MBA Essay Guidance 2025-26: Chicago Booth School of Business

The Full-Time MBA Program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business is renowned for its academic flexibility, rigorous analytical approach, and vibrant community. Located in the heart of Chicago’s Hyde Park, Booth offers students the freedom to tailor their academic journey with a highly flexible curriculum that includes foundational courses and a wide array of electives across 13 concentrations, such as Analytic Finance, Strategy Management, and International Business. The program emphasizes multidisciplinary problem-solving and empowers students to challenge conventional wisdom, preparing them to lead with confidence in a rapidly changing business world. Booth’s collaborative environment, world-class faculty, and expansive global alumni network provide students with the resources and support to achieve their professional goals and maximize their return on investment.

With the release of Booth’s latest MBA application essays, now is the perfect time to focus on crafting responses that authentically reflect your goals, experiences, and fit with Booth’s distinctive culture. Let’s dive into our expert guidance to help you stand out in this year’s application cycle.

Booth

We’d like to hear more about your aspirations, your goals, and the passions and experiences that have and continue to shape you. Please respond to both essay prompts below. We have intentionally only set a word count minimum; we want to allow you the space needed to convey your thoughts, while using your best judgement regarding the length of response.

Essay 1

How will the Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals? (250-word minimum)

Admitify Guidance

Essay 1 is a fairly standard Goals/Why MBA/Why Booth essay. Make sure each of these elements is discussed in detail. We think 500-700 words should be sufficient for Essay 1.  Since your reasons for seeking a Booth MBA stem from your goals, start the essay with a fairly meaty statement of your goals: long-term goal (Plan A, Plan B), short-term goal (Plan A, Plan B). The Why Booth material could then follow directly or indirectly after. Indirectly?: Since Booth doesn’t limit you on word count, why not add a multi-paragraph section between the goals and Why Booth in which you show how your professional (and even pre-professional) experiences (read: accomplishments) have led you to this goal. This new section would enable you to explain the ‘why’ behind your goals and to share one or two key accomplishments that perhaps your recommenders won’t share. From this new section you could then segue into the Why Booth section with a short transition paragraph, ‘While my career has given me skills X and Y which my post-MBA skills require, it has not given me skills A and B which my post-MBA goals require. A Booth MBA ….”.

Essay 2

Chicago Booth appreciates the individual experiences and perspectives that all of our students bring to our community. This respect for different viewpoints creates an open-minded environment that supports curiosity, inspires us to think more broadly, and take risks. At Booth, community is about collaborative thinking and learning from one another to better ourselves, our ideas, and the world around us.

The photos below represent some of the values described above that we uphold at Chicago Booth. Select one and share how it resonates with one of your own values. (250-word minimum)

Admitify Guidance

Booth has changed its essay 2 prompt (back to a photo-based prompt similar to its ‘Booth Moments’ essay circa 2018), but it’s essence or thrust is the same: Booth wants to know about the person behind the resume through ‘values’ that drive you. Booth gives you four photos of life at Booth from which you must choose one and explain how it resonates with or aligns with your values. Some are classroom centered, some are group or social centered and one shows the award ceremony for Booth’s New Venture Challenge. Your ‘values’ are essentially ‘what matters most to you’ – the ideas or core principles that you fight for every day (you can write about one value if it’s truly defining for you). The word ‘value’ has an ethical component that some applicants may want to run with. Think in terms of your 2-4 core, ‘defining-moment’ life experiences that demonstrate or illustrate your values (or core value if you’re writing about one). Think in terms of moments of self-challenge, adversity, or resistance when you were forced to take a stand or stand up for your values. These experiences can be professional, personal, academic or community/extracurricular. It doesn’t matter really, but they need to have been important to you perhaps because they expressed your values and perhaps changed  you. So sharing how these experiences shaped you, in addition to the specifics of the experience, is important. 

Is there a common thread (perhaps involving striving toward personal freedom, ‘finding’ yourself, overcoming some setback, doing the right thing etc.) that unites these different life experiences? It’s not essential that the experiences add up to some big insight about your life, but if so, sharing that common thread can make the essay stronger (if all the experiences express your single core value, then the common thread is built in).

Again, extra points if these experiences had an ethical/moral component. Note that I suggest only 3 (maybe 4) experiences because (a) you really need to unpack your thinking in explaining why the examples express your values (i.e., we need extended examples) and (b) an essay longer than 700-800 words may try the committee’s patience. In many cases the experiences the essay should be built around will be obvious from the story you shared in our Admitify questionnaire or brainstorming calls.

Additional Information

Is there any unclear information in your application that needs further explanation or additional details you would like to share with the Admissions Committee? If so, please use this section to clarify. (Optional) (Maximum 300 words.)

Admitify Guidance

There are two ways to approach this optional essay: you can either do damage control — if you need to — on extenuating circumstances, or you can provide additive content (see below). You can also try to do both as long as you meet the word limit.

• Damage Control. You can tackle the essay by making a case, with evidence, that what appears to be an issue really is not, or acknowledging the weakness but building the case that you have grown past it. Admitify’s advice for damage control essays is to be brief and specific about the topic of concern, explain your case for viewing the issue in the most positive light, and provide examples of how you have offset the issue.
• Additive Essays. You can also use the essay to shed new light on your achievements or the multiple dimensions of your candidacy. If the school’s required essays mostly focused on your professional accomplishments and leadership, for example, you could use the open-ended optional essay to describe your extracurricular or community involvements. Just make sure the new information you provide adds value and has substance.

Not sure how to tackle Booth’s new Essay 2? 

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