Should You Use Sample MBA Essays?
Many applicants read multiple sample MBA essays before writing their own application essays. The general assumption is that if an essay helped someone get into a top program like Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD, or LBS, it can be useful for them too.
While sample essays can help applicants understand the structure, reflection, and writing style, they can also encourage applicants to imitate narratives that do not necessarily resonate with their own experiences, resulting in generic cookie-cutter essays.
In this post, I explain why relying too much on sample MBA essays can weaken your application and how to use them more effectively.
Why Applicants Turn to Sample MBA Essays
MBA applications can feel overwhelming, particularly for first-time applicants. Sample essays offer a sense of direction by helping applicants:
- Understand the level of detail expected
- Learn how stories are structured
- See how leadership and impact are discussed
- Understand how career goals are presented
- Reduce the anxiety of starting with a blank page
In a sense, sample essays make the admissions process feel a bit less abstract and more tangible. However, the problem arises when applicants move from learning from sample MBA essays to emulating them.
Learn how to write great MBA application essays that resonate with adcoms and help you stand out from the competition.
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The Problem with Sample MBA Essays
1. The Assumption That the Essay Earned the Admit
When reading ‘winning’ essays, applicants often assume that the essay is the reason for the successful admit. However, admissions decisions are holistic and based on an applicant’s entire profile. Along with essays, adcoms consider other factors when evaluating an applicant, like:
- Academic performance
- Professional achievements
- Career goals
- Leadership potential
- Recommendations
- Interviews
- Extracurricular involvement
Essays are only part of a much larger application package. When applicants read sample essays, they don’t see the broader context behind the essay:
- What was the candidate’s professional background?
- What impact had they created at work?
- How did they perform in the interview?
- What sets them apart from the rest of the applicant pool?
- How strong were their recommendations?
- How did they demonstrate leadership at work and beyond?
As a result, attempting to replicate a successful essay without understanding the profile behind it can be misleading.
Understand what storytelling in MBA essays actually means and how reflection, emotional progression, and narrative coherence shape compelling essays.
2. The Invisible Thinking Process Behind Essays
Another limitation of sample MBA essays is that they only show the finished version. Readers don’t see, and are sometimes even unaware of, the thinking that goes into creating these essays – brainstorming, reflection, positioning, story selection, and narrative building.
Strong essays are not just about good writing. They are the result of a much deeper process of understanding the applicant’s experiences, motivations, strengths, and goals, and tying them together into a coherent, compelling narrative. In many cases, applicants spend more time thinking than writing.
This is why when applicants read well-written sample essays, they assume that the quality of the writing was responsible for the admit. However, the most important work often happens before the first draft is written.
Read about the key thinking phase most applicants miss in the MBA application process and why it leads to weak applications.
3. Risk of Ending Up with Generic Narratives
Perhaps the biggest danger of using sample essays is that they lead to imitation. Many applicants begin to unconsciously emulate the ideas, language, and messaging they read in the sample essays. This results in generic themes in their essays, like:
- Creating global impact
- Transforming industries
- Becoming visionary leaders
- Empowering underserved communities
- Bridging business and technology
While these aspirations may be genuine, without being rooted in specific personal experiences, they end up sounding shallow. The result is essays with generic leadership narratives and vague ambitions that sound polished but interchangeable with other applicants’ essays.
This issue is especially visible in career goals essays. Many applicants borrow goals from sample essays for their target schools without fully understanding whether those goals make sense for their aspirations or if they can justify their goals based on their past experience.
Even when applicants have defined clear post-MBA goals, they often fail to translate them into a strong goals essay due to reasoning and judgment errors. This article on common MBA goals essay mistakes explains why.
4. Authenticity is Hard to Verify
Many sample essays available online are edited, shortened, anonymized, or rewritten. Publishers often make these changes to improve readability or protect the applicant’s privacy. Often, the version applicants read may not accurately reflect the original version submitted to the school.
Moreover, reading too many sample essays can make it difficult to distinguish your own voice from the patterns you have absorbed from the samples. Applicants generally start with authentic experiences but gradually reshape them to resemble the stories from the sample essays because they believe that is what adcoms want to hear. The result is an essay that does not feel personal or genuine.
Understand the psychology behind a winning MBA essay and how to use this knowledge to craft a compelling MBA application.
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What You Should Do Instead
1. Use Sample MBA Essays Strategically
Sample essays can still be helpful if they are treated as examples of effective communication rather than templates that applicants should replicate. They can help applicants understand how to structure essays, incorporate reflection, communicate impact, and transition between ideas. They should not be used to build your story, goals, leadership examples, motivations, and positioning strategy.
2. Look Inwards Rather Than Outwards
Many applicants begin the essay-writing process by looking at what successful applicants wrote or thinking about what the adcoms want to hear. However, a more useful approach is to look inwards and ask: what experiences have shaped the way I think, lead, and make decisions?
The strongest essays emerge from self-reflection rather than imitation. Before writing, think about:
- Key turning points in your life
- Significant leadership experiences
- Challenges that shaped your perspective
- Moments of growth or self-discovery
- Long-term motivations and aspirations
- Decisions that shaped your professional journey
Once these themes are identified, building a narrative that ties them together becomes intuitive, leading to more effective essays. You can then shift your focus to essay structure and presentation.
Learn how you can build an MBA application narrative that conveys your authentic and personal story to the adcoms, and helps you stand out.
3. Don’t Chase Uniqueness
When applicants read successful MBA essays, they may end up thinking that they need extraordinary achievements to stand out. However, most sample essays available online are selected from a vast pool, and perhaps optimized before publication. It is highly likely that only the most impressive ones get published.
In reality, adcoms are not necessarily looking for extraordinary accomplishments. They are looking for self-awareness, reflection, authenticity, and evidence of impact. A thoughtful essay about an ordinary journey is more compelling than a dramatic story that lacks personal insight. Instead of exaggerating your experiences or manufacturing uniqueness, think about what experiences shaped your goals, what is your leadership style, and what value can you bring to the class.
Read more about MBA application spikes, how adcoms evaluate them, and what to do when you don’t have an obvious spike.
Final Thoughts
Sample MBA essays can be useful learning tools, but they should not become blueprints for your own application. The strongest MBA essays are successful not because they follow a particular template, but because they communicate a clear, authentic, and personal story about the person behind the application.
Use sample essays to understand how effective essays are written but not to decide what your own story should be. Ultimately, adcoms are not looking for another version of a previously successful applicant—they are looking to understand your motivations, goals, and value add to the class.
Understand why well-written MBA essays still fail and how adcoms actually evaluate essays in MBA admissions.
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