from different parts of your life – personal, extracurricular, academic, and work. For example, you should avoid writing three work-related essays. Across the three submissions, you want to show how you have demonstrated HBS’s desired skills in different areas of your life
In Stratus Admissions’ How to Get into Harvard Business School, you will find information on a variety of the MBA program’s offerings, such as FIELD, Innovation Labs, the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, and the HBS Health Care Conference. This free guide also includes class profile statistics.