Stanford MBA Essays

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Following our exclusive series of top B-school Essays, today we bring you the Stanford Graduate School Application Essays for the admission cycle 2022-23! Recognized as one of the top three, B-schools in the US, Stanford is part of both the famous H-W-S Trio and M7 esteemed B-schools across the United States.

The Stanford MBA program is recognized for its small size, competitive application process, world-class education, resources, and obviously extravagant packages! Being close to Silicon Valley, the world’s tech hub, Stanford B-school is well known for its strengths in entrepreneurship and the high-tech industry. AS INDICATED BY ITS MOTTO, the Stanford MBA program encourages positive change, “Change lives. Change Organizations. Change the world.”

With that said, let us first glance at all the relevant dates regarding different rolling application rounds!

Application Round	Submission Deadline	Decision Notification Date
MBA Round 1.	12 Sep 2023	07 Dec 2023
MBA Round 2	04 Jan 2024	28 Mar 2024
MBA Round 3	09 Apr 2024	23 May 2024

**Complete the application, including your LORs and application fee payment, is due at 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time on the deadline date for the round in which you apply.**

With that settled, let’s move on to the Core part of this article, The Stanford MBA Essays!

MBA ESSAYS 2022-23

For B-schools, the essay questions are a way to help them learn about who you are rather than solely what you have done. All the other elements of your application give insight into your academic and professional success involving accolades, accomplishments, and leadership awards; the essays reveal the person behind those achievements, the journey, the hard work, the failures, and all those long nights that collectively which shaped your life and made you the person you are today!

For this admission cycle, Stanford has selected two standardized personal essays.

Essay A: What matters most to you, and why?

Essay B: Why Stanford?

Moreover, as per instructions on the Standford B-school official website, both essays combined must not exceed 1,050 words – “We recommend up to 650 words for Essay A and up to 400 words for Essay B.”

Apart from the two mandatory essays, there is also an Optional Short Answer Question in the application process to provide an opportunity for each candidate to expand on their background by responding to the below-mentioned optional short answer question:

Think about times you’ve created a positive impact, whether in professional, extracurricular, academic, or other settings. What was your impact? What made it significant to you or others?

STANFORD B-SCHOOL MBA ESSAY TIPS 2023: WRITE ESSAYS THAT INSPIRES!

Let’s start with the basics – In each essay, we recommend applicants to be “genuine.” Introspect carefully about your ambitions, passion, dreams, goals, and most importantly, personal values. As in the words of Stanford AdCom, there is no “right answer” to these questions — the best answer is the one that “is truest for you.”

The first essay it’s more of a personal question to the core; hence we would like to suggest you reflect deeply upon your journey and write from the heart! Certain experiences, people, insights, or observations may have shaped your perspectives and viewpoint!

Once you’ve identified what matters to you the most, it’s up to you to make the AdCom understand “Why?” To better understand the theme, you might consider answering questions like- What makes this so important to you? Who Inspired you?

What insights or experiences shaped your viewpoint? For your reference, I would like you to refer to our article- Are you ready to apply to Stanford? You will get some beneficial insights.

The second essay is one of the most common B-school essays asked by each school in their application or school essays. To start, describe your goals & aspirations and how your experience at Stanford GSB will help you realize them. Hence you need to understand how to link your goals to your experience, your ECAs, and your skill-set to form a network structure in your essays to make them collinear. To have a better understanding of the topic, I would recommend you go through some of the reference articles like-

Suggested Reading

How to bring collinearity to your post-MBA goals?

How to Frame Practical MBA Goals Essays

How to demonstrate your fit to your target business school?

OPTIONAL SHORT ANSWER QUESTIONS

This additional section allows applicants to discuss some of their contributions more fully.

“optional” means that it’s totally up to you! No pressure at all.

It’s your choice; If you feel that you’ve already described your contributions sufficiently well in other areas of the application, congratulations, you’re done! If not, feel free to use this space to tell us more about yourself!

As the question clearly states, the emphasis must be on positive change! Stanford loves entrepreneurs who have created positive qualitative differences in people’s lives throughout their journey to become the best amongst the crowd! Try to find examples that would suit these instances perfectly, no matter how small, as it’s not about the magnitude but the impact itself!

First, it’s better to plan everything out in the open. Then, design a brief structure emphasizing leadership, positive change, an appetite for serving the community, and most importantly, a clear vision to help make your plans successful!

Finally, try not to overlap with examples and materials already listed on other documents sent to the committee. You could definitely take a reference and quote one or two lines but using the same examples more and more showcases the lack of creativity and content! That’s exactly where an expert’s advice could come in handy!

We follow a unique framework to help applicants dig deep into their work experience, leadership potential, strengths, weaknesses, etc., and structure the stories in a way that can bring the most impact.

That’s all about the Stanford B-School essay requirements! Begin working on the essays early to give yourself enough time to reflect, write, and edit. Always feel free to ask your friends & family members for genuine feedback. In this case, having a bit of expert advice at every step could really be a Game-Changer!

Hence, if you are looking for more personal and precise advice, feel free to hop on a 1:1 profile evaluation call with our experts, where we’ll dive deep into your profile and help you understand your chances to top B-schools with honest feedback.

To understand how our process helps aspiring MBA candidates see a glimpse of how our Profile evaluations and consulting assistance works!

For more on B-School essays, you can check the links for our articles below!

Suggested Reading

At MBA and Beyond, we are determined to help you develop a unique structure for each essay question providing step-by-step procedures to build a specific answer that would help you stand out; among the crowd! We are a team of expert consultants who follow a unique process to achieve maximum efficiency, quality, and interaction, ensuring a 100% unique and authentic application!

Good luck!

MBAandBeyond