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Embark MBA is a boutique MBA Admissions consulting firm founded by former M7 Adcom. My superpower is helping applicants craft materials that sound and feel like them. Since 2017, I’ve helped hundreds of MBA-hopefuls - 97% have succeeded, with 59% receiving scholarships (an average of $143k). I achieve this by simplifying the application process, providing individualized and tailored advice, and spending time to deeply understand you.

Successful Harvard Business School Essay

“See those letters up there? They’re over six feet tall,” she whispered, grinning. Standing below Michelangelo’s dome inside St. Peter’s at the Vatican, my mother pointed at the lapis-lazuli letters in the mosaic hundreds of feet above us. After confirming the letters’ size relative to a man standing on the platform above, their significance was clear and my passion for art, its geometric precision, and its import in the world had been ignited. While my interest in art history has only grown since that moment 14 years ago, I’ve also discovered passions for the arts more broadly, business, and the environment. Experiences stemming from these interests have led me to integrate art and analytics, build adaptability, and grow and exercise a passion for positive impact.

Art + Analytics: From Evensong to EBITDA

In addition to an early interest in Renaissance art, studying ballet for 12 years inspired a passion for classical music and, subsequently, a love of singing that continues today. While the formulaic precision of classical music intrigues me, singing is even more captivating to me. From joining a church choir in third grade to completing a European tour with a high school group to taking lessons at the Peabody Institute, singing has allowed me to share arguably-underappreciated genres of music with the community. Most recently, after moving to Texas last summer, I tried out for and joined the adult choir at a local church. I’m very excited to continue my pursuit of music while co-leading our 2020 tour to New York.

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While I indulged my passion for singing through voice minor lessons at Johns Hopkins, by studying art history and business courses, I further cultivated my interest in art and analytics. Additionally, interviewing a student investment group for a JH News-Letter article significantly expanded my opportunity paradigm of the intersection of art and analytics. Just as art history demands a combination of aesthetic appreciation and well-researched logic, finance presented fascinating ways to leverage research in solving business challenges. While proactively moving up the financial knowledge curve helped me secure internships with [Asset Management Firm] and [Investment Firm], recruiting for investment banking roles as an art history student at a “non-target” school posed significant challenges. After countless cold emails and informal conversations, I received and accepted an offer with [Investment Bank] in Milwaukee. Upon arrival, I strove to build a rigorous analytical base while applying the dual art-plus-analytics lens from my humanities background, thereby earning the respect and trust of my originally-skeptical colleagues. Receiving “top bucket” performance ratings and being selected for an Associate promotion felt like affirmations of the value of blending art and business.

A Quest to Become U-Haul’s Top Customer

Transitioning from art to investment banking represented one big leap – studying in Italy and moving to four different cities in the span of four years helped me further appreciate the importance of adaptability. While I’d studied Italian at Hopkins, living with a host mom who spoke minimal English in Florence challenged me to rapidly improve Italian language proficiency while adjusting to a new culture. Similarly, living in Baltimore, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Dallas has stretched my horizons. Having grown up in quiet Connecticut, living in Baltimore during college offered exposure to a more urban environment, but that transition did little to prepare me for the Midwest. In fact, Milwaukee’s exceptionally-friendly people and bone-chilling winters sometimes felt as foreign as elements of studying abroad.

After spending three years with [Investment Bank] in Milwaukee and Chicago – a period during which I absorbed many new perspectives and proactively flung myself into new communities – I accepted a private equity role in Dallas with confidence, knowing I’d adapt to the scorching summer heat and abundance of barbeque joints just as I’d adapted to polar vortices living along Lake Michigan. While often stressful and initially lonely, these transnational moves have exposed me to diverse viewpoints, allowed me to interact with people of varied experiences, and helped me become comfortable integrating into new environments.

A Tale of Two Passions: Education and the Environment

Beyond exposure to city life, living in Baltimore helped me understand the need for a stronger U.S. education system and gave me an outlet to drive positive impact. In serving as an Organizer with a school-affiliated tutoring program supporting elementary school students, I guided progress across pairs of tutors and students while connecting Hopkins with the Baltimore community. Transitioning from one-on-one tutoring to leading tutor-student pairs enabled me to learn how to motivate others. Sharing success stories of helping students advance across multiple reading levels, for example, generated renewed commitment from high-achieving undergraduates with limited time, and connecting tutors with one another empowered them to refresh their knowledge of teaching tools. It was extremely rewarding to develop relationships with students, their families, and tutors, and to witness demonstrable student progress that often led to transformative opportunities in middle school and beyond.

At [Private Equity Firm], I’ve continued fostering a passion for creating positive change, albeit for a broader set of communities. Having grown up in a family that, ever-conscious of the Earth’s finite resources, recycled enthusiastically and regularly held “shortest shower” competitions to conserve water, I believe the business community can and should do good via an environmentally-conscious approach to growth. As a personally-passionate champion of environmental sustainability initiatives, I was thrilled with the opportunity to guide an air pollution control company within Insight’s portfolio. Through this experience, I’ve helped lead the portfolio company’s expansion into aftermarket services, a recurring revenue stream that will boost Insight’s financial return but, more critically, will enable customers to maintain their aging anti-pollution systems, reducing airborne toxins and converting waste into usable materials.

Looking forward, I hope to funnel my love for blending art and analytics, appreciation for adaptability, and commitment to positive impact toward transforming how we engage with our planet. Post-MBA, I aspire to join an environmentally-focused investing firm that considers financial, social and environmental metrics. I hope to strengthen the critical skills of efficiently synthesizing complex scenarios, listening intently to and comfortably sharing ideas, and thinking from the perspective of a leader at Harvard. Longer-term, my career mission involves leveraging these skills to lead an investment firm that benefits the planet while achieving attractive financial returns. Specifically, I aim to create environmental solutions through investing and supporting technologies and companies that reduce waste, plastic consumption, ocean pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Art and music provided me with early connections to our shared world history – it’s critical to pioneer new ways of interacting with our world that will enable the continuation of art, music, and other noble endeavors for millennia to come.

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Professional Review by Embark MBA

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Let’s start with the topic at hand - What more would you like us to know? The beauty and challenge of this topic (and others like it - I’m looking at you, Stanford’s “What Matters Most” essay!) is to tell the reader who you are and why. For the majority of the essay, Emma did this well! I felt like I was sitting down over a cup of coffee with her. I could hear her voice - she’s clever, thoughtful, introspective. From the six-feet tall lapis-lazuli mosaic letters, to the polar vortices of Lake Michigan, to the “shortest shower” competitions, I could picture, sense, and imagine the scenarios she placed for the reader. Her essay invites you to want to know her more. As a former Admissions Committee Member who read thousands of essays a year, this is a rare feat - I applaud her!

What would I have done differently? The intro reads as mismatched to the rest of the essay. Her intro introduces the idea of art opening her aperture of the world, concluding with additional passions for arts, business, and the environment and THEN overlaying on “integrating arts more broadly, build adaptability, and grow and exercise a passion for positive impact”. Whew! That’s a lot for 1 essay! Had this essay more precisely either A) threaded a singular art theme to all 3 vignettes (she does so in the first, not the other two) or B) positioned the intro as her having 3 passions - art, analytics, and the environment - this would have read as a more united, fluid essay. Again, this essay is warm and inviting, but suffers from the common pitfall of tackling too many topics.

What do I mean? Her first paragraph details her exploration of art through singing and art history and how she found similar appreciation for analytics - love it. What I don’t love is weaving in the perceived challenges of recruiting for an investment banking internship and winning over her ‘originally-skeptical colleagues’. Positioning herself as disadvantaged and the magnification of how she was maybe looked down upon takes away from what I’d rather read - her perception of beauty shared between art and numbers. It’s unnecessary detail that pulls me away from knowing her.

The second vignette is set to show how she’s built adaptability by moving from studying art to her investment banking roles and subsequent moves. This paragraph has some lovely detail - AND I would have chosen to either detail how art was at the core of her travels + put the more in line with “appreciation” for adaptability as what we read in other vignettes. She describes her moves mostly as being required to adapt (“stressful and lonely”) vs. maybe a sense of adventure, which those two adjectives betray.

The third vignette is the weakest for me - education and the environment. Again, while there’s beautiful detail, she’s chosen 2 large topics. I would have chosen just 1 as this paragraph is too ambitious. Further, detailing her accomplishments in tutoring is the one place in the essay that begins to read as if any one could have written it.

For most applicants, it does not make sense to state your goals within this particular essay, unless the content of the essay ties into your goals. HBS already has a separate goals essay, therefore the content repeated here could be repeated. I don’t know if that’s the case for Emma. That said, it seems like Emma is reflecting on the “why” behind her goals, which she may not have had room for elsewhere. In that case, this is perfectly fine although I would have guided her to tie her experiences / goals more succinctly and instead devoted more content to the essay's main body.

Emma is clearly a strong candidate with a warm, inviting tone to her essay - no wonder she was invited to interview! I am tough on essays - when I read, I try to imagine what I would have thought as Adcom. My advice for anyone drafting is to narrow topics while ensuring that every paragraph sounds uniquely like you.

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