EssaySnark

2022 MBA Essay Questions: UC-Berkeley Haas

 

The Haas Class of 2025 questions are inviting you to explore leadership – a timely topic indeed, given the state of the world!!

Here’s a post giving you insight on what Berkeley Haas cares about in selecting applicants for admission.

 

EssaySnark's Strategies for the 2022-2023 Berkeley-Haas MBA Application The Berkeley Haas Application Guide ready to help you with these challenging essay questions!


 

Berkeley Round 1 is 2 weeks, 1 day, 2 hours ago (September 22).

This is kind of in the middle-towards-the-end of the crunch-time period that you’ll be experiencing for Round 1.

 

The 2022-23 MBA essay questions for Berkeley Haas full-time are:

  1. What makes you feel alive when you are doing it, and why? (300 words)
     
    Kinda cool, eh? This really gets to the core of who you are, don’t you think? Instead of a tired, cliched question about your “passion” the Haas team is asking you something so direct that you cannot fake your answer.
     
  2. What kind of leader do you aspire to be, and why? (300 words maximum)
     
    Let’s start by examining what they said in the preamble to their “leadership” question three years back: “At Berkeley Haas, we are redefining leadership. We value different opinions and perspectives, recognizing that we always have more to learn about others’ lived experiences and histories. We encourage speaking up and listening, and courageously use our power to address barriers and drive change for positive impact.”

    Hmmm, maybe that can serve as a starting point to your self-reflection on leadership? Admittedly, there’s some lofty language there! And, it’s going to be difficult to cover everything you’ll probably want to. What you should try to avoid is to make it entirely a “why Haas” essay; that can certainly be part of it, but it’s absolutely not the entirety of what they have asked! Pro Tip: A very concise statement of a career goal in here might be useful! Could be short-term goal, could be longer-term. Should not be so ambitious-sounding that it’s not actually attainable in the foreseeable future!! Don’t write to impress. Write to share who you are. Yup, a tall order!!!! Our Strategy Guide can help!
     

As to the additional questions they’re asking, those are opportunities, too. Haas has been much more open to these important factors for longer than most schools have. Regardless of your position of relative power or privilege in society, or if you’ve come from a deficit of those based on the facts of your upbringing, you’ll want to think through your personal history, and be thoughtful in how you address them. We do encourage you to consider answering Optional Information #1 about family background!

What if you don’t have anything unique or different about your background?

THINK MORE ABOUT IT!

We really believe that the Optional Information #1 essay is a major opportunity for EVERYONE. Just don’t overdo it! You don’t want to come across as unaware of your privilege, if that’s been your experience.

However, it does seem to be an opportunity that many candidates could potentially explore.

Why?

Because Haas is signalling that WHO YOU ARE — based on where you came from and your unique formative years and childhood or early adult experiences — are very indicative of the type of fit you may be to their culture and environment. We applaud this question! It also makes sense that it’s optional (sort of) but we do wish that there was one more standardized question for everyone to answer such as they’ve had in the past, about impact or achievements or challenges or professional and teamwork wins that you’ve had. They’re not asking for that, and we understand why, and they’ve also simplified the main two essays as well which is applicant-friendly… but…. We just can’t help feeling that something was lost in ditching out on a more standard required essay such as they had before.

Our Berkeley Haas MBA Application Guide will help steer you in the right direction about all of these critical strategies.

With Optional Information #1, Haas invites discussion of your opportunities and circumstances from your family of origin, circumstances of your childhood, and how you grew up. We encourage all applicants to consider answering this question, which should be explored in the context of showing who you are and how your background has influenced you. Write an essay that talks about challenges, hardships, and how you’ve overcome.

Their Optional Information #2 is the classic “optional essay” that we cover in multiple posts here on the blahg, where you can talk about issues during college that resulted in a low GPA, or gaps in employment, that sort of thing. We do not suggest writing the Optional Information #2 unless you have a specific reason to do so, that cannot be fully covered anywhere else in the application.

You may want to consider getting our Haas MBA application guide. Pro Tip: Be careful about buying used hardcopy versions on the Internet; they are ALL outdated. We have not published to hardcopy in many years. The only current versions of school-specific guides are available right here on essaysnark.com.

 

Letters of Recommendation

Berkeley uses sort of quasi standardized recommender questions with one different question.

They ask the four questions that certain schools including Stanford are asking, plus one more – and that last one is really tricky since it’s so specific to Haas. You definitely should consider picking up our Recommender’s Instruction Sets if you’re applying to the UC Berkeley MBA.

 

Berkeley-Haas 2022-2023 MBA Application Dates and Deadlines

See the full schedule of Haas Full-Time MBA Application Deadlines on their website

  • Round 1: September 22, 2022 Interview invites tend to be scattered at this school, they can come at any time, all the way up into December (though an invite happening that late is pretty rare). In the past, Haas has not done a mid-cycle release of the definitely-no candidates.
  • Round 2: January 5, 2023 Round 2 applicants are going to be stressed out in this first week of January. =

 

UC-Berkeley Haas General Info

Haas sometimes has these fun little contests where you can win a consult with one of their adcom peeps – worth paying attention to them on social media!

from the EssaySnark blahg:

EssaySnark Essay Reviews

We’ve offered quite a lot of Haas essay advice on the blahg:

And some really old reviews – but still very relevant, given the Haas Defining Principles and all that jazz:

 

 
The SnarkStrategies Guide for Berkeley Haas covers the essay questions to support you for your Class of 2025 aspirations!

 

[Index of essay questions by business school]