“What do you hope to gain professionally from the Wharton MBA?” 

This question is very standard and is mostly focused on your career goals. However, the applicant must remember to connect the dots and mix both his personal life to his professional career and goals. The committee wants to know more about your personality and wether you are going to become a potential successful student in the program. 

The applicant must be very careful here and answer the question in a detailed manner without overwhelming the committee. It is important to also read the question again and again to understand that the committee wants to know more than just your accomplishments bur rather wants to know what and how you will be using both the degree and the knowledge you gain from Wharton Business school in the future to achieve whatever it is you are planning to achieve. 

Here, you have more than enough room and freedom to make the essay more interesting by using your personal background information. Write about those moments in your professional life that made you decide on what degrees you wanted to get and the places you wanted to visit. Think about what led you to set whatever goals you have set for yourselves. 

You need to have an exact idea of how you will fit within the Wharton community and what will you add to it. Write about how Wharton will affect you personally and professionally and mention how you already your research about the campus, the university and the school’s history all while connecting the research you made to your own background. The goal here is to convince the committee that the school is a great fit for you. Do your research on the state of Pennsylvania and specifically the city of Philadelphia and the location could really help both your career and personal life. 

“Taking into consideration your background – personal, professional, and/or academic – how do you plan to make specific, meaningful contributions to the Wharton community?” 

When addressing this topic, you must focus on how exactly can your background and past experiences help you make a lasting impact on the Wharton community. The contributions could be done in many ways and places! You could write about how you will be conducting yourself in the classrooms, the different social clubs available on campus, or within the small group projects. 

If you own a business or come form a different background than the majority of the students at Wharton, you could use that to mention creative ideas to both your classmates and group members. Perhaps, you could even teach your members about your culture, your origins, languages or even take a leading role within a project! 

Wharton’s admissions committee here is really trying to dive deep and get to know your identity. Who you really are and how can you stand out in a community as diverse and as competitive as Wharton Business School. Your history is really important in this question and you must elaborate on it in a way that shows how it affects your future goals with a Wharton MBA. The committee wants to know your real story and how it could influence your leadership in the future. What you do as a student at Wharton is as important to the committee as what you will do as an alumnus representing the school. 

One important thing to remember is that you must show that you did your research on the program. This means that the applicant must express how deep he understands the values and culture of Wharton as a school and a community. The applicant must also show that he knows about the community’s diversity and how he could both benefit and impact it in a positive way. 

Eventually, you want create a narrative with both essay questions. The first essay is pretty much focused on how exactly will a higher business education at Wharton benefit you both in the short and long term, while the second question focuses on how you will benefit the school in return.