Northwestern Kellogg MBA Essay Analysis, Your 2015-2016 Application

Northwestern Kellogg MBA Essay Question 1

Leadership and teamwork are integral parts of the Kellogg experience. Describe a recent and meaningful time you were a leader. What challenges did you face, and what did you learn? (450 words)

If your response doesn’t somehow address teamwork, or the art form of working with others, or collaboration, you’ve missed something vital. Why else would they mention teamwork at all? Now, here’s where you wanna avoid an amateur mistake when picking the best story. Don’t think about your best “teamwork” story. Instead, pick your absolute best LEADERSHIP story. The one that casts you in the most impressive light, period. Now, just to make a point, imagine we challenged you to take that exact story and turn it into a story about FAILURE. Could you do it? The answer is yes. You just need to recast it somewhat. Same story, but different angle. If that’s your goal (to talk about some way in which you failed), all you need to do is rejigger the outcome, and the rest will take care of itself. If we challenged you to turn this exact story into one about discovering something about yourself, just say abracadabra, and, poof, you should be able to recast the exact same story to turn into “the moment you realized you were destined for X” or “the time you discovered you did not have the heart for X but you DID for Y.” See where we’re headed here? Using your best leadership story, find the angle that puts the TEAMWORK challenges front and center. This may lead to a slightly different “version” of this story, but that’s the version that’s gonna sell here.

Try to frame the challenges around people-related issues. Ignore the other stuff. If, for example, the success or failure of your story rests on your ability to deliver an incredible pitch… ignore that aspect. Instead, talk about the drink you shared with one of the board members the night before, where you connected on a personal level. If your story rests on your ability to have sharp financial insights (you and you alone), ignore THAT aspect, and instead focus on the part where you trained your junior colleagues to help prep the financials in a way that allowed you to excel. Talk about how giving them a higher bar to pursue as a team allowed them to gel in a way that improved the entire unit, etc. You get the idea. Shift the focus away from you and how smart you are, and onto any aspect that highlights people-challenges. Collaboration. Team gelling. Morale-boosting. The power of many over one. All that stuff. If your leadership story doesn’t have a single “team” element, find the next best leadership story and dig. You shouldn’t have to, by the way. Chances are, a story that fails this test isn’t a leadership story so much as a success story. Leadership and teamwork tend to go hand-in-hand. Kellogg is all about that idea. Show them that you are too.

Structure:

First, frame the challenge, and do so in a way that highlights “team-related” issues. See if you can hinge the success or failure of this particular story around your ability to masterfully execute some team-related thing, as opposed to “growing the business by 150%” or “improving X by Y percent.” Focus it around people challenges. Establish the stakes, what happened if it didn’t work? Why was it so important to succeed?

Next, walk us through your actions. And equally important, your reasoning behind each one. This is where you demonstrate a key understanding of what makes others tick, and it can ALSO be an opportunity to reveal what makes you tick. Don’t be afraid to expose faulty reasoning on occasion. Missteps, bad calls. As long as you gained insights and eventually improved, you’re gonna shine like a star. Focus on what you did, and why.

Finally, explain why it worked, in a way that taught you something about humans and how they relate, and the value of collaboration or of understanding other people, or of combining skills rather than pinning objectives on the abilities of an individual. Be straightforward and confident here. The confident leader guy who talks about teamwork is much more compelling than the hippie “let’s hold hands around a campfire and sing Kumbaya” guy who also talks about teamwork.

Northwestern Kellogg MBA Essay Question 2

Pursuing an MBA is a catalyst for personal and professional growth. How have you grown in the past? How do you intend to grow at Kellogg? (450 words)

Let’s talk about two things here.

First what is growth?
And second, how to relate this to Kellogg?

Growth. Growth is all about change from X to Y. Consider a plant. If a plant is in a certain environment, subjected to certain external pressures and conditions, it will experience a fundamental change we call “growth.” It may lengthen. It may produce flowers. Whatever it is, there’s some kind of DELTA between the before and after. Easy enough to understand right?

Okay, but let’s dig into it a bit more. What actually caused that growth? Was it the DNA of the plant? Or was it the conditions it was exposed to? Well, it can’t JUST be the DNA. If that were true, you could plant evergreen trees in the middle of the Sahara desert and they’d do just fine right? Wrong. The DNA is a terrible match for the harsh, arid environment of the desert. So, DNA alone doesn’t ensure growth. Likewise, conditions are only as effective as the “DNA” of the thing they’re influencing. Reverse it. Apply rain to coniferous trees and they love it. Apply the same rain to succulents, and it’s lights out. We’ve just applied the wrong “environment” to the DNA.

Conclusion: it has to be a match of (1) the inherent characteristics of the element, AND (2) the conditions of its environment. This is a key concept as you consider your own growth stories. First, you have to talk about growth in terms of a clear before and after. But also, you must address what the environment was, and how it influenced “your DNA.” In order to do this well, you need show a clear understanding of what you’re made of, and how that particular environment helped to shape it.

Now, you need to airlift that formula and apply it to something you detect about Kellogg. What is it about the Kellogg environment that holds promise for you that you will grow in a similar way? What is about their culture, or a specific aspect of their curriculum, or some other Kellogg-specific thing that is going to exert a force on you that encourages personal growth? The only way you can predict this is if you have a story in your past that shows how you respond to certain stimuli, that you can then connect to something at Kellogg that therefore holds the same promise for you.

Structure:

First, walk us through a “growth” story. Paint a clear before and a clear after, and explain how the ENVIRONMENT acted to help SHAPE that transformation from A to B. Hover on the environmental aspect, focus on the stuff that helped bring about that change. What were those external influences? How did they inspire you to grow?

Now, identify specific aspects of Kellogg that resemble those “conditions.” Be careful, the stuff you pick can’t apply equally well to other schools, or else your point won’t weigh anything. It has to be Kellogg specific. Now explain the parallel to how these conditions are the exact conditions that promote personal growth in you. We’ll believe you because you’ve already PROVEN this in section 1.

Northwestern Kellogg MBA Essay - Optional

Optional Essay/Additional Information: If needed, use this section to briefly describe any extenuating circumstances (e.g. unexplained gaps in work experience, choice of recommenders, inconsistent or questionable academic performance, etc.)

Here’s everything you need to know about writing the Optional Essay… the right way.
 

Northwestern Kellogg MBA Essay - Reapplicant

Since your previous application, what steps have you taken to strengthen your candidacy? (250 word limit)

This question hasn’t changed, and the strategy is always the same: show them a better version of yourself this time around than the last time you applied. Click here to read our Reapplicant Essay Analysis.