INSEAD MBA Essay Analysis, Your 2015-2016 App

INSEAD MBA Essay Analysis: Job Essays

Job Essay 1: Briefly summarise your current (or most recent) job, including the nature of work, major responsibilities, and where relevant, employees under your supervision, size of budget, clients/products and results achieved.

Okay folks, no real need to be creative here, or dramatic, or “interesting.” Why say that? Because if you attempt it, it may come across as an insecurity. You’re the guy who doesn’t understand when straightforward is actually a show of strength.

Be brief, straightforward, and get into the details…fast. One way of looking at this is simply to flesh out (somewhat) your latest entry on your resume. Just, turn it into a readable paragraph so that anyone reading it can understand exactly where you work, exactly what it is you do, and exactly what your accomplishments mean (i.e., you’ve given us enough context to be able to make sense of them). And that’s all, folks. Aim for 250 words.

Job Essay 2: What would be your next step in terms of position if you were to remain in the same company?

Assume for a minute that you are going to STAY at your current place of work for the next twenty years (just pretend). Presumably, you’ll rise in the ranks in SOME capacity. Even if you’re the CEO of a start-up, your position will evolve somehow as your company grows. Imagine that spectrum between today and 20 years from now sub-divided into five major bumps. What’s the very next one? Explain the bump in terms of what is it you do/oversee today and how it will CHANGE once you’re promoted or rise in the ranks some other way.

All we’re trying to do is understand where you are in life. That’s it. No need to explain that you truly want to do something else; we’re just getting our bearings. Aim for 250 words.

Job Essay 3: Please give a full description of your career since graduating from university. Describe your career path with the rationale behind your choices.

This is where it starts to get real. Whereas the first few can be extremely devoid of “carefully chosen words,” here, you need to express ideas clearly, and compellingly.

…and this is gonna take some thought.

Start by explaining the context behind your very first post-graduate decision, by way of some overarching goal — as clear or as nebulous as it may have been. Given that you one-day wanted to X, you decided to pursue Y as your first official move after university. Explain your developments, skills gained, ways in which you advanced your career interests (or gained clarity on what it was you truly wanted to do), and let that guide your description of whatever major thing happened next. Presumably, you were promoted, or you chose another job, or you chose another industry, or a life circumstance spun things in a new direction, etc. Whatever it is, keep in mind that this is all part of a single narrative that connects each juncture along a single spectrum that takes us from the first job after university to wherever you are today, with your decision-making as your rudder at each key moment. We should be able to read this essay and then repeat back not just what the steps were of your career, but why you made your choices at each step.

Aim for 300-400 words.

Job Essay 4: Discuss your short and long term career aspirations with or without an MBA from INSEAD.

So, tempting as it may be to address the ‘with or without’ MBA piece, leapfrog to the post-MBA stage, when you’re putting it all into motion, attacking your ST goals. Before you get into the nitty gritty of your short term goal choices, give us a frame by painting a (quick) picture of your LT goals. This will help us understand what it is you’re ultimately aiming for, and thus, your logic for your short-term steps will have more impact.

Focus on the things you’re hoping to achieve at each critical stage (there should be around three key moments along your journey – some will require more, some less). Each stage should feel absolutely necessary in order for the next one to be a possibility. There must be logic connecting the dots. THIS is where you can show off your business brain. How measured is your plan? How researched are you? Is it too fragile? Does it seem likely to happen? What if things don’t go your way; does your approach seem to suggest that you have a Plan B? On the surface, you’re just explaining us the pieces of the pathway, but underneath, if you’re doing it right, you’re selling us on this plan as though it were a BUSINESS plan. Make us believe that your “idea” and “plan” are bulletproof, and that you are the guy who’s gonna make it happen.

Aim for 300 words or so.

Optional Job Essay: If you are currently not working or if you plan to leave your current employer more than 2 months before the programme starts, please explain your activities and occupations between leaving your job and the start of the programme.

Only answer if this one if it applies to you. If you’re explaining the “not working” aspect, be extremely straightforward. The more it seems like you’re justifying something, the “guiltier” you’ll come across. Imagine you’re re-assuring the person who just hired you why there’s this strange gap that we just noticed. Before we get cold feet, make that feeling go away quickly, with extreme confidence, clarity, and brevity.

If you’re answering the other option, CREATING a gap (whether by choice or not) that gives you the ability to spend your time somehow before the program begins, you’ll want to approach it similarly, but this time, you may need to add a touch of justification, lest it arouse suspicion. Say, for example, that gap is six months, and there doesn’t seem to be any real reason for it. Here, you may have decided to travel the world, or learn a new language, or… you get the idea. Just about anything CAN be an amazing reason, we just need to be sold on it, is all. Brevity here is your best best best friend. A long optional essay can be a death sentence. Stay crisp, aim for 150-250 words.

INSEAD MBA Essay Analysis: Motivation Essays

Essay 1: Give a candid description of yourself (who are you as a person), stressing the personal characteristics you feel to be your strengths and weaknesses and the main factors which have influenced your personal development, giving examples when necessary (approximately 500 words).

This has been an INSEAD staple for a few years now. The only real change here is in word count. Click here and scroll to Essay #1 to dig in.

Essay 2: Describe the achievement of which you are most proud and explain why. In addition, describe a situation where you failed. How did these experiences impact your relationships with others? Comment on what you learned(approximately 400 words).

400 words for both essays tell you something, because there are a lot of components to this one. Let’s break it down:

1. Explain your top-most achievement (what it was, why should we impressed)
2. Then, explain why this ranks highest among all your achievements
3. Next explain a key failure (what it was, exactly)
4. Then, explain the ways in which these experiences impacted your relationship with other people (this is a twist – very few schools ask about this specifically)
5. What were YOUR lessons?

Those all need to be dealt with, and you have 400 words. So, be straightforward, folks. It’s actually a great exercise in high-yield communication. Let’s focus on #4 though. How does a success or failure leave some kind of imprint on the way in which you relate to others? This is where you need to paint by clear examples. Imagine DELTAs between each scenario. There was a before and after associated with your success story. Somehow, that success affected the way you related to people – thus, the delta between before and after. What was it? Similarly, before you failed, you related to people in some way. Then after that failure, things changed with respect to your relationships with others. What changed? Examining those DELTAs will be the first KEY step toward crushing this question, and demonstrating how thoughtful and strategic you can be.

Essay 3: Tell us about an experience where you were significantly impacted by cultural diversity, in a positive or negative way(approximately 300 words).

This is another question about deltas. A tricky one. The key assumption here is that somehow the main driver of impact was cultural diversity. So in order for this to truly make a lot of sense, you need to be able to predict an alternate scenario where there WASN’T any cultural diversity. How would that scenario have been different? What — therefore — was the impact of cultural diversity on you? Was it positive? Negative? Both? If not an alternative scenario, you may already have those data points from other similar episodes in your career that you can compare to. But that’s going to be a crucial first step (if even just mentally) to ISOLATE that variable (“cultural diversity”) so that you can appropriately assess the impact of it — and it alone.

Attribution error here is the biggest danger. You have to make sure that what ever thing you’re assigning to “cultural diversity” would have been different in the absence of that diversity. This is why it will be helpful for you to be able to point to parallel moments where there wasn’t any cultural diversity component, and the result was decidedly different purely on account of some kind of “cultural” factor.

Some may be clear cut, however: a team member who didn’t speak the language well, or where you were the team member who didn’t speak the language well. Or where the cultural expectations created an obvious rift between what was natural to some portion of the people involved, and those for whom those expectations were unnatural. In these instances, the cultural lines will reveal themselves.

However you arrive at the example, divide this into three pieces:

• Setting the stage – give us enough background to understand what the “norm” was and therefore how the cultural component created some kind of challenge. Explain that challenge.
• Now explain the “impact” that the actual experience had on you. As they point out, this can be either positive or negative, just walk us through the way in which it affected you.
• Finally, explain how you grew from this. Whether positive or negative, there must have been something about this experience that taught you something, either about someone else’s culture, or your own. Walk us through what that was, making a very clear distinction between what you USED to think compared to what you thought AFTERWARDS.

Essay 4: Describe all types of extra-professional activities in which you have been or are still involved for a significant amount of time (clubs, sports, music, arts, politics, etc). How are you enriched by these activities? (approximately 300 words).

Part I of this essay will be all about the stuff, and a very clear indication of how involved you are. Leadership roles, special awards and distinctions, etc. Anything that gives us a clue about how excited you are about any particular activity, is good. Part II is about the way in which any given activity has made you… cooler. “Enriched” you. Again, we return to the concept of deltas. Picture what you’d be like without the activity, or all of them. How different would you be? What qualities, therefore, do those activities nurture in you? This doesn’t have to be separated into Part I – Activities, Part 2 – Enrichment. They can be integrated as you’re going through each activity.

Don’t leave your passion out here. Straightforward, yes, but… if your extracurricular activities seem to be part of a checklist routine, you’re not gonna excite anyone. The idea here is to come across like a sparkplug. Someone dynamic with interests and hobbies and talents and THIRSTS for things. The awareness that is revealed through articulating just how each activity has improved you in some way is icing on top.

INSEAD MBA Essay Analysis: Optional Essay

Is there anything else that was not covered in your application that you would like to share with the Admissions Committee? (approximately 300 words)

As always, this is just your standard bschool Optional Essay. Click here for a rundown on how to do it right.