For the 2017-2018 new admissions season Berkeley Haas business school has changed its application essays requirements:

Essay 1. Tell us a six-word story that reflects a memorable experience in your life-to-date. Elaborate on why it is meaningful to you. (250 words maximum)

Essay 2. Respond to one of the following prompts: (250 words maximum)

• Describe a significant obstacle you have encountered and how it has impacted you.
• Describe how you have cultivated a diverse and inclusive culture.
• Describe a leadership experience and how you made a positive and lasting impact.

Essay 3.

1. Briefly describe your immediate post-MBA career goals. (50 words maximum)
2. How have prior experiences motivated and prepared you to pursue these goals? (250 words maximum)

ANALYSIS AND TIPS FOR BERKELEY 2017-2018 MBA ESSAYS

Essay 1. To make a catching, picturesque and completed six-word summary of your story is probably, more challenging task than to describe this story with 250 words after its presentation. The creation of the six-word pitch will take a lot of efforts and time, so you will need a plan that works:

• Remember 10-12 stories/cases you want to Berkeley most of all. List these stories in one column and fill in another column with the reasons of why they might be interesting to the school. Write your personal characteristics, which describe the roots of your behavior/actions in these cases, in a 3 column.
• Read all three columns 2-3 times, then close the table and remind just 2-3 stories, which would describe you as a person the most. If you were the AdComs member, what would you remember first of all? Would you consider valuable what you had remembered for the b-school community?
• If your answer is “Yes”, then you have chosen good stories. Now narrow down your shortlist to just one story by matching each of 2-3 chosen stories with six-word summaries. Write down the summaries, share them with your friends and family (people who know you best of all) and select the one, which would catch the biggest attention due to its uniqueness and intriguing idea.

Essay 2. Let’s look closer at each prompt:

     1. Describe a significant obstacle you have encountered and how it has impacted you.

Be it your professional or personal life, stick to the results and conclusions you have made after you encountered the obstacle. The main reason to choose this prompt is to show your attitude to difficulties in your life: how you perceive and pass through them, whether you are able to analyze them and learn lessons, how you transform by passing through challenges. Following this explanation, choose the case that would describe such experience most significantly.

     2. Describe how you have cultivated a diverse and inclusive culture.

One of the best approaches to this prompt is to describe your multinational experience. It might be working or studying in an international team, living or traveling abroad. If you do not have such experience it would be enough to write about your personal perception of diversity and inclusivity. Why do you think you would benefit from experiencing both things? How would they enrich your personality?

     3. Describe a leadership experience and how you made a positive and lasting impact.

To answer to this prompt, start with the end of the question, which is “your impact”. Remember all cases, when you behaved as a leader (both personal and professional) and scale the impact you made. You may scale as you like, be it qualitative or quantitative results (e.g. you might have raised your company’s position by considerably increasing sales, or completely changed one person’s life by giving him/her advice or assistance). Choose the one, which will occur on top of the list, and write about it.

Essay 3. Typical career goals MBA essay, which includes the statement of your immediate post-MBA goal (what?where?why?) and your motivation (to follow the word limit and also make your essay achieve the target, choose those experience and skills from your background, which might seem relevant to your post-MBA goal. This will prove your goals are realistic and well thought-of.