ESMT Kofi Annan Fellow Sona Rostomyan on the MBA Essay

Essays are an important part of the MBA application

Essays are one of the important elements of MBA application. Essay writing may seem daunting at first sight, but when you are in the process it becomes fun. As a current MBA student, I would like to share with you my strategy of essay writing for an MBA application. Each business school has its own essay questions, but there are certain questions which are similar -- for example, questions about your future career plans, your strengths and weaknesses, fit of the program, etc. My strategy included the following steps:

Step 1. Choose the business schools and MBA programs you want to apply to. How to choose the right program is a different topic about which I talked about a little in my previous article. When you have chosen a program, you have the list of the essay questions you need to answer.

Many people usually apply to two, three, or four programs. I applied only to ESMT’s full-time MBA program. Even though ESMT was my final choice, I considered some other MBA programs and looked through the essay questions of those programs as well. Why? Because having similar essay questions formulated differently helps you think about different aspects of the same essay question.

Step 2. Write down all the essay questions and keep them somewhere that’s easily available to you whenever you want them. I wrote those questions in my phone and was able to mentally refresh the questions I needed to think about every time I had free time to think.

Step 3. Brainstorm. Here’s where the fun begins. Pick a question at a time, break the question into parts and analyze it in detail. Think of relevant situations or examples from your life.

Sometimes, it is difficult to remember a certain situation directly and fully related to the essay question. Just write down any idea which comes to your mind, even if you don't see a direct connection between the idea and the topic or, you think it is a weak or over-simplified idea. Our memory stores the information with different complicated linkages, and often an idea can activate another idea, which in turn will activate another relevant idea, thus creating a chain of ideas for your essay. I wrote down all the keywords of those ideas. Then, I started to analyze those ideas. How they relate to me, how they make me stand out from other applicants, if there is anything interesting and unique which characterizes me, etc.

Most of the essay questions make you think about your past accomplishments, future goals and how the business school can help you. This means that you have to know yourself and know the school. It is a very interesting activity, which helps you to discover your uniqueness, your strengths and see how you and the business school fit together.

Step 4. Write the essay. After brainstorming and analyzing yourself and the business school, you will have a bunch of ideas on paper. Now, you need to filter those ideas leaving the best and the most relevant and deleting others. Then, you start writing the essay using those ideas. Try to writeas if you are telling a story and want to make it interesting for the reader. There are interesting essay writing tips on this and other websites. It is also useful to check the business school’s website to see if they have special tips or requirements. But of course, the most important thing is to “be yourself”. You should believe that the essay describes you and not somebody else.

I did not write essays in a day. The longest part for me was step 3. Sometimes we think we know ourselves, but when we are asked to write about ourselves answering specific essay questions, we find out it is not so easy to do. That is why it took me some time to refresh my memory and analyze the situations from my past which were relevant to the essays for my application to ESMT Full-time MBA program.

About Sona Rostomyan

Sona Rostomyan is a full-time MBA student at ESMT who was nominated as one of the Kofi Annan Fellows this year. Prior to joining ESMT as an MBA student, she started her career at one of the most rapidly growing banks in Armenia (Ameriabank CJSC) working first in the customer service department and then in the back office. She has more than 4 years experience in the banking industry (including customer transactions formalization, and account management). She enjoys solving mathematical puzzles, reading books and has a passion for photography.

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