Our good friends at mbaMission have released their 2012 Essay Analyses for Columbia Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Wharton, Stern School of Business, Yale School of Management, and the Ross School of Business. We’ve compiled these six analyses into one handy 2012 Essay Analysis Resource for you. Enjoy!

Columbia Business School Essay Analysis, 2012-2013

Applicants to Columbia Business School (CBS) this year must complete one short-answer question and two essays. Perhaps CBS is returning to the mind-set that less is more by getting rid of the third full essay from last year and adding a 200-character, career goal mini essay instead.

Stanford Graduate School of Business Essay Analysis, 2012-2013

The Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) has tweaked its essay questions and word limits this year, moving from an 1,800 word count across four essays to a 1,600 word count across three. Some quick math will reveal that you have more words per essay now”maybe the admissions committee felt it was not getting the true depth of candidate experiences previously? The most important broad advice we can give you is to be sure that you keep the reader learning. Keep your audience in mind”your admissions reader will be going through hundreds of essays this application season. If he/she gets to your essay three and has to read about the same theme yet again, he/she will be bored or frustrated or both. So as you write, be sure that you are introducing new experiences and dimensions of your profile. This will greatly improve the likelihood that you will be able to hold your reader’s attention throughout.

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!
Here is this week’s problem:

A_x(y) is an operation that adds 1 to y and then multiplies the result by x. If x = 2/3, then A_x(A_x(A_x(A_x(A_x(x))))) is between

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Last month, a few Manhattan Preppers headed to Brooklyn to partake in our second New York Cares Day.  In the spring, New York Cares Day aims to clean up city parks, gardens and public spaces all around the five boroughs. This year, there was a special focus on the city’s waterfront, and volunteers set out to restore 10 miles of coastlines to make the areas more sustainable for plant and animal life and more accessible for city residents.

We were assigned to paint a mural at the Jersey Barriers near Cobble Hill – someone must have heard we have a great artist on our team (shout out to Jon S!). Leading up to the event, the rest of us were crossing our fingers that it would be a paint by numbers mural, and we were definitely relieved to find out that we would be utilizing stencils. After given a brief tutorial on the vision of the mural, we set out to paint the barriers to resemble a lush forest landscape.  It was awesome to work beside other great companies, such as ZocDoc, who also sent out a team of volunteers. There were even a few passers-by, out on their morning run, who stopped to help with the community project! By the end of the day, we had made a few new friends and also left our artistic touch on a part of Brooklyn.

New York Cares Day has become one of our favorite volunteering activities in the office, and we are looking forward to another New York Cares Day this fall! For more information on New York Cares, you can visit their website at newyorkcares.org.

We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

In the x-y coordinate plane, what is the minimum distance between a point on line L and a point on line M?

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

The 4 sticks in a complete bag of Pick-Up Sticks are all straight-line segments of negligible width, but each has a different length: 1 inch, 2 inches, 3 inches, and 4 inches, respectively. If Tommy picks a stick from each of 3 different complete bags of Pick-Up Sticks, what is the probability that Tommy CANNOT form a triangle from the 3 sticks?

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

Z is the set of the first n positive odd numbers, where n is a positive integer. Given that n> k, where k is also a positive integer, x is the maximum value of the sum of k distinct members of Z, and y is the minimum value of the sum of k distinct members of Z, what isx + y?

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We have another installment of our immensely popular free Integrated Reasoning workshops.  Due to even more overwhelming student demand, we’ve added three more, which you can now register for.

Sign up fast before they sell out!

Saturday, June 9th (1:00 “ 3:00pm EST)
Instructor: Stephanie Moyerman

Monday, June 18th 81:00 “ 10:00pm EST)
Instructor: Liz Ghini

Saturday, June 30th (1:00 “ 3:00pm EST)
Instructor: Stephanie Moyerman

We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!
Here is this week’s problem:

For any numbers a and b, min(a, b) and max(a, b) represent the minimum and the maximum of a and b, respectively. If c > a, is a < b < c?

(1) min(max(a, b), c) = max(min(b, c), a)

(2) max(max(a, b), c) “ min(min(b, c), a) > c “ a

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Do you have a crazy story about what you had to do in order to take the GMAT before it changes this weekend? Did you have to fly to Puerto Rico to find an opening at a testing center (We know somebody who did this when the GRE changed!)? Did you delay your honeymoon in order to take the test?

Share your crazy, funny, extreme, or otherwise amusing story with us as a comment on this Facebook post. Most “liked” story by Friday afternoon will win a free copy of our Case Studies and Cocktails book. 2nd most “liked” story will win a free Manhattan GMAT t-shirt. And, as an added bonus, your story might appear in a major news publication (pending your approval, details to follow)!

Our partners and friends over at mbaMission have posted their annual Harvard Business School Essay Analysis. Here is is what they had to say…

Harvard Business School (HBS) kicks off the MBA application season again, and this time it is doing so with a significant overhaul of its entire application. HBS has shrunk its written requirements from four mandatory essays of 400 to 600 words to two essays of 400 words each, but has added a new post-interview 400-word write-up (for the approximately 25% of applicants who are selected to interview), giving interviewees a mere 24 hours to submit their last word to the school.

Managing Director of MBA Admissions Dee Leopold has long held that essays play too prominent a role in the business school admissions process, but does giving candidates just two essays (analyzed later in this post) truly reduce the emphasis? We suspect that having only 800 words with which to make a lasting impression on the admissions committee, candidates will worry that they do not have enough space to successfully convey a full picture of themselves. We therefore expect that applicants will fret even more than usual over their essays, debating whether the two stories they have chosen to share will be sufficiently powerful and compelling, and giving their essays an incredible amount of attention. Meanwhile, to make up for this lack of space”and thus allay their fears that they have not shared enough information about themselves in their essays to persuade the admissions committee to admit them”they will likely stuff their resumes, interview sessions and recommendations with as much crucial information as they can squeeze in. In some ways, then, HBS is just forcing candidates to play a game of whack-a-mole”the school is trying to push information out of the essays, but the information will undoubtedly pop up elsewhere!  As long as the admissions process is competitive and requires that applicants submit qualitative data, candidates will seek to gain an edge any way they can.

Here is our analysis of HBS’s essay questions for this year”we hope it will give you that edge.

To read the complete analysis, please visit mbaMission’s blog.