Don’t Write Boring MBA Essays! Here’s How to Start.

1. The first MBA essay mistake that people make is starting with a quotation. Here's an example. “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment” – Ralph Waldo Emerson. It's a great quote. It's actually really inspiring. But starting an MBA essay with a quotation is boring. It's not about you. It doesn't get into your story and it's really the most hackneyed and recycled way of communicating imaginable.
2. The second way you don't want to start your essay is to be too abrupt to just jump right in and answer the question. So take, for example, Stanford's question “What matters most to you and why?”. Well, you don't just want to start by saying what matters most to me is family, because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is not as big an MBA essay mistake as the quotation. However, it really spoils the mystery. Mostly what you want to do in your essays is tell a story. Don't give everything away up front. Take the reader on a journey and then answer the question.
3. Now, the third way, you don't want to start your essay – and this one is subtle – is what I call the irrelevant, vivid, moment opening. The irrelevant, vivid moment opening. So let me give you an example. Come into my office, said my boss. It was 2:00 a.m. and I was so tired I wondered what he wanted this time. He had been micromanaging me for the last week and I couldn't imagine what he had in store for me now. There's been a change in the project team and I need you to take the lead on Marco Workstream. Now, I could keep going because typically these kinds of openings go on after that. But you can see how I've wasted a ton of words. This was one hundred and nineteen words to showcase a moment that's really ultimately very unimportant in your personal story. It may have been important to you what had happened, but it's not important in your story.

Importantly, because you're not doing anything in this moment, all you're doing is standing there and then kind of nodding your head. While it's really tempting to start the essay in some kind of impressive, powerful, vivid moment – especially one with dialog – this is this is a misinterpretation of solid advice and it doesn’t make for an effective MBA essay opening. Solid advice is to get the reader right into the story. But that doesn't mean that you want to try to impress them with some crazy, vivid scene that actually doesn't foreword the story you're trying to tell. Great essays are essentially an exercise in great storytelling. And storytelling language is very simple. It's direct, it's clear, it takes the reader from one point to another fairly quickly without a lot of excess verbiage.