In this article, we’ll be covering how to write your UChicago Booth MBA essays.

Like most MBA applications, the Booth MBA essays are different from regular undergraduate applications because they require more sophisticated and delicate language. Undergraduate-level college application writing allows for more personal creativity, whereas the MBA application will demand more formality and effective writing techniques.

In order to get accepted into UChicago, your Booth essays need to be strong and stand out from the rest of the applicant pool. This is especially important since UChicago Booth is one of the most difficult programs to get accepted into.

Here’s a visualization of just how hard it is to get accepted.

Judging by the average accepted student, your grades in school should mostly be A’s with a few B’s. You also will need to have strong GMAT or GRE scores. This is just to fall under the median stats of accepted students.

Remember: there are plenty of students with scores at or above the listed stats here who were rejected by UChiacago Booth. So, just falling under this category doesn’t guarantee your acceptance.

To truly maximize your acceptance rate, you’ll need a strong set of UChicago Booth MBA essays that will cut through the competition. This is especially true for students who do not believe their GPA, test scores, or work experience is profound enough to make them stand out.

So, we’re going to cover exactly that.

Below, you’ll find a comprehensive guide to answering each of the UChicago Booth MBA essays.

Table of Contents

1. Required UChicago Booth MBA Essay Prompts
   • How will a Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals? (Minimum 250 words, no maximum.)
   • 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… (Minimum 250 words, no maximum.)
2. Optional UChicago Booth MBA Essay Prompt
   • Is there any unclear information in your application that needs further explanation? (Maximum 300 words.)
3. UChicago Booth MBA Essay Prompt for Reapplicants
   • Upon reflection, how has your perspective regarding your future, Chicago Booth, and/or getting an MBA changed since the time of your last application? (Maximum 300 words.)

Required UChicago Booth MBA Essay Prompts

How will a Booth MBA help you achieve your immediate and long-term post-MBA career goals? (Minimum 250 words, no maximum.)

This question is a rather straightforward one. It follows the same format as the “Why Us?” essay format; though, this one requires you to connect your reasons for earning a Booth MBA to your future endeavors.

So, you can’t be vague with this one. The key here is specificity.

As long as you can make the connections between earning a Booth MBA and how it helps with your future career endeavors, you’ll be capable of writing a strong essay. However, that means having to convince admissions officers that you’re not just applying just for the sake of it.

Thus, your reasons need to be solid, reasonable, and realistic.

A good example of this would be in using your MBA to qualify yourself as a candidate for a position in a financial engineering job. You’ll need to have the qualifications of someone capable of handling not only the title and position of power but the overwhelming responsibility that such a job may grant. So, having an MBA to qualify for that experience would be crucial.

You will also need to make the connection not just in the short-term, but in the long term as well.

Think 20 years from now, then 30. Then 40. What are you going to be doing from then? Chances are, you won’t have a solid answer. And, the further into the future you look, the harder it is to see the relevance of your MBA to that time period. You may end up conducting projects completely irrelevant to earning your MBA by the time you’re 50 or 60.

Nonetheless, admissions officers at UChicago Booth would like to see that you can make the connection between your MBA and your future endeavors even if it’s far into the future. They’re looking to accept candidates who can demonstrate a solid plan for how to maximize the use of their experience at Booth, and not just look at it from a short-term perspective.

This may also require you to come up with creative answers to demonstrate how the MBA may benefit you far into the future.

Our advice is to think about some of the unconventional ways an MBA may actually benefit the future career that you may be unaware of. Perhaps an MBA may actually provide you with a more broad spectrum of perspectives and methodologies that would apply to projects you aren’t even aware of in the future. Or, in other words, the MBA can give you tools you won’t know you need until you have to use them later in life.

No matter your answer, don’t be afraid of using your creativity to create a compelling essay. Impress admissions officers with your ingenuity in capitalizing on your MBA.

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… (Minimum 250 words, no maximum.)

Note that the beginning of this question starts off by describing the purpose of an MBA. They say that although MBAs are helpful for professional development, they’re also about personal growth.

So, we know that the admissions office at UChicago Booth values personal growth. And, thus, your response should reflect values on how an MBA will help your personal growth.

Would talking about your favorite video games be correct? Sure. What about your favorite T.V. show? Fine.

But, at the end of the day, admissions officers are subtly asking two things:

1. Who are you?
2. How does that identity grow and develop with an MBA?

Okay, so let’s take an example.

Let’s say outside the office you’re a historical fiction writer for fun. In your off hours, you can appreciate a nice D&D session, and you enjoy writing your own stories and doing your own worldbuilding as a hobbyist.

That’s a nice hobby to have at any age; and, it demonstrates that you’re willing to use your free time to create things rather than just sit on the couch all day and watch Netflix until the sun sets.

The experience of pursuing an MBA may help you learn from other people with different disciplines and mediums. Perhaps as an engineer, you’ll learn what the world of business is like for those majoring in Economics and Business; but, you’ll also learn the perspectives of those in the Liberal Arts.

You can cross-discipline this principle to your personal hobbies as a worldbuilder. You may learn to create a much more sophisticated world and write more compelling dialogue that captures the hearts of readers. In addition, you may gain more collaborative skills during your MBA program that let you collaborate with others in your world-building projects.

You may even talk about how some of the personal skills you develop as a worldbuilder and D&D player actually translate to some of the work that you do in your own career.

Ultimately, though, you should keep this one rule in mind when answering this question: don’t make it about your work too much. Keep it personal.

Remember, this prompt at the end of the day is a chance for admissions officers to see you for who you are outside of the classroom and work office. So, although you can use this as a chance to impress them, the ultimate goal is to connect with them.

Optional UChicago Booth MBA Essay Prompt

Is there any unclear information in your application that needs further explanation? (Maximum 300 words.)

Although most college admissions consulting firms would agree that optional college essays are not truly optional, this is an exception.

You should not answer the optional UChicago Booth MBA essay prompt unless you actually have unusual or unclear information that needs to be clarified to the admissions office.

Such unclear information can include but is not limited to the following:

1. Mistakes in formatting and submission of the transcript.
2. Unusual or unconventional grading protocol based on your institution’s rules. (Example: 5.0 GPA scales or disallowing certain classes)
3. Issues that occurred during standardized testing
4. Issues with mental health that could not be clarified elsewhere and may require a doctor’s note
5. Issues with learning disabilities such as ADHD that may require a doctor’s note
6. Personal situations that could not be explained elsewhere such as instances of discrimination that occurred during your academic year which caused fluctuations in performance.
7. Glitches that occurred in the admissions process such as documents that could not be submitted or inputted properly due to technical issues.

You typically should not use this space as an opportunity to demonstrate your continued interest or to brag about extra work experience.

This space is solely for instances in the application that was unusual or is otherwise difficult to elaborate on and require further explanation. Deviating from this can be seen as a sign of not following instructions, and is certainly not a good look to the Booth admissions officers.

UChicago Booth MBA Essay Prompt for Reapplicants

Upon reflection, how has your perspective regarding your future, Chicago Booth, and/or getting an MBA changed since the time of your last application? (Maximum 300 words.)

If you’re reapplying to the Chicago Booth MBA program, this is going to be a difficult question to answer.

There are two elements you need to address when answering the Booth MBA essay prompt for reapplicants.

1. How has your perspective on your future changed?
2. How has your perspective on Chicago Booth changed?
   • …and/or getting an MBA changed?

Because there are only 300 words you can spare in this essay question, we would highly recommend combining your perspective on Chicago Booth and getting an MBA. Do not make your perspective on Chicago Booth and the act of getting an MBA separate items, as there are simply not enough words to spare.

So, the best way to answer the reapplicant question would be to order your topics like this.

1. How has your perspective on your future changed?
2. How has your perspective on getting an MBA at Chicago Booth changed?

This combines the topics together in a manner such that you can dedicate approximately 150 words per question.

In terms of how to answer each one, our biggest recommendation is to keep two elements in mind: growth and humility.

For growth, you want to show the admissions officers at Chicago Booth that you’ve grown since you last applied. If you were rejected before, you want to demonstrate that you have improved to make yourself a more suitable candidate. After all, if the portfolio and stats you’ve had couldn’t get you in last time, it’s unlikely to change after saying nothing has changed!

So, show that you’ve changed for the better since your last application to demonstrate that you’re a more suitable candidate than you once were!

Here’s an example.

Let’s say that you’ve grown your online business side project since you last applied to Booth. However, the growth of this online business has opened up doors to elements of business that you were completely unaware of and ignorant of. So, although you’ve increased the efficiency of a side project, you can also see a future scaling this business. Therefore, you have a new future with to look forward to because you want to transition to entrepreneurship to make the most of this newfound online business.

Now, let’s talk about humility.

Humility is one of the most important elements of just about any college application. This is especially the case for reapplicants because they are reentering the college admissions process. Those who reenter the college admissions process arrogant and full of themselves are not demonstrating that they’ve learned from their insufficiencies in the past.

By being humble, in your reapplication essay, you can show admissions officers that you did in fact not know enough to truly be ready for Booth. And, now that you’ve matured and humbled, you are proving that you developed the necessary business temperament and mindset to truly succeed in a prestigious MBA program like Booth.

Of course, you’ll need to convey this in your UChicago Booth MBA essay itself.

Again, let’s take the online business example.

Most people who create an online business believe that once their project has “made it” things will become infinitely easier. That’s not the case. In fact, the problems start to become more obscure and complex; thus, problem-solving is no longer as easy as just searching for an answer on YouTube. Instead, you’ll need to listen to multiple consultants, hire experts, and use your own intuition to find the most cost-effective solution.

Sometimes, discovering that your success only reveals how little you know is the most humbling part of the business. And, that’s also why humility is a great indicator of someone who truly knows what it’s like working in the trenches of scaling a startup.

If you can demonstrate to the admissions office at Chicago Booth that you are someone who is humble about their knowledge, and is open-minded about learning more, you will show them that you are a fantastic candidate for their MBA program and will grow a lot from it.

If you’re still unsure about what to write about in your UChicago Booth MBA essays, fear not. Our expert college admissions essay editors and consultants have helped students like you write and edit fantastic essays that got them accepted into some of the most prestigious programs in the nation. Contact us for a free consultation, and we’ll provide you with free advice on how to improve your Booth MBA essays to stand out from the rest of the applicant pool.