Essay B
In the second essay, please note that there are two separate but related questions. Answer both. First, we ask you to describe your career aspirations. What, and how, do you hope to contribute in your professional life after Stanford? You might focus solely on your future plans, or include elements of your previous experiences. The choice is yours. You do not need to have your entire life planned, but you may find it difficult to explain why you need an MBA to achieve your goals if the goals themselves are ill-defined. You should be honest, with yourself and with us, in addressing these questions. Certainly you do not need to make up a path if you don't have one, but a certain level of focused interests will enable you to make the most of the Stanford experience. Second, we ask how the MBA Program at Stanford will help you achieve these aspirations. The key here is that you should have goals for your Stanford experience, whether personal, intellectual, or professional. How do you plan to take advantage of the incredible opportunities at Stanford? How do you envision yourself contributing, growing, and learning here at the Business School? From both parts of this essay, we learn about your dreams, what has shaped them, and how Stanford can help you bring them into fruition.
Essay C: Short Answers
This year, we have added two short-answer questions. Unlike the two essays, in which you are asked to write about your life from a more “global” perspective, these questions ask you to reflect on a specific recent experience that has made a difference to you and/or the people around you. The best answers will transport us to that moment in time by painting a vivid picture not only of what you did, but also of how you did it. Include details about what you thought and felt during that time and your perceptions about how others responded. From these short-answer responses, we visualize you “in action.”
Good People Can Give Bad Advice
Moving beyond the specific essay and short-answer questions, I'd like to address a couple of myths. First, one of the most good-spirited but misguided pieces of advice is "Tell the Committee on Admissions what makes you unique" in your essays. This often leads applicants to believe that you need to have accomplishments or feats that are unusual or different from your peers (e.g., traveling to an exotic place or talking about a tragic situation in your life). But how are you to know which of your experiences are unique when you know neither the backgrounds of the other applicants nor the topics they have chosen? What makes you unique is not that you have had these experiences, but rather how and why your perspective has changed or been reinforced as a result of those and other everyday experiences. That is a story that only you can tell. If you concentrate your efforts on telling us who you are, differentiation will occur naturally; if your goal is to appear unique, you actually may achieve the opposite effect. Truly, the most impressive essays that we read each year are those that do not begin with the goal of impressing us.
Second, there is a widespread myth that if you don't have amazing essays, you won't be admitted even if you are a compelling applicant. Please remember that no single element of your application is dispositive. And since we recognize that our application has limits, we constantly remind ourselves to focus on the applicant rather than the application. This means that we will admit someone despite the application essays if we feel we’ve gotten a good sense of the
