Chicago Booth

September 19, 2024

January 7, 2025

April 3, 2024

Essay 1: Goals & Chicago Booth

Prompt: How will a Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals? (Minimum 250 words, no maximum.)

Begin by breaking down the essay question:

What is your immediate career goal, just after you graduate from Chicago Booth? Tell them what job role that you seek; in which industry; and possibly your target companies. Tell them why this is your career goal (your motivation), and what experience and skills you will bring from your current professional experience.
What is your long-term career goal (meaning 5-10 years after your graduation from Booth)? Tell them why this is your goal. Chicago Booth tends to be a "mission-based school," meaning that they like to admit people who have a definite, specific, and ambitious purpose for pursuing an MBA, outside of the simple "I will go up the career ladder."
How will the Booth MBA help you achieve those goals?

For the last question, you should think of the answer in four ways:

What skills or knowledge that you lack today that you need to pursue those goals?
What skills or knowledge that you want to build upon that will help you achieve very ambitious goals? (You might achieve your goals on your own, but not as well or as easily.)
What are Chicago Booth's specific offerings (courses, star professors, clubs, organizations, programs, events, etc.) that will help you gain what you lack or wish to build upon? How will you engage with those offerings to prepare to reach your goals? (Don't write a long list; focus on the offerings that you will really engage in and benefit from.)
How will the Chicago Booth culture prepare you as a leader? Please read The Chicago Approach.

Essay 2: You, Outside the Office

Prompt: An MBA is as much about personal growth as it is about professional development. In addition to sharing your experience and goals in terms of career, we’d like to learn more about you outside of the office. Use this opportunity to tell us something about who you are… (Minimum 250 words, no maximum.)

As usual, Booth comes up with something completely unique! Keep in mind three things:

Booth is a mission-based school, in that its students often have specific missions that they wish to pursue while in school.
Traditionally, Booth application questions require creativity in the response. I believe that they seek a mind balanced between structure and evidence-based, and free-thinking ability to put ideas together in new ways.
Booth seeks self-directed MBA students. (See below.)

When writing this essay, please keep in mind that Booth is an MBA program in which there are no cohorts and the curriculum is very, very flexible - so you have to be comfortable with making your own way. That is why they ask this question. Tell them about the basis on which you make your decisions.

Let me describe one of my clients (who went to Booth) and how he made his life decisions, as an example.

Steve chose to come to the US from Cameroon to go to college. He was very committed to getting the best education he could, because he had seen his father fail without a degree. His value for education, and wanting to be the model for his younger brother, was why he went to the US. Things did not go well for him at first. He ended up living in a tiny apartment in Houston, and going to community college, and walking everyday to a job at Walmart. On his own, he sought out a professor for help in transferring to the University of Texas in Austin, which is where he really got his start in life.

His decisions and actions were motivated by his drive to pursue a good education.
His goals led him to take decisive action.
He sought appropriate help as needed.

Later on, while working at Ernst & Young, Steve traveled back to Cameroon and happened to hear a philanthropist talking about his organization. He sought out the philanthropist later. Steve got very involved in the charity, so much so that he was managing education-related projects in Cameroon for the charity, while still working many hours for E&Y.

His decisions and actions were motivated by his desire to give back to Cameroon, and his desire to improve education in Cameroon.
Again, he took decisive action.
In this case, he became a leader.

The essay that Steve wrote described his decisions, his motivations (his reason why he made certain decisions), his goals, the actions that he took, the help that he received from others, and how he demonstrated leadership.

Also, please note how self-driven Steve was. He didn't wait for someone to come up to him and say, "Let me tell you how to get into UT." He went out and found that person himself, and then followed through. That is what Booth is seeking.

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Optional Essay

Prompt: Is there any unclear information in your application that needs further explanation? (Maximum 300 words.)

By "unclear," they mean, "something that might be unclear to the Admissions Committee," something that might need further explanation. This space can also be used to address any extenuating circumstances that you would like the Admissions Committee to consider. Use to address:

why your current direct supervisor is not writing your recommendation
gaps in work experience
low GPA or inconsistent or questionable academic performance
interruptions in academic career
difficult issues (i.e., Driving Under the Influence or other types of arrests)
areas of weakness (i.e., less than five years work experience - why you are not waiting to apply)

Use this essay to turn a potential weakness into a strength. Tell the Admissions Committee what happened and why it happened. Be honest in your self-evaluation. Most importantly, tell them what you have learned from a negative experience, and how this learning has influenced future actions.

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Chicago Booth requires a video to be created and submitted prior to the 1-1 interview.

Interview Video

Should you receive an interview invitation, you will be asked to create and upload a video for one of the following prompts:

Tell us about something new you learned recently that shifted your worldview. How did it influence your behavior and/or actions?
What is something you wish people knew about you, but you're not sure that they do?

Note:

No more than 60 seconds
Evaluated only on the content, not the editing and styling
Due by 11:59 PM Central Time on Friday, October 29.

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For the first prompt, you are describing how you will behave as a Booth student. Remember that they are asking about a WORLDVIEW, how you viewed the world, in other words, a fundamental belief that would shape your behavior and/or actions.

Describe 1) what you had believed before, and why; 2) the data or information or exposure to someone else's perspective that made you re-evaluate that belief; and 3) a concrete behavioral change or actual action that you took (reflecting a bias towards action).

For the second prompt, you are showing self-awareness, which again is tied to an ability to self-evaluate and be able to change. The question is not about something that you wish to hide but that you wish to reveal (you wish people knew this about you).

Describe 1) the thing that is not self-evident, 2) why you would wish that it was clearer to people, and 3) what is stopping them from seeing that thing. You may wish to add 4) what you are doing to change that situation.