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Emory Goizueta MBA Essay Topic Analysis 2023-2024

The following essay topic analysis examines Emory Goizueta’s MBA admissions essays for the 2023-2024 admissions season. You can also review essay topic analyses for all of the other leading MBA programs as well as general Essay Tips to further aid you in developing your admissions essays.

Emory Goizueta MBA Essay Topic Analysis 2023-2024

Essay 1

What will professional success look like immediately after your MBA experience? Please describe where you would like this degree program to take you professionally. Include information such as desired job title, responsibilities, company, impact, and/or industry. Explain how your professional experiences and personal strengths align with your post-MBA goals. (200 word limit)
This inquiry is a fairly straightforward career goals essay, with an explicit emphasis on the short term. Candidates should open the essay with a clear statement of their short-term post-MBA goal, i.e. the position they plan to seek immediately after graduating from Goizueta. Applicants should name a specific job title/functional role, and might even consider naming 1-2 firms that they plan to target. While a long-term goal isn’t explicitly requested, briefly commenting on how this position will support one’s longer-term career vision would provide some context for this choice.

Meanwhile, applicants should take care to include a discussion of how their experiences and strengths are aligned with this short-term goal.  Candidates should ensure that they cover each of the items named in the prompt, explaining how their professional experiences to date have informed their goals and prepared them (to some extent) for this position, as well as how they see their professional strengths (functional skills such as communication or quantitative knowledge) and personal attributes (more global qualities like flexibility or perseverance) supporting them in handling the day-to-day demands of their target role.

This is a fair amount of ground to cover in a 200-word response, and applicants should make covering each aspect of the prompt their first priority.

Essay 2

Goizueta Business School is a values-driven community with a mission to prepare principled leaders to have an influence on business and society. Please tell us which of the Goizueta Core Values (Courage, Accountability, Integrity, Rigor, Diversity, Team, Community) resonates most with you and share a personal account of demonstrating leadership in this area within your current or previous company or service organization. The committee is interested in a personal story of leadership. (200 word limit)
The primary task of this essay is to recount a leadership experience and comment on your impact and core value. In selecting a topic, it will be important to key in to the preamble and its emphasis on the concepts of principled leadership that involves both social and shareholder responsibility. We therefore strongly recommend that candidates aim to select an example that aligns with at least one of these two touch points.

Note that the example in this essay can come from the personal or professional realm (though all things being equal, a professional experience will likely be preferable here). Your highest priority should be to identify an example that will allow you to showcase one of the global- or responsibility-oriented values mentioned above.

Once you have identified your example, we recommend a simple STAR structure for this response. Begin by describing the situation, the players, and stakeholders involved before moving into the task: what you needed to accomplish in your leadership role (as well as any challenges or barriers that you anticipated). You should then move into the action, providing a chronological account of how you moved through the project or process. Finally, you should comment on the result — the positive outcome of your leadership efforts and the resolution of the story. In a concluding section, applicants will then want to summarize the lessons they learned in the course of this leadership experience, and might also include a comment on how these lessons have served them since and/or how they position the applicant to add real value to the Emory MBA community.

Video Essay

Telling your story through written essays is an important part of the application, but the video essay lets us hear your words in your own voice. In the required video essay, every candidate will answer a “small talk” question to help the MBA Admissions Committee get to know you. The video essay instructions and link are located in your application portal.
Before pressing the “record” button, it would be worth reviewing our advice on video essays to understand the broader goals of a video prompt. As this is a visual presentation that will be recorded live, ensure you are dressed in appropriate professional attire. In terms of a background, clean and steady may work best—you do not want to make the adcom dizzy by taking them on an unsteady walking tour with your laptop. While many applicants will be tempted to introduce props into their video, such as signs, souvenirs, or any prized possessions, we would like to urge caution in this domain.  A focused response to the question (while looking your audience in the eye) may be far more effective than a distracting string of props, signs, charts—each requiring valuable time to make transitions—not to mention careful attention to readability/visibility on screen.  As the question can change and because the adcom is looking for an unscripted view of you, you will not want to be hampered by trying to work in materials that may or may not be relevant to the prompt.  Take the preview period to gather your thoughts and then speak genuinely and clearly.

Optional Essay

If there is an important part of your story missing from your MBA application (e.g., unexplained gaps in work experience, choice of recommenders, past academic challenges), please use this section to provide a brief explanation. Please use bullets if you need to address more than one topic. (200 word limit)
The adcom is primarily interested in hearing about explanations or extenuating circumstances that might have a meaningful impact on their consideration of one’s application. Applicants should therefore take a conservative approach to this response, including only information that you believe warrants the extra item it will require for a reader to review.

Clear Admit Resources

Thanks for reading our analysis of this year’s Goizueta essay topics! As you work on your Emory MBA application, we encourage you to consider all of Clear Admit’s Goizueta offerings: