Vanderbilt / Owen MBA Essay Topic Analysis 2025-2026

The following essay topic analysis examines the Owen Graduate School of Business of Vanderbilt University (Owen) MBA admissions essays for the 2025-2026 admissions season. You can also review essay topic analyses for all other leading MBA programs as well as general Essay Tips to further aid you in developing your admissions essays.

Vanderbilt / Owen Essay Topic Analysis 2025-2026

Let’s take a closer look at each prompt. 

Essay 1

Our Career Management Center offers resources, guidance, and support to students as they navigate their anticipated post-MBA career paths. Examples of popular industry career paths are Consulting, Financial Services, Consumer Products, Healthcare, Human Resources, Technology, and beyond. It is noteworthy that many students opt to concurrently explore multiple industry career paths.

As you contemplate your post-MBA aspirations, walk us through your career journey thus far and share two post-MBA career paths you aim to explore during the Vanderbilt MBA program. Please articulate what in your career journey has led to your decision to pursue an MBA, and touch on skills you’ve developed that will help you achieve your post-MBA career plans. (400 words)
This is a fairly standard career goals essay, except Vanderbilt is looking for applicants to present two plausible career plans. We recommend having one priority career plan and a reasonable alternative; this could look like two different short-term goals that serve as plausible stepping stones to the long term, short-term flexibility in industry or functional focus, etc. Applicants will want to begin by describing their professional aspirations, including both the potential positions they hope to obtain immediately following an MBA, as well as their long-term objective.

This year, Vanderbilt added the request for reflection on your career journey—and another 200 words to the word limit. It would make sense to include a few sentences about your educational and work experience to date, and how these have influenced (and prepared you for) these future roles. You can then note the skills and knowledge that you still need to gain in order to move successfully along this path. With this “why MBA” piece established, you will then want to offer a detailed treatment of the ways specific elements of the Owen MBA program would help you to bridge the gap between your current skill set and your future plans. You’ll want to review Vanderbilt’s curricular and club offerings to determine what best meets your needs.

Essay 2

Reflect on a challenge or stressful situation you have faced. How did you respond to this challenge, and what did you learn about yourself through the process? (300 words)
This Owen MBA essay question asks you to recount an experience in which you overcame a challenge and grew in the process of resolving it.

Regarding the sorts of examples that you might cover, the wording of this Owen MBA essay question is technically wide open to personal and professional experiences. Rather than gauging the significance of an experience solely in dollar amounts or percentages, we encourage applicants to attend to the follow up question lessons learned. Whether the challenge was logistical (like stretching yourself to coordinate across internal teams while managing a client’s expectations) or interpersonal (such as developing a good working relationship with an adversarial colleague), effective responses will highlight a transferable skill that was formed or strengthened during this process. Of course, the end result must be positive.

With respect to structure, we recommend a basic STAR approach 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 goal. You should also lay the groundwork for the challenges you encountered, identifying the factors or relationships you would need to navigate to be successful. You should then move into the action, providing a chronological account of how you moved through the project or process. It would likely make narrative sense to introduce the challenges and how you overcame them as part of this narrative rather than addressing this in a separate section.

Finally, you should comment on the result — the positive outcome of your efforts and the resolution of the story. The response should then conclude with a reflection on the lessons you learned, and perhaps a comment on how they have served you since and/or how they position you to add real value to the Vanderbilt community.

Optional Explanatory Statement

You may provide an additional statement to briefly explain anything that is not already addressed elsewhere in your application. This could include employment gaps, lack of recommendation from your current or most recent supervisor, violations of the law, academic misconduct, sub-par academic performance, or anything else that is relevant to your application. Bullet points are acceptable for this statement when appropriate. (300 word limit, optional)
If you need to address potential liabilities, per the list in the prompt, such discussions should be direct and to the point. Provide an explanation and point to mitigating factors without being defensive or making excuses. While there are 300 words allotted for this response, applicants using this essay to address an issue in their application will likely use only a fraction of this space.

Video Response

The video response is a chance for you to provide a glimpse of your authentic self, speaking without a script. The video questions are designed to be easy to answer, “small talk” questions to help us to get to know you. You will have time to prepare your response and the application will provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to record your answers.
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, 90-second 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. The adcom has noted that there is no pressure to use the entire video recording window, so once you feel you have fully addressed a question, you may wrap up the recording.

Clear Admit Resources

Thanks for reading our analysis of this year’s Vanderbilt / Owen MBA essay topics. As you work on your Owen MBA essays and application, we encourage you to consider all of Clear Admit’s Vanderbilt / Owen offerings:

• Vanderbilt / Owen Profile on the Clear Admit website: up-to-date advice and admissions information
• Clear Admit LiveWire: admissions updates submitted in real time by applicants to Vanderbilt / Owen
• Clear Admit DecisionWire: school selections in real-time by admits to Vanderbilt / Owen