Carnegie Mellon / Tepper MBA Essay Tips 2024-2025

The following essay tips cover the Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business (Tepper) MBA admissions essays for the 2024-2025 admissions season. You can also review essay topic analyses for all of the other leading MBA programs as well as general Essay Tips to further aid you in developing your admissions essays.

Carnegie Mellon University Tepper MBA Essay Tips 2024-2025

Let’s take a closer look at each prompt.

Goals Video Essay

Now, let’s hear directly from you! We know that your career goals are an important part of your decision to attend business school, and we are excited to hear them.  Please describe your post-MBA career goals.  You have up to 2 minutes to respond to this question.

Please consider the following information in your response:

• Please be as specific as possible. If you have not yet identified specific companies, that is okay. Just tell us what interests you for your next role or company. What about the industry, company, or functional role is appealing to you?
• If you have any criteria you are using to evaluate career opportunities, please share those as well. We may have great opportunities to add to your list.
• How does this post-MBA career goal relate to your long-term career plan?

Pro Tip: While we have titled this a video essay, we prefer you to answer this prompt like a live question. We do want you to think about your response and likely write down some of the points you would like to communicate. However, the best responses are not reading your essay on camera.
CMU Tepper has taken a standard career goals essay and requested that applicants deliver this information via video. In light of the format, be sure to review our tips on Video Essays. In regards to the content itself, follow Tepper’s directions in presenting your plans. They want to know your immediate post-MBA goal, in as specific terms as you can provide. You can then share the thinking/motivation/decision making behind your plans, as they request the related criteria. Finally, wrap up by explaining how your short-term plans are a bridge to your long-term goals. You will likely not have enough time to dig into as much detail for your long-term goals, so just try to leave the adcom with a sense of the impact you hope to have in the long term. You may be able to speak 200-250 words in the allotted two minutes, so keep that limit in mind when drafting a “script.”

Required Essay

The Tepper School community is committed to helping students reach their full potential. Explain your philosophy on helping others achieve their full potential. How have you implemented this philosophy in your professional life, and what impact has it had on those around you? How will this philosophy influence your approach to leadership in the Tepper School of Business and beyond? (Maximum 500 words, double spaced, 12 point font)
Open the essay by explaining what supporting others looks like/matters to you. Then, account for how you have applied this philosophy in a professional setting. Once you have identified your example, we recommend a simple STAR structure for this response. Begin by describing the situation, the players, and stakeholders involved before moving into the task: what you needed to do to help others reach their full potential. You should then move into the action, providing a chronological account of how you moved through the project or process. Finally, you should comment on the result — the positive outcome of your leadership efforts and the resolution of the story, including your impact.

The adcom also wants to know that you’ll be supportive and collaborative while on campus at Tepper and be a good addition to the student community. Applicants should aim to connect their history with potential future contributions to Tepper.  It’s important to create context before connecting to how you would contribute to Tepper. As you approach the contributions, specifically, think about how you can translate your experience and related lessons into involvement on the CMU campus and as an alum. Creating a link between your past and your potential future at the program will enable you to present a consistent and clear picture of your candidacy, as well as your professional and personal interests. The more information you can provide about how exactly you would contribute (playing a certain role in organizing a particular annual event, for example), the more reason you’ll give the adcom to admit you.

Optional Essay

Is there anything else that you would like to share with the Admissions Committee as we evaluate your application? If you believe your credentials and essays represent you fairly, you should not feel obligated to answer this question. This essay is intended to provide a place for you to add information that you think is important but is not covered elsewhere in the application. This could include clarification of your employment or academic record, choice of recommenders or helpful context for the admissions committee in reviewing your application.
While there is no set word limit for this essay, it would be wise to keep this under 500 words, given the length of the required essay. Optional materials also create more work for the reader, so it’s important to keep that in consideration while being concise in one’s explanations.

This optional essay should be reserved for addressing potential liabilities in one’s application. Such discussions should be direct and to the point, providing an explanation and pointing to mitigating factors without being defensive or making excuses. This essay is optional, so should not be used if there are no issues to explain.

Clear Admit Resources

Thanks for reading our MBA essay tips of this year’s Tepper essay topics! As you work on your Carnegie Mellon MBA essays and application, we encourage you to consider all of Clear Admit’s CMU / Tepper offerings:

• Carnegie Mellon University / Tepper School of Business Profile on the Clear Admit website: up-to-date advice and admissions information
• Clear Admit LiveWire: admissions updates submitted in real time by applicants to Tepper
• Clear Admit DecisionWire: school selections in real-time by admits to Tepper