INSEAD’s latest update to its MBA application essays marks a significant shift in their admissions process, sparking an engaging discussion on Poets & Quants’ “Business Casual” podcast with hosts John Byrne, Maria Wich-Vila, and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Known for seldom altering its application format, INSEAD’s decision to overhaul their essay questions introduces a fresh opportunity for applicants to showcase their personal and professional journeys in a more comprehensive manner.

One of the standout changes is the increase in total word count from 1,700 to 2,000 words, countering the trend of reducing essay lengths. Caroline, who previously led INSEAD’s admissions, highlights the importance of this adjustment in allowing applicants to craft a more cohesive career narrative. The consolidation of career-related inquiries into a single, flowing essay helps candidates articulate their professional paths and clarify their ambitions. Additionally, the reintroduction and expansion of questions about career goals and how INSEAD can facilitate these ambitions offers a more in-depth exploration of applicants’ alignment with the program.

Moreover, the revival of the extracurriculars essay underscores INSEAD’s commitment to understanding the holistic profile of applicants. By re-emphasizing activities outside of work and academics, INSEAD seeks to recruit candidates who will enrich the community beyond the classroom. The adjustment to the ‘candid description’ essay, adding a dimension of leadership evaluation, has its critics. Caroline notes that while this change attempts to merge personal insights with leadership qualities, the extensive coverage of professional characteristics elsewhere in the application makes this addition somewhat redundant. These thoughtful modifications underscore INSEAD’s intent to better grasp an applicant’s potential both within and outside the MBA experience.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain minor inaccuracies.

[00:00:06] – John

Hi there. It’s John Byrne with Poets & Quants. Welcome to business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-host, Maria Wiffila and Caroline DRT Edwards. Big news out of NCI. The school, which rarely changes his application, has revamped its essays. It’s the most substantial refresh of the MBA Application Essays in Years at NCI. And of course, we have in the studio the best person to describe what’s going on here, Caroline, who, of course, had been the head of admissions at NCI for many years before being a co founder of Fortuna Admissions. Caroline, what do you make of this?

[00:00:53] – Caroline

Well, yes, big changes. Very exciting in the life of NCI Admissions. So they’ve actually changed all of the questions a little bit. The word count has increased overall, which is interesting as the trend, in general, of course, has been reducing word count over the years rather than expanding it. I think it was at 1,700 words last year, and now we’re back to 2,000 words.

[00:01:19] – John

Wow, that’s a lot of words.

[00:01:21] – Caroline

It is quite a lot of words. But we can come back to why that is and why I think that’s a good thing. Then in terms of the changes, they have consolidated some career-related questions, which I think makes a lot of sense. There’s a question where you have to explain your career track since you graduated from your university and explain why you’ve made the choices to pursue the positions that you have and what you’ve done. So that question used to be broken down into a couple of different questions. I think it makes a lot of sense to consolidate It makes more of a narrative thread, I think, and logical flow for that particular essay. Then there’s a question about career goals, and they had cut that question back to 100 words, which was quite tricky in some cases, and they’ve expanded that and also added in a question about how INSEAD will help you achieve those goals. So that’s back up to 300 words. And the school hadn’t had a question for a few years about why you’re applying to INSEAD. They used to have an essay about it, and they took it out a few years ago with the aim of streamlining the application a little bit, and they shifted that question to the interview stage.

[00:02:43] – Caroline

And so the alumni interviewers will always ask the candidate about their motivation for applying to the school. But I think it’s useful for the far readers to see the candidate also articulate on paper how they see themselves taking advantage of the MBA experience and how they will use INSEAD as a springboard. So they’ve included that. They have brought back a question about extracurriculars. So they used to have this question, and then they dropped it. And I’m sure that the far readers weren’t very happy about it because, of course, extracurriculars tell you a lot about a candidate, I think, and it’s a really useful context. And it’s interesting to know what a person likes to do outside of work and study. And of course, schools are looking for candidates who will get involved in the life of the school outside of the classroom and who will take advantage of all the clubs and societies and social activities. That’s a huge part of the MBA experience. And of course, they’re looking for students who will be active members of the alumni community when they graduate. And so those extracurriculars can be an interesting indicator of what student they will be and what they will get involved in.

[00:03:56] – Caroline

So I think it’s great that they brought that back, and I’m sure that was a specific request from the file readers who were missing that information when it was cut out. And then there is the classic candid description essay, which the scores had for many, many years, but they have tweaked it a little bit. They have added an additional dimension. So they ask you to give a candid description of yourself as a person and a leader. So in the past, it was really just focusing on the personal side. So they are looking to understand your leadership qualities here as well. The question also asks you about your strengths and weaknesses, how you’re working on your development, and what experiences have shaped the person that you’ve become. So I think that this is an interesting development, and I’m not a huge fan of this change, personally, because I think that the school learns a lot about professional experience and professional characteristics from the rest of the applications. So you have those career questions that I mentioned. You have the recommendation letters. You have the resume. So I think that the school has plenty of opportunities to learn about the candidate’s leadership qualities elsewhere in the application.

[00:05:15] – Caroline

And the Canada Scription essay was often, to me, the most interesting essay because it was where the candidate would tell a bit more of their life story and tell more about who they are as a person beyond the facts and figures of their resume. And it’s really interesting to peel back those layers and understand what are the key experiences that have shaped the development of that person? And what are the key stories that they tell about who they are. And so I’m concerned that that may get lost. And so I think that would be a loss for the application. So I’m encouraging candidates not to focus solely on the leadership aspects and to try and strike a balance there and also tell a bit more of their personal story, because I know that that makes it much more interesting for the file readers that they get some of that personal background as well. And then they have a new question about a highly stressful situation. So you need to describe a highly stressful situation and how you faced and how you managed it. So in the past, they had a question here about last year with a question just about an experience of failure failure.

[00:06:30] – Caroline

Before that, it used to be divided in two parts where there was an example of achievement and an example of failure. And so now they’re focusing on a stressful situation. I think that’s an interesting evolution. I guess they’re looking to understand how a candidate has performed under pressure, what they have learned from those experiences. Also, perhaps they’re looking to understand resilience and dig into that that is such an important quality. And I know that there are sometimes concerns about young professionals not having sufficient resilience under pressure. And of course, if you’re going to school like INSEAD and you are going to be pursuing an international career, you will find yourselves often in ambiguous situations where there are complexities to navigate that you might not be familiar with. And so Or perhaps they’re looking to understand as well how a candidate is able to deal with situations where they aren’t fully in control of everything, and how do they navigate through that uncertainty. So I think that’s quite an interesting edition. So that’s it. They’ve kept the optional essay that was there before. So in addition to those 2,000 words, you have another 300 words where you can share anything else that you haven’t covered that you want to share.

[00:08:00] – Caroline

In most cases, I advise candidates not to use that space unless they’ve got something that really is critical to their story that they haven’t got across elsewhere. It could be, for example, maybe their GMAT isn’t fantastic and they want to explain that, or maybe they’re concerned about some aspects of that undergraduate transcript and they want to explain what happened. So that can be a good space to explain those situations. But it shouldn’t be an overflow for the other essays because, quite frankly, you’ve got a lot of space given those 2,000 words. You should be able to get your story across.

[00:08:35] – John

One thing they haven’t changed is the video interview, which continues to be an important part of the application, right?

[00:08:41] – Caroline

Yes, that’s right. I think the the far readers find those video interviews very insightful and very useful because they’re short. It’s just a series of short one minute recordings, so they can literally watch it in five minutes or less. And they learn a lot from those those recordings about the candidate’s ability to think on their feet, their communication style. Of course, INSEED gets a lot of applications from candidates who are not native English speakers, so they want to make sure that they’re able to get the message across clearly in English, because, of course, people will often write the essays and perfect them on paper. But are you able to actually speak up? And that’s a critical skill in the classroom. So Those video questions are integral as well.

[00:09:34] – John

Maria, what do you make of these changes?

[00:09:38] – Speaker

I really like these changes overall. I agree with Caroline that especially the consolidation of the career description essay, it was always very stressful, honestly, to take what would otherwise be one flowing narrative where you describe what your career has been through college, what your current career is, et cetera. To In the past, when it was broken out, it felt very disjointed, and it took a lot of time for the applicants to tweak and to copy and cut and paste a line like, Oh, should I put it in this one? Should I put it in this one? By consolidating these two topics into one essay topic, I think it’s going to allow for a much better reading experience and a much better writing experience because you’re not having to interrupt yourself in putting things into these artificial buckets. I also like that they’ve added a little bit more specificity even into existing questions. They’ve asked a long time, What are your career aspirations? Why are you pursuing an MBA from INSEAD? But now to that essay, they’ve not only added an extra 200 words, as Caroline pointed out, but they’ve really added some specific elements of, Okay, what is your target geography and industry and function?

[00:10:52] – Speaker

But they’ve added some information and some verbiage to the question that I think really helps guide the applicants more. I wonder if by explicitly pointing out, We want to know geography, function, industry, if perhaps in the past, they were getting these very vague answers of, I want to become a leader in business, something along those lines, which is great, but not very satisfying. Then finally, I’m curious to get… I’d love to get Caroline’s take on this, pointing out that the highly stressful situation. First of all, I like the change from a failure to a stressful situation because I think in the past, phrasing it as a failure would force people to artificially construct failures. To say, Well, I did this amazing accomplishment, and it was a very stressful situation. It required a lot of political navigation, but it wasn’t really a failure. So do I try to exaggerate and make it seem more of a failure than it was? That word failure, I think, was a real stumbling block sometimes in terms of maybe narrowing down people talked about or making them feel like, Oh, I need to be overly dramatic because that was a really hard situation, but it wasn’t really quite a failure, was it?

[00:12:07] – Speaker

I like the change from failure to a highly stressful situation. Caroline’s insight that this might be seeking out more resilience in candidates. That’s really interesting because I wonder what prompted the admissions committee to start explicitly looking more for resilience as a personality trait. I can’t help but wonder if recent shifts in maybe hiring practices. We’ve spoken in the past about how many business schools, a lot of those tried and true recruiters, maybe those opportunities and those offers aren’t materializing as quickly as they used to. We live in a much more geo-politically unstable and uncertain world now than we did a few years ago. I’m wondering if some of these… Is it macro elements that might be leading to this interest, a slightly Is it more pointed interest in resilience? Or is it more, wow, in the past couple of years, we’ve noticed that some of our students that we’ve accepted, perhaps are not… We really wish that they had a little bit thicker skin, as it were. I don’t know, Caroline, if you happen to have any insight into what might have prompted this change, but I’d love to hear it.

[00:13:23] – Caroline

I haven’t talked to the school about it yet, so I will try and get some more information about that. But I think I suspect it’s probably a mix of both. And I think that you’re right, that with the failure essay, sometimes candidates were trying to retrofit an example, and it was a bit of a stretch sometimes. And also candidates aren’t always terribly comfortable about writing about failures, which is a shame, because I think that candidates who, at least candidates who had very good examples of failures, which were quite dramatic failures, often had learnt more than somebody who had, I messed up a PowerPoint slide, and it didn’t go down very well. Big deal, right? And they haven’t necessarily learnt a huge amount from it. Whereas someone who has taken a bigger risk and maybe didn’t go as planned, they have gained a lot more from that experience. And so I think that those failure stories could sometimes be really interesting, but I’m sure that sometimes candidates were faking it a little bit, it and were too nervous to really expose themselves a lot in that essay. And so by framing it as a stressful situation, it just gives you a lot more scope.

[00:14:41] – Caroline

I’m sure that any or most candidates can come up with a few stressful situations that they’ve experienced in their lives or in their career. It doesn’t have to be. It’s also not specified in the question that it has to be a professional example. So it could be from someone’s personal life. So I’m sure that there are plenty of examples that candidates could potentially draw on, which gives them a bit more scope to pick an example that they think conveys qualities that they’ve developed and perhaps adds an additional dimension to their story that is useful to the overall picture that they’re looking to convey. Because, of course, the essay is, especially we have several essays like this, they’re like pieces of a puzzle that should fit together to build a picture overall. So with each question, when you’re addressing it, you need to think about what does this add that gives something additional and complements the overall picture. So I think it’s nice in that question that it gives candidates more options, I think, of the example that they might draw on.

[00:15:50] – John

So, Caroline, I guess my question is why does NCI need 1,000… No, actually 2,000 words in its admissions process, and Harvard only needs 800?

[00:16:02] – Caroline

Well, in yet, students are much more interesting than half of business school students. That’s the one. No, I think that… Right. So the school, historically, has always had a lot of questions, and I think that because they have such a diverse pool with people coming from all over the world, they are giving people an opportunity to tell their story in multiple dimensions. I think that ultimately, whilst it looks intimidating, fascinating. What I see from candidates when they’re working on these applications is that within CIAD, yes, it’s quite a heavy lift to produce all of that material, but sometimes it’s actually easier to tell a story in 2,000 words than it is in in 100 words. Then also, at the end of the day, they’re often very proud of what they’ve written, and they feel that they’ve really had an opportunity to tell multiple dimensions of their story, and that they have been able to really showcase their candidacy in a way that they might not have been able to do with some other applications. So I think that candidates are often very satisfied with the result when they submit their application, and they’re quite proud of it.

[00:17:15] – Caroline

I had a client the other day who said he was joked that he was going to print out his candid description essay and put it on the bathroom wall. He was so proud of it.

[00:17:27] – John

Do you think that the length of the application puts some people off or not?

[00:17:35] – Caroline

I’m sure it does, yeah, which is unfortunate because I think that it does look intimidating when you first look at it and that can be off-putting compared to some other schools where they have far fewer essays. But I think that’s a shame because I think that it’s not actually more difficult, really, at the end of the day. So as I said, it’s often harder to tell your story in less words than more words. So it’s giving you more scope to get your key messages across and to tell stories about what you’ve done and what you’ve achieved. So whereas with some of those other applications, if you’ve got fewer words, then with those Harvard essays, they’re so tricky now, right? With that series of questions and that very limited word count. I I think that’s much more challenging than the Intiat application where you have more scope. And as Maria said, they’ve put in some pretty clear signposts about what they want you to say. So they’ve made it easier, I think, because they’re very clear, this is what We’re expecting you to tell us. I think that that’s very helpful. To me, it’s not harder than some of the other applications.

[00:18:52] – Caroline

In fact, maybe it’s easier.

[00:18:54] – John

Now, do you think AI has had anything to do with this? In other words, you might require a little bit more, and you might make the questions more specific so that people are less tempted to simply cut and paste from ChatGPT.

[00:19:09] – Caroline

Yeah, I don’t think… Because it’s so personal, ChatGPT can’t tell you what you should say about yourself. It can help with refining your material, and it can help with editing and so on, but it can’t tell you what you should say. I don’t know if these questions, These changes are motivated by ChatGPT, but I’m sure they are seeing a few hand essays, which I’m quite sure they’re not thrilled about.

[00:19:40] – John

Indeed. Now, Maria, what advice would you give your applicants in confronting the new NCI application?

[00:19:49] – Speaker

I agree with Caroline. I think this is an easier essay set to write than it has been in the past. I think that the more generous word count limits. Before the, Why do you want to get an MBA from INSEAD at 100 words? That was tough because it was short term, long term career. And why INSEAD? That is hard to do in 100 words. My advice would be, I actually think that I would heave a sigh of relief if I were a candidate confronting this essay set versus the one in the past. I think in general for Inzayad, keep in mind some of these traits that they’re looking for. Caroline mentioned resilience, openness other cultures. It is the most internationally diverse business school. It is famous for graduating people who can nimbly navigate any cultural context in which they may find themselves. I think keep that in the back of your mind as well in showing, I don’t think you have to necessarily hit the nail on the head, but making sure that if you have evidence of being that person that you’re letting that filter through and how you portray yourself. But overall, I really like these changes to the Insayad essay.

[00:21:00] – Speaker

I think these will be welcome by candidates.

[00:21:06] – John

All right, there you have it. If you want to read more about this, Caroline has actually written a very comprehensive article on the Revamp on the Poets & Quants website. It’s called NCOD Revamp. It’s MBA Application Essays. Check it out. If you’re applying to NCOD, and quite a few people do, you really want to read this it to figure out how to approach the new essay prompts. This is John Byrne with Poets of Quants. Thanks for listening.