2017 MBA Essay Questions: MIT Sloan

2016 MIT Essays – EssaySnark’s Analysis

They are officially going retro! MIT has restored their classic “cover letter” question, which was the very first form of an “introduce yourself” type essay that any school ever instituted. Good news: We’ve got lots of experience in helping successful applicants work through this important deliverable!

Cover Letter and Resume

Cover Letter: Please submit a cover letter seeking a place in the MIT Sloan MBA Program. Your letter should conform to a standard business correspondence and be addressed to Mr. Rod Garcia, Senior Director of Admissions. (250 words or fewer for the body of the letter)

Resume: Please submit a resume that includes your employment history and academic record in reverse chronological order. Other information appropriate to a business resume is welcomed and encouraged. (no more than 1 page in length)

Thankfully they’ve clarified now that the 250 words is the body of the cover letter only!

On each of these EssaySnark school essay question and info pages, we always retain our commentary from past seasons’ app requirements at the bottom – and in the case of MIT Sloan, we’re going to recommend you actually go through and read all of that. The info on last year’s app can give some context into the changes that the adcom has been making. Also, to fill you in, the cover letter requirement was a staple of the MIT app through 2012 when it was but one of a suite of essays. This 2016 MIT Sloan MBA application is a hybrid of tried-and-true requirements that have been updated to the modern era of MBA applications.

As an example of the modern era, they’ve again kept their “Additional Information” optional submission, which we actually say is not optional – this is one of the very few schools where you really do want to submit something for this:

Optional Question: The Admissions Committee invites you to share additional information about yourself, in any format. If you choose a multimedia format, please host the information on a website and provide us with the URL.

Suggested guidelines:
Please keep all videos and media limited to 2:00 minutes total in length.
Please keep all written essays to 500 words or less.
If hosting your submission on a website, please ensure you provide an unprotected link (no password required).

Instead of this being a traditional “optional essay” which we typically suggest you DON’T submit unless you have to in order to explain something, in this case, for MIT, we suggest you DO come up with something to include here – particularly this year when there’s only the single essay for the app. Our MIT essay guide goes into all the strategy behind this suggestion.

We have revised our comprehensive MIT SnarkStrategies Guide to reflect all of this and how it impacts your strategy as a Class of 2019 MBA applicant. We do NOT recommend buying any previous season version of this school’s guide; it will NOT help you with the core application and the details involved with this year’s strategy.

They’ve also kept their post-interview-invite essay where they want you to tell a story about being successful in the context of their mission – a classic “culture” type question:

The mission of the MIT Sloan School of Management is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice. Please share with us something about your past that aligns with this mission. (250 words or fewer).

Only those who are lucky enough to get invited to the interview stage will need to do this additional essay (we actually suggest you write it when you write your cover letter though! our essay guide explains why, and how).

Recommendations

• How long and in what capacity have you known the applicant?
• How does the applicant stand out from others in a similar capacity?
• Please give an example of the applicant’s impact on a person, group, or organization.
• Please give a representative example of how the applicant interacts with other people.
• Which of the applicant’s personal or professional characteristics would you change?
• If you are an academic/technical recommender, please tell us how well the applicant mastered the subject you taught or supervised and in what ways did the applicant demonstrate this mastery. (LGO only?)
• Please tell us anything else you think we should know about this applicant.

Our Recommender’s Instruction Sets can be especially useful for this school!

[end discussion of MIT’s last-year questions]

2015 MIT Essays – EssaySnark’s Analysis

Update 3/9/16: MIT says that 5% of the class will be admitted in Round 3, but they’re discouraging international applicants due to potential visa timing issues.

MIT WAS PICKY IN ROUND 1!!! They’re clearly going for an improvement to their rankings based on a strengthening of the class profile. We expect average GMAT score to go up even further at MIT for the Class of 2018, based on the outcomes we’re seeing from them so far this season. (We did predict that, back in May…)

In the “it’s ever more competitive” department: Average GMAT score at MIT is now 716 (up from 713). Wow.

Thankfully (!!!) MIT has modified its application this year. Their essay questions the past two cycles were straight-up awful for BSers to deal with. This year they’ve gone down to ONE main question – which normally we’d be rather unhappy about, except that they’re also introducing a system sort of similar to HBS, where you submit a second essay if you’re invited to interview. (Harvard’s Post-Interview Reflection is not the same, but it’s the same idea: get another submission from the applicant at the interview stage.) AND while on first glance it appeared that MIT retained the worst of the worst of its essay prompts from last year (see below), actually they changed that too! All around positives.

The other big change? They’re EXPANDING their admissions cycle to three rounds. For a very long time, MIT has had just two rounds – yet for several years running, we’ve heard that they accepted “late” applications after their January Round 2 date was past. So they sort of kind of let you apply after their final deadline anyway. They’re now standardizing to do what every other top school does. Three Rounds. September, January, April. Cool.

We’ve written about our impressions on this change on the blahg: “Three rounds at MIT: Does it matter?” (May 11, 2015)

The main application essay question is what we’re most pleased about. Here it is:

Tell us about a recent success you had: How did you accomplish this? Who else was involved? What hurdles did you encounter? What type of impact did this have? (500 words or fewer).

This is such a classic “significant achievement” question that we’re practically rejoicing here in Snarkville. Such questions let applicants communicate in ways that are revealing – at least, provided the applicant does a good job with the question! The question itself is absolutely awesome: It has subparts that guide you on what to focus on, it’s a reasonable length to convey what’s needed, and it’s unambiguous. Thank you, Sloan!

We have a category for posts here on the blahg called “essay types – ‘achievement’ essays” which you may want to investigate if you’re researching how to approach this. Our – wait for it – Accomplishments & Achievements App Accelerator may also be useful in hashing through your possible topics and figuring out which “recent success” is going to be most effective for you to present.

What other goodness is coming from the MIT announcement?

Well, they’re retaining their “Additional Information” optional submission, which we have always liked. Here’s the wording for that:

Optional Question: The Admissions Committee invites you to share anything else you would like us to know about you, in any format.

Good stuff already coming @MITSloanAdcom chat: "It is highly recommended you also submit optional essay" (tho it's schoolspecific advice!)

— Essay Snark (@EssaySnark) August 26, 2015

They’re also introducing a post-interview-invite essay requirement which looks remarkably similar to what they asked as a main essay prompt for the past two years, except that they fixed the awkwardness of it and now they’re just asking you to tell another story about being successful somehow:

The mission of the MIT Sloan School of Management is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice. Please share with us something about your past that aligns with this mission. (250 words or fewer).

MIT had a near-identical question as its Essay 1 for two years and almost entirely because of that, had been recognized here in Snarkville as having the worst essay questions. This new version of the prompt is much better – though 250 words is very short. If you are in the lucky position of being invited to interview at MIT, you definitely will want to avail yourself of the benefits in our Sloan essay strategy guide — though hopefully you will get the guide right away so that you can benefit from the entire strategy we lay forth!

To get this new app info straight from the horse’s mouth: Here’s the early May 2015 blog post from MIT Admissions announcing these changes .

As of that early May 2015 announcement of the new essay questions, their app requirements page had NOT been fully edited and updated (once again, MIT exhibits sloppiness – as of this writing on 5/10/15, they have the new essay questions listed at the top but then the discussion of Letters of Recommendation talks about an “essay #2” which is a leftover comment from last year’s app). We’re not saying that we never have errors on our site – but on a school’s app requirements page? Proofread, Sloan Adcom, proofread.

7/16/15 Good news! MIT continues to introduce applicant-friendly changes. We’ve now discovered that they ditched the ridiculous suggestion that applicants submit a resume in Sloan’s own resume format, and that the resume could be only “50 lines.” These restrictions were just silly, and created undue stress for candidates. You still should only be submitting a one-page resume (that’s true for any school) but now you don’t have to worry about a particular format for a particular school (especially when that format did not even demonstrate best practices for MBA applicants). Thank you, Sloan Adcom, for coming around!!

MIT 2015 Dates and Deadlines
MIT now has three rounds!
MIT Full-Time MBA Application Deadlines announced
That means: Be careful about any posts you read here on the blahg about “two rounds” and MIT. We have discussed the implications of this change to three rounds in the 2015 MIT Application Guide but we have not gone back over our historical posts here on this site to offer warnings or corrections – what we may have said in the past about application strategy at MIT may not apply to this new world of a standardized admissions cycle.

• Round 1: September 17, 2015 – almost a week earlier than Rd 1 was last year. Traditionally this has been the most advantageous at MIT but we don’t know if that will hold true quite in the same way this year (Rd 1 is always recommended but it used to be REALLY recommended at MIT based on how they managed their two-round cycle; Rd 1 will still be an advantage, but it’s a TBD on how big of an advantage it will be going forward at this school).
  Based on a 10/7/15 announcement on the MIT blog , interview invitations this year will work the same as they did last year in Round 1: They’ll start going out in mid-October, through the “week of November 9th” (not sure why they can’t name the actual day?). That’s when the Round 1 “release from consideration” happens, which is a nice way to say “no” to you if they’re not interested. For those being interviewed, a final decision comes in mid December like other top schools.
• Round 2: January 14, 2016. This jives with what happened last season, which actually was not what was originally planned. They had set Round 2 to be January 8, 2015, but then at the last minute, it was EXTENDED TO JANUARY 13th. Round 2 is always viable at MIT. Round 2 interview invitations will going out the week of February 15th (same as last year), with Round 2 release to happen somewhere around March 1st.
• Round 3 – THIS IS NEW: April 11, 2016. We don’t generally post Round 3 deadlines here on the blahg because it’s typically near-impossible to get in then. HOWEVER: Since Round 3 is NEW at MIT, then we can only expect that they have modified their internal admissions processes to leave spots open for candidates at that stage. We still believe it will be difficult to get in on a Round 3 app but in this case, it may not be quite so difficult as it would be elsewhere. YMMV.

Whew! That’s a lot of change!

If you want to understand how this works, please pick up the SnarkStrategies Guide for MIT (2015 version) – it will help you grasp what’s so very unique about this school’s admissions criteria, compared to other top MBA programs. And of course, you get a full discussion of the impact of the changes with the addition of Round 3 and everything else. The 2015 guide was totally overhauled from 2014; this is not an edit or refresh, it’s a completely new book!

[end discussion of MIT’s 2015 questions]

2014 MIT Essays – EssaySnark’s Analysis

Here’s what we said when the 2014 questions came out… remember this analysis is from a previous year.

Two “essays” (if you can call them that):

1. The mission of the MIT Sloan School of Management is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice. Discuss how you will contribute toward advancing the mission based on examples of past work and activities. (500 words or fewer)
2. Write a professional letter of recommendation on behalf of yourself. Answer the following questions as if you were your most recent supervisor recommending yourself for admission to the MIT Sloan MBA Program: (750 words or fewer)
   • How long and in what capacity have you known the applicant? Really, MIT? REALLY?!?
   • How does the applicant stand out from others in a similar capacity?
   • Please give an example of the applicant’s impact on a person, group, or organization.
   • Please give a representative example of how the applicant interacts with other people.
   • Which of the applicant’s personal or professional characteristics would you change?
   • Please tell us anything else you think we should know about this applicant.

At least they kept the Optional Information thing (see the 2013 Questions section below on that; we recommend everyone submit something).

They also kept essentially the same deadlines as they had in 2013.

MIT Full-Time 2014 MBA Application Deadlines announced
[end discussion of MIT’s 2014 questions]

2013 Essays – EssaySnark’s Analysis

Here’s what we said when the 2013 questions came out.

Wow! No cover letter?!??? [They had this cover-letter thing as part of their app for YEARS. Decades, maybe. They ditched it in 2013.] They really switched things up! Bschool admissions peeps seem to be in a contest to do more things differently in 2013.

Here’s the Sloan 2013 essay questions:

Two essays:

1. The mission of the MIT Sloan School of Management is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and generate ideas that advance management practice. Discuss how you will contribute toward advancing the mission based on examples of past work and activities. (500 words/one page max)
2. Describe a time [within the last three years] when you pushed yourself beyond your comfort zone. (500 words/one page max)
3. Optional Question: The Admissions Committee invites you to share anything else you would like us to know about you, in any format.

First note: ESSAY 1 IS HARD!!!!!!

Second note: While most every school allows an “optional essay”, in most cases, we advise to only write it when you have something important to explain that you can’t cover elsewhere in the app (typically a gap in employment, not getting a rec from a current supervisor, what happened during college and that low GPA, etc.). For MIT, we recommend that EVERYONE submit the “Optional Question” and in particular that you do so using a non-written format if possible – e.g., video or something snappy. Note though: They don’t allow uploads. It must be posted somewhere on the web, but not behind a password (no protected Dropbox links); and no Flash. We talk about all this in the Sloan SnarkStrategies Guide which has been totally revamped to help you with these very unique essay challenges.

[end discussion of 2013 questions]

1. Please prepare a cover letter (up to 500 words) seeking a place in the MIT Sloan MBA program. Your letter should describe your accomplishments, address any extenuating circumstances that may apply to your application, and conform to standard business correspondence. Your letter should be addressed to Mr. Rod Garcia, Senior Director of Admissions.
2. Essay 1: Please describe a time when you had to convince a person or a group of your idea.
3. Essay 2: Please describe a time when you overcame a personal setback.

[end discussion of 2012 questions]