MBA Essay Guidance 2024-25: Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School has released its MBA application deadlines and essay questions for the 2024-25 application cycle. Here are the important dates and Admitify’s guidance on the essays.

R1: Sep 4, 2024 / R2: Jan 6, 2025 / Deferred: Apr 25, 2025

Harvard

The mission of Harvard Business School is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. Our community strives to accomplish this through a focus on hard work, with humility, for humanity.

Through the rich case- and experience-based curriculum at Harvard Business School, students will develop integrated thinking and judgment skills that will broaden their perspective, impact how they lead, and enable them to make a difference in the world. The HBS classroom and community thrive when we bring together people who can share a variety of experiences and perspectives, while also ensuring they share the common characteristics of being business-minded, leadership-focused, and growth-oriented.

In this year’s application, we will ask you to respond to three short essays aligned with our criteria. This is your opportunity to discuss meaningful or formative experiences that are important to you that you haven’t had a chance to fully explore elsewhere in your application.

Short Essay #1 – Business-Minded: Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you strive to make on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)

Admitify Guidance 

After many years, HBS, now under a new admissions director, Rupal Gadhia, has retooled its legendary open-ended MBA application essay, ‘What more would you like us to know.” The weakness of that prompt was also its strength: it was so broad that the applicant could take it in any direction. Perhaps to gain more specific information from its applicants, HBS has replaced that single 900-word essay with three much more targeted prompts. This first “Business Minded” prompt is in some ways a traditional core ‘why an MBA’ essay, but one that focuses less on the need for the degree than on aligning your life so far with your future goals (the impact you strive to make). HBS’s general guidance on the new essays makes clear that the impact you strive to make should not be limited to traditional details about post-MBA industries, preferred employers, and desired roles. Such language as “difference in the world” and “humanity” signals HBS wants to hear about ambitious, macro-level impact that extends beyond business to larger communities. So lean your response to the second part of the essay to your boldest long-term impact and by all means discuss your community leadership intentions as well as your professional aspirations. Think less in terms of functional titles and more about the changes you want to make through most aspirational roles. If you want to start a company, what will it seek to achieve beyond its own success? If you want to be a partner at a consultancy, what changes would you hope to lead within your firm and your industry (beyond satisfying clients and bottom-line targets)? The first part of this essay—on the experiences that have influenced your career choices and aspirations—asks you to explain where your impact aspirations come in your life (not only in your career). This is the reality-check part of the essay because overly bold goals that have little connection to the life and career you’ve lived so far will seem weak. This doesn’t mean that your post-MBA impact goals can’t be radically different from your pre-MBA career; it just means you must show how your life and/or professional experiences  have informed/shaped your post-MBA goals (you can’t just state world-changing post-MBA goals just because they sound impressive). This part of the essay is also an opportunity to share – concisely – accomplishments you’re proud of.

Harvard

Short Essay #2 – Leadership-Focused: What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)

Admitify Guidance

Like the first prompt, HBS’s new second prompt again uses a past-future structure to your leadership. Again, HBS asks you focus on formative experiences, but here the experiences should tell us about the kind of leader you are. These experiences could obviously be extended examples about your best leadership roles but they could also be about the role models that helped you understand what leadership is. HBS signals very clearly that it wants leaders who “invest in others” so lean toward leadership examples that emphasize your empowering leadership traits (mentoring, etc.). The last part of the prompt – what kind of leader [do] you want to become? – can be relatively concise, since it will refer not to examples of your own leadership (and the life experiences that informed your ideas about leadership), but to how you see yourself evolving and improving as a leader. This final part of the essay could be where you bring in relevant HBS leadership development resources. In practical terms, we see this essay as an opportunity to share two or three of your strongest, most formative leadership experiences from any part of your life.

Harvard

Short Essay #3 – Growth-Oriented: Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

Admitify Guidance

This essay is the most obviously personal essay – the one where nonprofessional experiences are most likely to come into play. The key words in this final prompt are ‘growth’ and ‘curiosity’. ‘Growth’ means nothing less than your evolution as a person (whose beliefs, perspectives, goals may have changed through experience and adversity). ‘Curiosity’ implies that HBS wants a life example that you instigated: your curiosity about X (and X could be almost anything) led to an experience, choice, setback, and deepened understanding that changed you. This means that applicants whose most differentiating stories are experiences that happened to them (that they did not instigate through their own curiosity) will be harder pressed to share those experiences here. Clearly, this essay signals HBS interest in applicants who are intellectually inquisitive but also open and aspirational about learning from life and changing as people. Note that HBS wants only one example here, so you want to choose a very good one.

Now is the perfect time to start on your Harvard MBA application!  Contact us today and we’ll guide you through the application process.