Berkeley Haas has officially kicked off the 2024-2025 MBA application season by announcing its essay questions for the 2024-2025 application cycle. If you are looking for an MBA program with a small class size and close-knit community, Berkeley Haas may be a great choice for you.
In a statement introducing the 2024-2025 Berkeley Haas Application, Berkeley Haas shared the following:
Our distinctive culture is defined by four key principles — Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. We encourage you to reflect on your experiences, values, and passions so that you may craft thoughtful and authentic responses that demonstrate your alignment with our principles.
Below, you will find Personal MBA Coach’s advice on tackling the Haas MBA essay prompts.
Tips to Master Berkeley Haas 2024-2025 MBA Essays, Video Essay, and Application
Berkeley Haas MBA Essay Prompts
Berkeley Haas MBA Essay 1: What makes you feel alive when you are doing it, and why? (300 words maximum)
Berkeley Haas has left its first essay question unchanged. This is a great essay to tell the admissions committee a bit more about your story. With this short essay, get right to the point. Make the most of this opportunity to talk about your true passions and what really drives you.
For some applicants, this may be their job (but tread cautiously here). If your job is what truly drives you, be sure that you have a strong reason and can illustrate passion as you write. Extracurricular work also could fit well but be sure it is an area where you have emerged as a leader and/or have added substantial value. Be succinct and speak from the heart.
A strong essay will include a balance of “what” and “why.” While this is not the time to brag about accomplishments, an ideal answer will show something you have done to set yourself apart.
Berkeley Haas MBA Essay 2: What are your short-term and long-term career goals, and how will an MBA from Haas help you achieve those goals?
Short-term career goals should be achievable within 3-5 years post-MBA, whereas long-term goals may span a decade or more and encompass broader professional aspirations. (300 words max)
Despite changing the wording of the second essay slightly, Berkeley Haas has retained the classic “goals” essay it added last year. (Find out more about the most common MBA essay types and how to address them here.)
With only 300 words and directions to include both short-term and long-term goals along with how a Haas MBA will help, there is a lot to cover with limited space! Many schools allocate 400 or 500 words to their “goals” essays. This means you have to make every word count!
Often with a goals essay, we recommend that applicants cover their past successes before sharing their goals. However, with such a short essay, there is very little space, so you will need to set the context for your goals succinctly.
Next, you should share both your short-term and long-term goals. While this new wording invites candidates to think about their long-term goals a bit more broadly, Personal MBA Coach recommends that these goals should be ambitious yet achievable! For more on how to develop compelling goals, check out this blog and video.
Finally, let the Haas admissions committee know why you need an MBA (and specifically a Haas MBA) to achieve these goals. To answer this question, think about your skills gaps—both technical and leadership—and what offerings at Haas will help you to address these gaps. Take the time to research Berkeley Haas’s offerings. Personal MBA Coach suggests being specific in detailing the opportunities you plan to take advantage of on campus and carefully articulate how each will position you to achieve your career aspirations.
Berkeley Haas MBA Essay 3: One of our goals at Berkeley Haas is to develop leaders who value diversity and to create an inclusive environment in which people from different ethnicities, genders, lived experiences, and national origins feel welcomed and supported. Describe any experience or exposure you have in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging whether through community organizations, personal, or in the workplace.
Candidates seeking consideration for mission-aligned fellowships may use this space to reflect on their commitment to the mission of those fellowships. (300 words max)
With this short essay, Berkeley Haas continues the trend among business schools to require a DEI essay in its MBA application. For some applicants, this will be easy to answer. However, if an example does not come to mind easily here, remember that it is ok to think of diversity broadly.
As you approach this essay, we recommend focusing on a few examples and using them to show the reader the type of classmate you will be!
Berkeley Haas MBA Video Essay Prompt
The Berkeley MBA program develops leaders who embody our four Defining Leadership Principles. Briefly introduce yourself to the admissions committee, explain which leadership principle resonates most with you, and tell us how you have exemplified the principle in your personal or professional life. Please review the Defining Leadership Principles in advance and take time to prepare your answer before recording. You will be able to test your audio-visual connection before recording. Video essays should last 1-2 minutes and may not exceed 2 minutes.
This year, Berkeley Haas retained a video component in its MBA application. For many years, Berkeley Haas has pressed candidates to define successful leadership. Instead of asking about leadership in an essay, Berkeley Haas has incorporated this leadership prompt into its video.
At 2 minutes, this video is longer than many other MBA videos. However, candidates have a lot to cover. In addition to introducing themselves, candidates should reflect on Haas’s four leadership principles and pick just one.
These four principles are:
- Question the Status Quo
- Confidence Without Attitude
- Students Always
- Beyond Yourself
Personal MBA Coach recommends that candidates consider the qualities they believe that successful leaders embody and why they believe these traits are important as they select a principle from this list.
Next, think about how you personally have begun to demonstrate this principle, including a few short examples.
As Personal MBA Coach generally advises, you should not include a laundry list. Instead pick a limited number of stories that you can easily explain from your personal and professional life.
As with all videos, we recommend that you write out bullets and not a full script so that your style appears more natural. Keep in mind that one of the key objectives of a video essay is to evaluate how you will contribute in class and how you will perform in a job interview.
Optional Berkeley Haas Essay Prompts
Berkeley Haas also has two optional essays.
Optional Essay 1: We invite you to help us better understand the context of your opportunities and achievements.
Many applicants will not answer this question. Personal MBA Coach recommends that applicants use optional essays sparingly. If your answers to these questions are not unique, there is a good chance you should skip this essay.
Optional Essay 2: This section should only be used to convey relevant information not addressed elsewhere in your application. This may include explanation of employment gaps, academic aberrations, supplemental coursework, etc. You are encouraged to use bullet points where appropriate.
For this second Haas optional essay, answer only if you have specific or extenuating circumstances to explain. Read more on our approach to optional essays here.
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