Stanford keeps its tradition of 2017-2018 MBA application topics. As it has been for previous years, it requires to answer 2 questions, with the word limit of 1150 for both:

1. What matters most to you and why?
2. Why Stanford?

The first topic is recommended to comprise 750 words and the second one – 400. While Stanford admissions page advises to not stick to what Stanford would seek in essays, but rather think of your own identity, interests and motivation, there is still one direction it would value most – your entrepreneurship spirit.

Whether you have a background in finance, marketing, consulting, liberal arts or law your skills and abilities as an entrepreneur will be of the largest value for Stanford. The strongest ones to demonstrate are as follows:

• Drive to start something or change existing patterns
• Leader approach
• Personal development in a team
• Global vision

Let us give some examples for each of 4 skills to demonstrate what is expected more clearly. The cases that may work for Stanford are:

• Your family has been moving around different countries, since you were a child. You have experienced a multicultural environment and known well all its challenges. To help your mates and share your experience, you started Cult classes and events to help newcomers adapting.
• You played football well, when you were a child. You didn’t take it seriously however, till your teammates and visitors would wish pay money for your play! Now you’re making a lot of money in consulting and have invested some of them in your home town football team, and helped them grow in a local club.
• You are a natural-born mentor, who get inspiration and drive by helping others to learn and develop. As a result, you have become an informal guru for interns and colleagues at work. Some of them got promotions and achieved impressive results.
• You’ve got an opportunity to work in a multicultural team and designed an effective approach to achieve collaboration and exceed goals. You have revealed your strong leadership skills and global vision to prioritize diversity and use it as an additional opportunity to support and enrich the teamwork.

Whatever you have to tell the Stanford’s Adcoms, do not use the cases above as patterns to brainstorm your own ideas. Just think of them as examples of good direction to develop personal cases. Additionally, bear in mind that Stanford MBA application experience is exciting itself, even if you are not invited! So enjoy the process of learning yourself better and discovering new things in your personality!