As promised when we posted Fuqua’s essay questions last week, here are some thoughts and pointers for applicants preparing to tackle this particular program’s application.

Duke’s questions this year are fairly straightforward, covering common topics such as ethics and a past failure. It’s also important to note, however, that each of the program’s inquiries contains two or more questions, and that it will be important to explicitly address each in order to tailor these essays to Fuqua’s questions.

Short Essays

Essay 1: Please discuss your career path, your short and long-term goals. 

Essay 2: Why are you interested in The Duke MBA program and how will it help you achieve your goals? If you are interested in the Health Sector Management concentration or a joint degree program, please address in this essay.

These two questions combined constitute the fairly standard career goals/why MBA question posed by most programs. Because the program requests that applicants answer each of these short questions in a single page (1.5 spaced), you may have to arrive at a condensed narrative of your career to date but should fortunately have a fair amount of room to fully articulate your interest in Duke’s program.

Long Essays

Essay 1 (required): How has your personal history and family background influenced your intellectual and personal development? What unique personal qualities or life experiences might distinguish you from other applicants? How will your background, values and non-work related activities enhance the experience of other Duke MBA students and add to the diverse culture we strive for at Fuqua? Note: The goal of this essay is to get a sense of who you are, rather than what you have achieved professionally.

This is quite a tall order for the 500-750 word prescribed length for this essay (though there is no formal word limit, the instructions hint that most applicants find this sufficient), as there are several lines of questioning and potential topics here. The key will therefore be spending a fair amount of time reflecting on the question and identifying the most important and interesting aspects of one’s personality to cover in this response. One approach might be to identify two or three characteristics that have influenced your activities and interactions and to trace their development from your early days, comment on the role they play at present, and suggest how they might come to bear on the Fuqua community.

Essay 2: Please respond fully and concisely to one of the following essay questions, identifying clearly which question you have selected.

A. To be a good team player, one needs to be an effective individual leader and vice-versa. Describe an example of where you were challenged to become a leader in a team-oriented context. What was the challenge you faced, how did you address it, and what did you take away from the experience for your future development as a leader?

This essay presents a great opportunity to showcase a leadership success that includes the angle of personal or professional growth as a result of a challenge. In addition to a detailed description of the situation, an account of your thoughts and actions throughout and a discussion of the lessons you learned, it would also be great to comment on the outcome of the situation and the impact you were able to have on the team and whatever larger context the story might involve. To distinguish this response from an answer to the classic “impact” essay posed by many schools, though, applicants might consider building this desired outcome into their introduction rather than the conclusion as an explanation of the importance of their ability to rise to the challenge.

B. Describe a situation in which your ability to perform ethically was challenged. What was the issue, how did you handle it, and what did you learn from it?

For a detailed discussion of the elements to consider when responding to a question about an ethical dilemma, see our take on Wharton’s similar question.

C. Describe a significant leadership failure in your life. What did you learn from this failure? How has it impacted who you are today and the kind of leader you would like to be?

When responding to a question about a time when you performed less than optimally, it’s best to select a story from which you have some distance; a college extracurricular could be a viable topic, as could an early professional experience. As is also the case with any failure essay (again, see our thoughts on this year’s Wharton essays for an explanation of these general principles), the key will be to summarize the situation as briefly as possible in order to allot a good number of words to a discussion of the lessons you learned from this experience, how they have served you since that time, and how they will continue to influence your leadership style.