Customer Reviews

Essays That Will Get You into Business School (Barron's Essays That Will Get You Into Business School)

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As someone who works privately with students, helping them with admissions essays for MBA programs, I highly recommend this book. When students call me in regard to assistance with their essays, I recommend that they first buy this book as a means to get started. The guidelines and essays have helped my clients not only to gather their thoughts, but also to organize and write them into interesting and creative essays. By the time they come to me for feedback and editing, they are well along the way to getting into the MBA program of their choice.

resource.

The point of writing the application essays is to emphasize your candidacy while presenting yourself as unique "fish" among the "school" of applicants. While the examples and critiques are mildly interesting, they don't do that much to help you be yourself.

A better, and more holistic analysis of positioning your entire application is presented in the Richard Montauk book, "How to Get Into the Top MBA Programs."

If you're interested purely in the essay portion, the Harry Bauld "On Writing the College Application Essay" is much better because it adds a human (and humor) element to writing. (Don't be misled by the undergraduate flair: Harry Haggard and Sarah Bleary review B-school applications, too!)

These essays are outdated, answer irrelevant questions and are entirely too long. They are good only to read and say - "I can do better than that." Besides, reading other people's essays is not as useful as a good book full of advice on which topics to cover and how to write. Save your money.

This is a new (3rd) edition of the book but it does not have a single new essay since it's second edition in 2003. The 2003 edition, on the other hand, has only 5 new essays since the first edition, that came out in 1998, which has essays from 1996.
Perhaps useful in a few ways (if you want to get an answer/strategy to a specific question/problem), would suggest you don't follow these archaic recommendations or essays.

The book that has the freshest essay content is the 65 HBS Essays, 2nd edition that came out in August of 2009.
65 Successful Harvard Business School Application Essays, 2nd Ed


BB, Founder of GMAT Club
GMAT 750

This book helps you to get good personal essays for business school. If you are looking for a guide, it will be useful. However it takes lots of time to complete this book because it's not a small pocket book which you can finish in a couple of days because of many advices and themes

While not as good as Montauk's "How to Get Into the Top MBA Programs," this book is much shorter (1/3 the size) and may be better if you're on a tight deadline. Found that the essays provided some good guidelines. Helped me get into UCLA, so it was definitely worth the read.