HBS Essays: Tips from MBA Admissions Experts (2025-2026)

After much anticipation, Harvard Business School (HBS) has released its 2025-2026 essay prompts with only minor wording changes from the prior year. Although the edits (deletions, mostly) are subtle, our team finds them to be a solid improvement from last year.

For context, HBS overhauled its longstanding single essay prompt last year, replacing it with a trio of much shorter essays. The new HBS essay prompts posed some challenges, often packing multiple questions in a single response. This year, we’re glad to see those prompts streamlined, resulting in clearer direction for applicants.

The 2025-2026 HBS Essay Prompts

Business-Minded Essay: Please reflect on how your choices have influenced your career path and aspirations. (up to 300 words)

Leadership-Focused Essay: What experiences have shaped how you invest in others and how you lead? (up to 250 words)

Growth-Oriented Essay: Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)

What Does HBS Look For?

As a starting point, it’s helpful to consider the qualities HBS looks for. Note that these qualities align with the essay prompts above.

1. Business-Minded
2. Leadership-Focused
3. Growth-Oriented

HBS wants strong, conscientious leaders who will change the world. Every successful candidate needs to not only meet the criteria above but do so in their own distinctive way.

If you’re not sure how to bring these qualities to life in your own application, we’re here to help.

Start Big Picture, Then Drill Down to Each Question

It can be tempting to jump straight into the prompts and start brainstorming the best story to answer that specific question. But we urge you to pause and look at the big picture first. Go back to your personal brand and what you stand for. What is the message that you want to deliver to HBS loud and clear?  

Write that message at the top of your essay brainstorming document and refer to it frequently. Use it as your guidepost as you ideate on individual essay topics. And ask yourself, does this story a) answer the prompt? AND b) support and reinforce that message? Your answer should be yes.

The Career Goals Question

The first “Business-Minded” essay prompt centers around the “why” behind your career choices to-date and your aspirations for the future. HBS is looking for clear cause and effect here and a strong essay will draw simple but powerful connections between your past and your future.

We recommend starting by writing down key inflection points or “aha” moments in your past that sparked your interest in using business as a force for good. These can be but certainly don’t have to be professional experiences. From that list, choose the most influential 1-3 past experiences that you will expand on and connect with your passion for creating an impact.

Then the remainder of the essay can describe your future aspirations. It’s important to convey not just what you hope to accomplish, but also why it matters to you and how it connects to your unique background and insights.

If you want additional guidance on how to bring your goals to life in a way that excites the admissions committee, we break that down here.

The Leadership Question

In the second “Leadership-Focused” question, HBS is asking you to elaborate on both who you are as a leader and how you’ve had an impact. In other words, this essay must reveal your character, your special brand of leadership, and how you lead – and how those have left a mark on others.

To accomplish this, we recommend following the outline of the prompt. Open by sharing a defining moment or experience that explains the origin of your leadership values and character. This will most likely be a personal experience and can certainly reflect the influence of a role model or leader you admire, a challenge you overcame, or even a unique family dynamic. Anything is fair game here so get creative.

Then you can tell a story of a specific time when you positively impacted others through your leadership. To select the best story here, we recommend writing down all of the key moments in your life where you demonstrated leadership, regardless of whether it was in a formal role. Then from that list, choose your proudest or most defining experience.

Lastly, with the remaining word count, reflect on what the experience taught you about yourself and your leadership style. Focus on the personal growth that emerged. Did it shift how you think about leading others? Reveal a blind spot? Reinforce a core value? Aim to show that the experience left a meaningful and lasting mark on how you show up as a leader.

The Growth Mindset Question

If the first two questions put you in the driver’s seat of impact, the third “Growth-Oriented” question reverses the roles and asks you to discuss a time when you’ve been impacted. More specifically, the question is asking about a time when you sought out a new experience, new knowledge, a new perspective, or any other avenue that was the opposite of certainty.

Unlike the other questions that ask you to connect the dots between multiple experiences, this question is asking you to recount one specific story or anecdote. We recommend choosing the one most compelling story – the story that exemplifies your curiosity AND strongly supports your personal brand / overarching application theme.

Because curiosity is a core value for HBS, we recommend choosing a story where the stakes were high and the impact on you was truly meaningful. If you’re struggling to identify a good story here, start at the end. Identify specific instances where you experienced personal or professional growth – where there was a clear before and after. Then, backtrack to the actions you took that led to those leaps in growth.

A classic STAR (Situation, Action, Task, Result) format will help you make the most use of the limited word count here. Describe the context of the situation, what sparked your curiosity, and the steps you took to satisfy it. Then conclude by explaining the impact of your curiosity on your development.

What to Avoid

You’ll notice that none of the questions ask you “why HBS” or “why MBA”. This is not a trap. HBS simply isn’t interested in understanding your reasons. So, we don’t recommend spending your specious word count on addressing “why HBS” or “why MBA”. These essays should be deep and personal. What drives you? Who are you as a person (if someone were to start writing a biography about you right now?) And importantly, for HBS, it should point to good examples of how you are a leader.

We also recommend checking out this piece on common MBA essay mistakes to help you avoid some of the pitfalls we see most often.

Get Personal

Your experiences and accomplishments don’t have to be massive things relatively speaking – not everyone has started a non-profit or is on a mission to save the world – but if they are significant to you and your trajectory and evolution as a person, then that’s the point. The goal is to show who you are, what drives you, and what has helped you become who you are today.

Lastly, check out HBS’ Portrait Project. The stories students share and the level of personal depth they go into is exactly the kind of direction you should be taking with these essays. 

---

Reading this essay analysis is a great starting point in your HBS application process. It will point you in the direction and help you avoid some common pitfalls. But remember that general guidance will only get you so far. Feedback on your individual story and writing is what will supercharge your essays.

If you would like some personalized guidance, click here to request a free 30-minute consultation!