What would you like the MBA Admissions Board to know about your undergraduate academic experience?

Sample One

He astonishes me when he recounts his life story. Born in Bohdikov, Czechoslovakia, in 1927, he immigrated to the United States at age 21 as the Communist Party planted its roots. As a displaced immigrant, he arrived without friends and knowing little English. Nevertheless, he held two jobs, attended night school and completed his mechanical engineering degree in nine years – all while supporting a growing family of five.

My grandfather’s life story and his sacrifices have instilled a strong work ethic in me. He has shown me that to fulfill noteworthy goals, you must take the initiative. He affirms that this country provides the greatest opportunities, and that being here is an immeasurable advantage. But with those opportunities come responsibilities, and those that can succeed should help others do the same. My many years of living and traveling abroad have reinforced these lessons.

All this may seem unconnected, but thoughts of my grandfather strongly influenced my decision to attend the University of Iowa. Based on my academic achievements, the university and the state of Iowa offered me a merit-based scholarship that paid all my college costs. Although I qualified to attend schools with stronger reputations, I believed that Iowa offered me the best value: a solid education at minimal cost.

My grandfather’s teachings and my life experiences reminded me that initiative and motivation would be my keys to achieving success. Given my free tuition, I crammed my schedule with courses in biological engineering and finance – classes that would aid me in the renewable fuels industry. I joined a prominent fraternity and established a tutoring program for struggling members. Using my personal computer, I formed a small online business to generate revenue for personal expenses. I kept my body healthy by competing in boxing and mixed martial arts. Having the luxury of free time, I invested myself in community service activities. All these pursuits were guided by my grandfather’s principles of taking initiative, seizing opportunities and succeeding while helping others do the same.

My grandfather’s legacy will live on in me; I know that others have struggled to provide me with opportunities to succeed, and I will not sit idly. My grandfather and my past ignite my motivation. My deep respect for my grandfather and his teachings fills me with pride, and I strive to make him proud.

Sample Two

As a child, I convinced my mom to designate a portion of the basement as my development lab. In the lab, I created inventions that addressed problems relevant to the world around me. My most popular inventions with my schoolmates were a rubber band gun re-loader which cut reloading time by 75% and a wing design for a Styrofoam airplane which minimized damage during landing. My beginnings as a novice inventor matured into a desire to be an engineer and solve real-world problems.

The complex math and physics I studied during my first two years at The University of California Berkeley provided the backbone of electrical engineering. I went from wondering how computer chips worked to learning firsthand how to design them. The secret to survival in the most challenging courses was my study group. The four of us contributed our diverse strengths, and I saw the benefit of our collective learning and problem solving. Each week, we spent hours together white boarding and debating until we mastered the subjects and built the frameworks necessary for our upper division classes.

At the end of my sophomore year, I wanted to put my learning into practice, so I entered the cooperative engineering program to work for technology companies. On the job, I integrated the theories and concepts from the classroom and started to understand how the fundamentals worked together. When I returned to school, I added more to classroom discussions because I could relate the theory to real-world engineering applications. During my senior project I completed my transformation into an engineer. My project assignment was to help Computer Inc., a Silicon Valley startup, solve a technical problem that was blocking their expansion into Europe. After working for one month without a viable solution, my teammate was ready to give up and join another project group. I wanted to stay the course, even though our grade was on the line. I persuaded him to take the risk by explaining that as engineers we were sure to find ourselves in similar situations and this experience would prove that we were ready. We eventually unraveled the problem, and when Computer’s CEO gave me a high five, I realized I was finally a real engineer.

As an MBA student at Harvard I will begin a new transformation--from a sales-focused engineer into a business leader with the foundations to solve any organizational challenge I will face in my career.

Sample Three

My undergraduate academic experience served as a bridge between two worlds—my past as an Orthodox Jewish girl from Teaneck, NJ who rarely left the confines of her insular community, and my present as an Orthodox woman in the public sphere in Washington, DC. This was not a seamless transition and, as such, I grappled with many changes during college.

My education at Yeshiva University began in an all-girls Jewish seminary in Jerusalem. On my own for the first time, I soaked up the local Israeli culture, and explored my religious identity. Inspired by my patently Jewish surroundings, I was intent on maintaining my traditional observance and embraced the familiar lifestyle—keeping kosher, praying daily, dating for marriage. The traditions of my upbringing felt comfortable and secure, and followed me into Yeshiva’s all-female New York campus sophomore year. Despite our urban location, it was an idyllic self-contained community. I ensconced myself in the comfort of the familiar, with young women in long skirts blissfully shuttling back and forth from school without much regard for the pulsating city surrounding them.

While the close access to professors and small classes fomented academic inspiration and enduring leadership skills, a uniformity of views pervaded Yeshiva. Gradually Yeshiva’s parochial ways felt limiting and I craved greater intellectual openness and diversity. As an outlet, I developed a love for creative writing, and professors affirmed my passion, choosing my pieces to read aloud, encouraging me to submit for publication. My political science minor stemmed from politically heated Friday family dinner discussions and an infatuation with The New York Times, which explained the Maureen Dowd columns hanging on my dorm room walls.

Pursuing numerous extracurricular activities, from college paper staff writer to Model United Nations committee chair, helped me find my voice while concurrently fueling my dissatisfaction with Yeshiva’s narrow-mindedness. The once attractive student body of a thousand women from similar backgrounds had turned into a stifling bubble of claustrophobia. I worked to harness my position as Senior Class president as a way out of this predicament, spearheading new programs and injecting a more cosmopolitan spirit into the hallways of the University. I became close with the University administration while earning the respect of my peers as I tackled the seemingly unconquerable mountain of apathy that has long persisted at Yeshiva.

Those seminal undergraduate years underscored the values that I truly found important—a love of learning and the relish of a challenge—and what I wanted to pursue, bringing me to Washington and my current role on Capitol Hill. These experiences have afforded me the tools that I am uniquely positioned to further cultivate as an MBA student at HBS.

Sample Four

When I enrolled at the State University of New York at Geneseo, I was eager to learn about business but not yet equipped with the study habits and time management skills that college would demand. In addition to my academic responsibilities, I dedicated fifteen hours a week to playing goalkeeper for the varsity soccer team and more than ten hours a week to my job as a barber. A month into the term I started to feel overwhelmed—so many balls were flying at me that I couldn’t stop them all. By the end of the term, I failed to live up to the high academic standards that had earned me a college scholarship.

During my second semester, I responded by committing more time to academics. The harder I worked and the more I participated in classroom discussion, the more I enjoyed my studies. I took the lead on difficult group assignments and enrolled in courses outside of the business school. One course, The Developing World, was particularly intriguing. My classmates and I gathered in a coffee shop after lectures to continue debates ignited in class, such as the pros and cons of imperialism on Latin America. A paper I wrote about a Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, inspired me to learn even more about the Hispanic culture, and I decided to study abroad in Spain.

While abroad, I studied foreign politics and Spanish humanities in the classroom and my studies sprang to life during social interactions with my Spanish friends. Staying up until 3:00 AM debating the value of the nascent European Union opened my eyes to new perspectives on politics and international economics. Every moment was a learning experience, from ordering meals in Spanish to navigating the transit system. On more than a few occasions I hopped on the wrong bus or train and ended up an hour from my actual destination, but as I learned in my first semester in college, getting lost is part of the journey. My experiences in Spain that semester made me a more confident and worldly person.

My setback freshman year taught me the value of prioritization and the dividends of pushing myself academically. College opened the door to new places and new ways of thinking. I learned that I can prevail under the pressure of competing priorities and in unfamiliar environments.