MBA application essay advice: why school X?

MBA application essay advice: why school X?

How do you answer the question, ‘why school X?’ This is a very common essay question. Most schools have it. What you really want to focus on is being specific about the resources you would take advantage of at that school. You know you have answered this question well if you can’t just remove one name of the school and put another school. You can’t just remove NYU and put Columbia. If all you’ve talked about is the location of New York, that’s not central to NYU specifically or Columbia specifically. You need to dig deep into some of the faculty members, some of the entrepreneurship resources. Whatever it is that you’re going to take advantage of, it has to be specific. Also, my advice here is to not focus so much on what you’re going to get out of the program, but on what you can contribute. Thinking about, ‘when I visited this class, this was a discussion and I think I could further the discussion based on my background in this and this.’ You want them to imagine you there, and you want them to think, ‘this person reminds me of this other person at the school that I admitted and that’s really thrived.’ The more you can be specific and the more you can indicate how you would contribute to the school, the more likeable you will be.