Advice from Atul Jose - Leading MBA and Master's Admissions Consultant

PTSD in Veterans is a delicate theme. You must sensitively address the problem by personalizing the experience. 

For the essay, the applicant’s legacy of coming from a military family brings authenticity to his motivation.

He didn’t pursue his family’s legacy. Instead, he had a traditional design role in a Technology company. But the essay is not about his professional journey. 

Covering any transformational stories, especially poverty narrative, requires offering the right context. If we get indulgent in one interesting angle, the overall impact of the What Matters Stanford GSB Essay will go down.

For the applicant – a Uruguan native, the struggle was the lack of a mentor at home as his mother did 2-3 jobs as a single parent.

If you are an international applicant tackling a cause that is local to your country or the country where you resided before moving to the US, the What Matters Essay is an opportunity to educate the admissions team about the problem, your connection with the cause, and the plan to overcome the problem.

This narrative style works if your post-MBA goals or the Why Stanford MBA essay includes a plan to return to your home country in 3-4 years. Ideally, the problem should have been in the news cycle of international publications. 

The applicant – a second-generation American, shares her family’s journey from Hong Kong to the US – all in pursuit of living the American dream. The single-minded dedication and its impact on the family is the opening paragraph. 

Whenever you cover negative and downbeat themes, piling on to the trauma narrative is counterproductive. At some point in your essay, preferably by the last one-third of the essay, the style should shift to a silver lining or a trend that is uplifting.

By the 2nd half of the essay, the focus should be on a solution that you have worked on or the steps that address the beneficiary in some form.

Talking about privilege is tricky. The tone of the essay can turn preachy or one-sided. These are the worst kind of narratives.

Preachy works sometimes when the subject matter is closely tied to the identity of the applicant. 

For example, an applicant displaced by war preaches about politics, incentives of warmongers, and how the world should be; it doesn’t come across as the applicant advising the admissions team. 

To pull off this kind of an opener for Stanford, you must be from the same ethnicity the statement highlights. 

Stanford is highly cautious of provocateurs from both the left and right or someone with biases against other races and nationalities. 

The applicant starts with a controversial conclusion that an AI generative tool reached about African American fathers. 

The 650 words in the Stanford What Matters essay limit the number of values that you can capture. This is the only essay that came organically, and by the end of the essay, I had captured four aspects of a human life – personal, professional, social, and spiritual. 

Resilience and Persistence are the two sides of the same coin. Sometimes, resilience is not about persistence. It is a timeline of survival and overcoming tremendous challenges and setbacks. But in a way persistence is a mindset not to be bogged down by setbacks.

The number #1 criticism against AI, apart from copyright infringement, is the lack of empathy for how the technology is disrupting livelihoods and economies. As a Harvard MBA Applicant, you don’t have much control over the direction in which your company is heading if you are not the Founder or an investor. I get that perspective. But you should be aware of the sentiment against AI and choose good examples.