Wharton Essay 1 Outline

Question 1: Describe your career progress to date and your future short-term and long-term career goals. How do you expect an MBA from Wharton to help you achieve these goals, and why is now the best time for you to join our program? (1,000 words)

I am writing about my approach here as an example of what I had thought and done. I am sure there are better ways to address the same question. Although bschool essays are not required to follow the exact rules of English style or grammar, a well written essay will have a good flow and will convince the reader about your answer to the essay question.

Opening Line:
This wasn't an eye catching phrase or anything like that. In my case, I was able to write one sentence summarizing the essense of my application, a certain theme that I gave the whole application. I don't think I struggled for this line. In fact, it just came to me one fine day when I was redrafting my essay. Nevertheless,this sentence also fit in making the transition to start my next paragraph describing my career progress.

Paragraph 1, 2, 3, 4:
As the question asks about career progress, I wrote 4 short paragraph talking about my career, instead of writing big paragraphs. I am a software engineer. And as such, my goal was to describe the learnings that came out of my experiences. I gave references to couple projects instead of being generic. These paragraphs summarized my 4 years of work in the software development industry and how I was using technology inside and outside work. This helped me to lead the discussion into my community work

Paragraph 5:
This was how I grew because of my community involvement. Again main points. I was going to write about the specifics in other essays. I was writing about this here because this was leading upto my goals. Once I was satisfied that I had provided enough context. I wrote about my goals.


Paragraph 6, 7:
Statements and discussion about short term and long term goals and why they mean so much to me, what I need to achieve to my goals.

Paragraph 8, 9, 10:
Once I spoke about my goals, I linked that to how an MBA helps here. And then spoke about Wharton MBA, why it would help me in my goals, and what I do with it.

Last paragraph:
I mentioned couple lines about why now is the best time for an MBA, which also summarized my essay.


In my approach, the essay flow addressed the question in order. However, you could also do this differently. For e.g, start with the goals, then link them to your about career progress, and then write about how MBA helps here. Instead of hurrying to write the essays, spend some time organizing your thoughts, and then pen them down. Also, the goals and Why MBA essay question will be repeated for all bschools in different forms. The flow that works for one question might not work for other.