Haas MBA Essay Analysis, Your 2015-2016 Application

Haas MBA Essay Analysis: Essay One

At Berkeley-Haas, we seek candidates from a broad range of cultures, backgrounds, and industries who demonstrate a strong cultural fit with our program and defining principles. Our distinctive culture is defined by four key principles — Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. Please use the following essays as an opportunity to reflect on and share with us the values, experiences, and accomplishments that have helped shape who you are. (Learn more about Berkeley-Haas’ Defining Principles)

If you could choose one song that expresses who you are, what is it and why? (250 word maximum)

Bold. A throwback to a question that USED to be one of the classic Haas essay questions. Let’s unpack it.

What does it mean for a song to “express” who you are? Express how? Words/lyrics? The way it sounds? Some kind of social/political context that’s a huge part of the song’s origin story? The fact is, it can be any of those. But one way or another, you’ll need to make a clear argument for the connection between whichever one it is, and something interesting about you.

First rule of thumb, unless the song is something like “Happy Birthday” or “Jingle Bells” … it is safest to assume that the reader may not be able to hum the tune (i.e., know it well). And unless the band is something like “Michael Jackson” or “The Beatles” … there is also a chance the reader may not be familiar with (or a fan of) the artist you’ve chosen. Why is this significant? Because it has implications for how you organize your 250 words. If you were in a room of Radiohead fanatics, you’d be able to pick a track and talk about it much differently. When that room contains folks who may have never heard of Radiohead, your original case will fall on deaf ears. You need to “universalize” your message. This is how you need to think about this essay. Universalize your message so that the reader — i.e., EVERY reader — is equally likely to extract the desired message.

How to achieve this? Simple. Think of this essay in two pieces:

1. Point #1 — “For me, this song is about X.” or “This song creates Y response when I listen to it.”
2. Point #2 — “This is how I embody that in real life: X Y Z.”

That’s it. First, “universalize” by establishing an immutable premise, which is how YOU interpret the lyrics, or discuss your interpretation of their significance. Make sure it’s through YOUR filter though. The second you start to talk about how X song is about Y, you may get that knee-jerk response of “well that’s not true, that song is about Z!” Avoid that at all costs. No one can argue that that’s how YOU receive it, so, you’re safe doing it that way.

Now comes part II: connect it to how you behave, or how it somehow reflects attributes of yours. So how do you pick what attribute to talk about? Well, we’ve always found that if you treat it as an open-ended prompt, you may land on a personal quality that feels like it describes you perfectly, but it runs the risk of being applicable to others. One way around that is to establish a few marquee identifying qualities of yours. For example: banker (Goldman, JP Morgan, etc.), 760 GMAT, age 25, graduate from top-ranked undergraduate school, Chinese, male. Something like that. Now, imagine TEN others who share the EXACT same specs as you. What makes you different from THOSE guys? If you were told that Haas had one seat left, and they needed to fill it with a Chinese male with a 760 GMAT banker etc. etc., and they had 10 viable candidates who met those requirements… why should they pick you over the others? The answer to THAT questions is likely to give a clue about what should be Part 2 to this question. Finding the song to match can happen later.

Haas MBA Essay Analysis: Essay Two

Please respond to one of the following prompts: (250 word maximum)

Describe an experience that has fundamentally changed the way you see the world and how it transformed you.

This is a carryover from last year. So let’s take a trip down memory lane…

95% of applicants will potentially have great stories to tell here, but the mistake they usually make is focusing on the CHANGED or slightly ALTERED worldview. The most effective response here contrasts the ORIGINAL worldview with… the CHANGED world view. This is a BEFORE & AFTER essay. This is what I used to think about X. Then this THING happened that changed my outlook. And my outlook went from X to…….. Y. Here’s why it changed, and this is how I changed as a result. I went from A to B.

Unless we know the “before,” NONE of it is interesting. At the end of Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader emotionally embraces his son, Luke Skywalker. Big deal. A father being nice to his kid? What’s interesting about that?

Well, only that “fifteen minutes prior, the same-said father tried to turn his son into an agent of evil, or… eviscerate him.” That’s a bit of a twist wouldn’t you say? Kinda need to know about THAT before you can be impressed about what happens after the change. Also, we are now begging to find out how did the guy go from wanting to “kill his son” to “saving him”?

The starker the contrast between the BEFORE and AFTER, the stronger the essay. We need to know the following elements:

I used to think THIS about XXX.
Then this THING happened—an event, a person who influenced you, some agent of change, doesn’t matter what form it takes.
I then went from thinking XXX to thinking YYY, on account of that agent of change.
Personally, I changed from being AAA to being BBB, and this is why this is worth writing about.

Describe a significant accomplishment and why it makes you proud.

This is also somewhat of a carryover from last year. So, here we go again:

Your CHOICE of accomplishment here will say something. The admissions committee will have access to the full slate of your biggest achievements through your resume. The one that is “most significant” will reveal something the resume is not likely to convey. For example, perhaps you talk about a small achievement during your very first job that inspired you to embrace RISK. Or you can talk about a virtually consequence-less accomplishment of turning a company adversary into your greatest ally through some kind of tactical brilliance. The most significant accomplishment may not have anything to do with “the bottom line.” Consider the accomplishments that make us the most excited about your future ability to succeed.

Describe a difficult decision you have made and why it was challenging.

This is a tricky one, because some decisions masquerade as tricky ones, but are actually easy decisions accompanied by complicated emotions. Let’s get inside that distinction.

Let’s say you’re diagnosed with a strange rare illness where you are told you are no longer allowed to eat red meat, otherwise you will die instantly. Let’s further assume that you have a spouse who depends on you, kids who depend on you, and you really really really love your spouse and kids more than you love red meat (just pretend). Now, this decision may SUCK because you may also reallllllly love a good steak or a good burger, but ultimately, you’re hopefully not going to choose to have one more bite of red meat, only to cause an instant death and leave all those people hanging. Does the decision hurt? Sure it does. It’s hard (as I write this) to even THINK about giving up delicious steaks and burgers and racks of lamb, etc. But it’s not really a hard decision.

Let’s say you love two employees the way you love a brother, or child, or best friend. And pretend further that for some reason, you needed to fire one. Let’s further assume that both were equally valuable for various reasons. Now THIS is a hard decision because there is potentially equal merit to EITHER SIDE. Or, if not equal merit, at least a compelling argument to be made for either side. In the previous example, there really isn’t a great case to be made for enjoying one last bite of a steak only to then cause a lifetime of suffering to loved ones, right? Here, however, it is not quite so simple. This is the kind of difficult choice we want to see you grappling with.

Here’s a neat trick to figuring out whether you have a “good” hard dilemma. Can you make a compelling case for EITHER or ALL potential decisions? If you can’t, then it’s probably not truly a hard choice. For it to be hard, you need to be able to find clear merit for either side — therein lies the rub: GIVEN that there is merit to multiple points of view, what’s the BEST one? Now we get into cooler stuff like assessing the bigger picture, looking at longer-term impacts, weighing intangibles with tangibles (“yes, this was in the short-term financial interest, but Choice A would have caused a mutiny and resulted in a mass exodus of our key people; so we opted for a loss, but we preserved our conscience and therefore the team that would lead us through the rough patch and eventually into great future successes”).

Once you have your choice, here are the ingredients of a killer short essay:

• Walk us through the situation as quickly as you can so that we understand the choices at hand.
• Then make strong cases for multiple approaches, and SELL them (don’t get ahead of yourself here)
• Now that you’ve laid out multiple outcomes, explain why this was a hard choice, because for each of those potential results, there was something undeniably desirable
• But then, walk us through YOUR METHODOLOGY for isolating the deltas between those results, using NEWER information, like long-term benefits, or other deciding factors that started to tilt the scales toward one approach over another

It’s all about that last bullet. We’re less interested in your choice and the results (we can get much of that from your resume) than we are in the way your GEARS work. Show us how you arrived at a way to help come to the right decision. Not, what that decision was, and why you made it. Go back one step and show us how you got there…

Haas MBA Essay Analysis: Essay Three

Tell us about your path to business school and your future plans. How will the Berkeley-Haas experience help you along this journey? (500 word maximum)

Very straightforward, standard b-school essay question. Not much to analyze here, other than to suggest a few key nodes you’ll wanna hit along the way:

• Before you delve into your path, give us a frame first. You’re applying to b-school because you’re chasing something, and you’re getting stuck (otherwise you wouldn’t need that MBA right?). So let’s start with what you’re chasing. Sell us on the idea first, in very broad strokes. Get our buy-in from the start. Get us leaning forward in our chairs. Get us excited. Give us just enough to understand what the idea is and how you’re going to achieve it. Very high-level (details will come in a few paragraphs).

• Now take us to only the three (or so) nodes in your past that connect the most important dots along your overall journey. That word journey is important. Only the stuff that ties to your PROGRESS toward the goal you established at the top. Now, there may have been some lateral moves and digressions along the way — that’s okay — all part of a progression, but the take-home point of each is that it somehow nudged you closer toward this eventual goal. Walk us through it as you would a story.

• This progression should bring you up to the point where you are either unable to advance any further without an MBA or without the business school experience. Or, you believe that an MBA is going to catapult you toward that goal. Explain it to us, show us the need, show us where the gaps are, make us understand the answer to this question: “Why aren’t you out there attacking your goal instead?”

• Now that established what you don’t have, show us how Haas gets you those things PARTICULARLY well or BETTER THAN a competitor. Imagine getting invites from Stanford and MIT and UCLA and HBS. Why might you select Haas over all of those? What is it about Haas specifically that fits best with what you need? (If your answer works with any other school, you’re not getting specific enough.)

Haas MBA Essay Analysis: Optional Essay

Tell us about your path to business school and your future plans. How will the Berkeley-Haas experience help you along this journey? (500 word maximum)

Very straightforward, standard b-school essay question. Not much to analyze here, other than to suggest a few key nodes you’ll wanna hit along the way:

• Before you delve into your path, give us a frame first. You’re applying to b-school because you’re chasing something, and you’re getting stuck (otherwise you wouldn’t need that MBA right?). So let’s start with what you’re chasing. Sell us on the idea first, in very broad strokes. Get our buy-in from the start. Get us leaning forward in our chairs. Get us excited. Give us just enough to understand what the idea is and how you’re going to achieve it. Very high-level (details will come in a few paragraphs).

• Now take us to only the three (or so) nodes in your past that connect the most important dots along your overall journey. That word journey is important. Only the stuff that ties to your PROGRESS toward the goal you established at the top. Now, there may have been some lateral moves and digressions along the way — that’s okay — all part of a progression, but the take-home point of each is that it somehow nudged you closer toward this eventual goal. Walk us through it as you would a story.

• This progression should bring you up to the point where you are either unable to advance any further without an MBA or without the business school experience. Or, you believe that an MBA is going to catapult you toward that goal. Explain it to us, show us the need, show us where the gaps are, make us understand the answer to this question: “Why aren’t you out there attacking your goal instead?”

• Now that established what you don’t have, show us how Haas gets you those things PARTICULARLY well or BETTER THAN a competitor. Imagine getting invites from Stanford and MIT and UCLA and HBS. Why might you select Haas over all of those? What is it about Haas specifically that fits best with what you need? (If your answer works with any other school, you’re not getting specific enough.)