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Booth won the ‘Snark’s Adcom of the Year Award for 2021!
Chicago Booth 2022 Full-Time MBA Essay Questions – Class of 2025
Booth Round 2 is 3 weeks, 5 days ago (January 5).
The SnarkStrategies Guide for Chicago Booth has been updated for 2022 to give you the most actionable advice possible in applying to this school.
How do you answer the Booth MBA essay questions?
- How will the Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals? (250 words minimum)
Yes you read that right — they have a MINIMUM word count! There is no maximum, though in our experience, you shouldn’t need more than around 600 words to do an excellent job, especially because of all the other in-app questions that they have you answer around goals and plans.
- 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…
Hmmm…. This is remarkably similar to what Kellogg asked in the past about “growth” — and here’s a July 2020 review of this new Booth prompt too! This Booth version is a straightforward, open-ended question — that’s best answered through examples! Don’t fall into the trap of only describing yourself. Instead, SHOW who you are, by giving some moments from your life that illustrate how you became that way! Key events that shaped you, the biggest decisions that brought you to where you are today, how you grew up in some aspect of your life, in what way you know your own values… All of these are potential avenues to explore! This post on storytelling in MBA essays might be a useful place to begin reflecting on this question.
Booth really wants you to demonstrate your understanding of what they offer – the whole “school fit” thing is paramount in your Chicago application!
The 2022 Chicago Booth MBA Application Guide gives you lots and lots of guidance for how to approach the big task of responding to the Booth prompts.
Can your goals change once you start the Booth MBA? Absolutely! But they want to know what your thinking is TODAY and how you’ve formulated your plan for success at this moment in time. There’s no problem if that changes as you move through your education. They only want to be confident that you’ll be able to control your own destiny and manage your options for success.
We have some purpose-built services to support you in developing the content that will resonate best in such essays — we’d suggest starting with the Career Goals App Accelerator that will perfectly establish your framework for essay 1 and the in-app questions! Or, you might consider the Complete Essay Package for Chicago Booth, which will fully support a robust strategy for these ideal essays. The most important aspects are to dig deep to identify the pieces of your past that can support essay 2 and be clear and distinct in establishing your current plans for your goals in essay 1.
Booth has an interview-invite short-answer question as well, similar to how other schools like MIT do it: If you get invited to interview, you’ll have about a week to submit a separate mini essay in advance. The essay is not part of the interview experience per se, it’s just another aspect of you that you get to present for them to learn more about you. If they stick with how they did it last year, you’ll get a choice of two or three questions — which are probably not going to be the same prompts that they asked of prior candidates. They tend to change the questions every round (our Booth application guide shares past ones with you, so you have a sense of what they tend to be like). EssaySnark’s advice? Choose a topic that’s new and different from what you wrote about in the main application!
Chicago Booth MBA Application Deadlines – Class of 2025
See their website for specifics: Booth MBA Application Deadlines
Round 1: September 22, 2022In the past, interview invitations came out the second week of October, with a mid-cycle “release” a few days later. Then, another essay was due for those being interviewed!! Also useful to know: Booth often begins calling their admits before their stated decision day. In recent years for Round 1, they have started these calls the first week of December. Keep your phone handy when that time rolls around this year!
- Round 2: January 5, 2023 This deadline, dang, it’s pretty much right after the holiday. Wish they’d moved Round 2 to the following week as some other programs did this year. For Booth, Round 2 interview invitations and mid-cycle release are likely to be in the second week of February.
We generally discourage any attempts at getting in during the last round of a school’s season; there might be some opportunities at Chicago Booth this season, but you really need to have your act together.
Chicago Booth MBA recommendations – Class of 2025
For 2022, Chicago seems to be using the same recommender requirements as Harvard and Columbia.- Two recommendations
- Two questions for them to answer:
- How does the candidate’s performance, potential, background, or personal qualities compare to those of other well-qualified individuals in similar roles? Please provide specific examples.
- Please describe the most important piece of constructive feedback you have given the applicant. Please detail the circumstances and the applicant’s response.
You can find the basics on Chicago’s recommendations info page . Just keep in mind that like all schools, the actual recommendation instructions that your recommenders receive differs from the subset of information they post in the instructions to you.
Chicago Booth Useful Links
school pages:
- Booth F/T MBA Admissions Blog
- Booth on Twitter – there’s a lot of them!
- @ChicagoBooth the school
- @BoothFullTime full-time MBA admissions
- @BoothEveWknd part-time MBA admissions
- @BoothExecMBA Exec MBA admissions
From the ‘Snark (a lot of our historical posts about Booth were discussing their then-option to create a PowerPoint presentation instead of a standard written essay):
- essay review! Booth essay 2 on “who you are” (July 2020) Which school had the Best Essay Questions in 2014? (February 2014)
- If you’re doing a PowerPoint for Booth, NYU or MIT (September 2013)
- adcoms that we love: Chicago Booth (November 2012) and “adcoms that we trust” series (October 2010)
- Pros and cons of Booth’s flexible curriculum (April 2011)
- One more Booth plug (April 2011)
The Booth MBA Essay Guide goes into a whole bunch more detail than this!
We have exercises, dos and don’ts, and lots of suggestions for structuring your essays, how long they should be, what goes where, and the thinking direct from the adcom about their values and what they’re looking for in their applicants. Get started on your Booth application today!