The MIT Sloan Required MBA Pre-Interview Essay Questions 2024-2025

Mar 206 min read

If you’re invited to interview with MIT Sloan, there’s an extra step you need to complete before you actually sit down with AdCom: 2 essay questions that you’ll need to submit at least 24 hours before your scheduled interview time.

MIT is looking for candidates who not only subscribe to their values, but live them everyday. That’s why they are looking for “specific examples of your personal and work behavior, such as how you persuade others, work as part of a team, and demonstrate leadership”. They already like you (that’s why they’ve invited you to interview!), but this extra step helps them understand your critical thinking process and how actively you are aligned with their mission.

Here are MIT Sloan’s required pre-MBA interview essay questions for 2024-2025, with example answers for each.

Required Question 1

The mission of the MIT Sloan School of Management is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice. We believe that a commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and well-being is a key component of both principled leadership and sound management practice.

In 250 words or less, please describe a time when you contributed toward making a work environment or organization more welcoming, inclusive, and diverse.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a hotly contested topic in the current political climate in the US, but it remains a key feature for many top business schools. MIT Sloan wants to build a class that can interact and work together with people from different backgrounds and with different perspectives – much like the modern, global workplace. MIT considers this a quality of "principled leadership”.

For applicants from under-represented backgrounds – not just race and gender, but also religion, disability, age, class, and communities – it may be easier to find an example where you have contributed knowledge and skills learned from your lived experiences to the workplace.But applicants from over-represented backgrounds may find this harder to tackle. Luckily, we wrote a whole guide on how to answer DEI questions here.

For this essay, you’ll need to identify one meaningful example of a time when you contributed to creating a more inclusive and diverse workplace. And with the short 250 word limit, you’d be hard pressed to do justice to any more examples. So start by brainstorming your story. Some examples include:

How did you address implicit bias in your organization’s processes or systems?

Did you amplify the voice of a team member belonging to an underrepresented group, or go outside of your team to support someone who was struggling to be included?

Did you make your workplace more comfortable for someone from a minority group?

Did you help or mentor someone who was being overlooked by the team or management?

Did you influence/propose a policy, start an employee resource group, or build/grow a community within your workplace to amplify the voices of underrepresented employees?

Have you called attention to an inappropriate comment or behavior?

Were you called out for an inappropriate comment or behavior that you learned from and actively worked to improve? Did you impact others with what you learned?

At its core, this question is seeking to understand the core leadership skills you have, like empathy, communication, self-awareness, and willingness to learn. So even if you had your own behavior or bias called out by someone else, your story holds value as long as you used that lesson to impact others positively.

Once you have picked a compelling story, structure it in the SCAR (Situation, Challenge, Action, Result) format. Provide clear outcomes and analyze what you learned, and how you hope to use this learning in the future. Here’s a good example of what your DEI pre-interview essay could look like:

Here’s an example of the Sloan Required Interview Essay 1:

Not long after I joined Amazon, I was encouraged by a female coworker to join the FemTech Collective, a support group for women in tech. As a man, I was apprehensive. I thought I would be intruding, or taking up space. But I couldn’t have been more wrong: the group was warm, inclusive, and welcoming of my support.

During Women’s History Month in March 2023, the FemTech Collective gave a multimedia presentation at the British Library celebrating the role of female programmers in building some of the earliest general purpose computers, ENIAC and UNIVAC. As an organizer, I liaised with the British Library administration, managed social media accounts, posted flyers, and ultimately managed to pack nearly 200 people into the Library’s foyer for our presentation. Tickets for the presentation cost a nominal fee; all profits went to charities supporting tech education for girls in secondary school.

I was particularly inspired by the stories of women professionals who fought to keep their jobs while facing sexual harassment and other structural workplace barriers. These conversations helped me better understand how systemic challenges influence career opportunities and job performance. I am committed to using my resources and voice as an ally, and aim to platform women in the workplace and beyond. Currently, I work as a mentorship coordinator for the FemTech College, placing talented young women with female tech industry mentors.

Required Question 2

We are interested in learning more about how you use data to make decisions and analyze results. Please select one of the following prompts to respond to:

Option A: Please select an existing data visualization and in 250 words or less explain why it matters to you. The data visualization should be uploaded as a PDF. Examples may come from current events, a business analysis, or personal research.

Option B: In 250 words or less, please describe a recent data driven decision you had to make, and include one slide presenting your analysis. The slide may include a data visualization example and should present data used in a professional context. Your slide must be uploaded as a PDF.

Let’s analyze each of these options.

In our experience, Option A is typically preferred by applicants who are in roles where they don’t work with data analysis or data-driven decision making. That’s because they can choose a relevant data visualization that is closely aligned with their target industry or goals – which leads nicely into why it matters to them. Ideally, this will be your career “mission”.

So even if you don’t come from a data background, Sloan wants to see if you can still understand and interpret basic data and connect it to your own work. You may use a data visualization from current events, a business analysis, or personal research.

In Option B, Sloan wants to see how you can make informed business decisions using a structured, data-driven thought process. Data-driven decision making isn’t necessarily only for people who work in highly analytical roles; any business decision, like a new product, partnership, or resource, is made considering different factors like calculated risk, budgets, and even qualitative factors like industry perspectives and client insights. This is all data! With this question, Sloan wants to see if you can analyze how data factored into your decision-making process and if you can organize it clearly for the viewer.

Ultimately, the prompt is less about the data itself; it’s more about how you used it effectively, and how you can communicate that impact visually through a structured presentation. Your visualization should clearly tell the reader why you made that decision.

While writing your answer, use the SCAR format. Your challenge is the decision you have to make, and your action is your thought process behind the decision where you carefully analyzed all factors involved.

Note that you are not expected to share any confidential or sensitive information.

Here’s an example of the Sloan Required Interview Essay 2, Option B:

In 2021, Dunhill changed the front page of its website. Initially, this dramatically reduced the number of leads generated through our site. Within weeks, the company’s Google rank dropped dramatically. Having invested a lot of time and money in the website revamp, management was displeased with the data and argued that we should return to the reliable, if old, website design.

Something didn’t seem right to me. So I used analytics tools including WebSite Auditor, Ahrefs, and Google Analytics to run different visualizations. I found that the Bounce Rate (essentially where someone clicks on to the website but then hits the Back button), was higher than before but still not dramatically so.

I worked through different permutations of the data until I finally used the visualization provided, which filed the Bounce Rate by country. The numbers for the UK, where the company is based, were as expected. However, numbers for the rest of the world, including substantial markets such as India and the US, had increased sharply.

This led me to investigate the front page of the site. We inferred that the changes to the site and its lead generation copy gave preference to the UK over other markets, apparently even leading clients to think that our services were UK-specific. Further research with new leads confirmed as much, and we summarily changed the copy.

Within several weeks, our ranking improved and our lead generation was back to pre-change levels plus about ten percent.

For our full list of the MIT Sloan AdCom interview questions, head over to our MIT Sloan MBA Interview Questions blog.

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