Adding to our store of essay guidelines, we wanted to take some time today to offer a bit of advice on approaching the essays for UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.
1. Please provide us with a summary of your personal and family background. Include information about your parents and siblings, where you grew up, and perhaps a highlight or special memory from your youth. (Limit to two pages, double spaced)
While we generally steer applicants away from writing at length about childhood or their upbringings (this can make one sound immature or excessively attached to the past), UCLA puts the topic front and center in its first essay question. This lifts the taboo that many schools place on writing about one’s family, but it’s still important to think strategically about this essay and avoid some of the common pitfalls associated with this subject. For instance, many applicants write about the values that their parents instilled in them or comment on the way their experiences have shaped their outlook – remarks that can make one sound rather passive. It’s important that you present yourself as being as active as possible in your application, attributing your success and decisions to your own drives and interests. Making yourself the agent in the sentence by commenting that you learned from a given situation or decided to adopt a certain attitude is a subtle difference in sentence structure that results in a drastic difference in tone.
It’s also important that you consider why UCLA might be asking this question; most likely, they want to get a sense of the origin of your interests, as well as learn about some aspects of your background that make you unique with respect to other applicants. It would be beneficial to highlight some early experiences or factors that contributed to the motivation behind your college major, career path to date, or goals for the future.
2. Discuss a situation, preferably work related, where you have taken a significant leadership role. How does this event demonstrate your managerial potential? (Limit to one page, double spaced)
This is a somewhat tall order for a one page, double spaced essay. You’ll want to briefly outline the situation, explain your role and comment on the results (ideally, you’ll select a professional success story here). It will also be important to provide adequate context about your company and industry for this document to be comprehensible if standing on its own. When discussing the way this demonstrates your potential, you might choose to highlight a few key skills that this story proves that you possess, and then explain how these abilities would translate into management of a larger scope or in another industry (perhaps foreshadowing the goals you’ll mention in the next essay).
3. Discuss your career goals. Why are you seeking an MBA degree at this particular point in your career. Specifically, why are you applying to UCLA Anderson? (Limit to two pages, double spaced).
This is your straightforward career goals essay. Because you’re given relatively little room to address your career to date, future objectives and basis for interest in the school, brevity will be crucial to an effective response.
4. (Optional) Is there any other information that you believe would be helpful to the Admissions Committee in considering your application? If you feel the application already represents you well, do not feel obligated to answer this essay question.
Although many school stipulate that the optional essay be used only to address a serious weakness or explain some extenuating circumstance, Anderson’s wording is a bit more welcoming of a response. Given the fact that the questions posed above are each somewhat narrow in scope, it’s quite possible that there will be something important that you’ll want to share with the adcom, but will not have been able to work into any of the three required essays. This would be especially true for applicants who are deeply involved with some organization outside of work, as there is not much room for discussion of current extracurricular activities elsewhere in the application. This essay might also be a nice place to expand upon your potential contribution to the program, in as specific terms as possible.
Contact Clear Admit to learn more about our counseling services for Anderson and other December/January MBA deadlines. You can set up a free initial chat with one of our admissions consultants by emailing your CV/resume to info@clearadmit.com.
