How to Tell If Your MBA Story Is Actually Good

The Intake Call Test

When a potential client sits down with me for the first time, I ask them to walk me through their full background — where they grew up, what interested them as a kid, what they studied, every job they've had, and where they are now. As they talk, I take notes. But I'm not writing down everything. I'm tracking one thing: which parts actually make me lean in.

That's the test. If I'm genuinely interested in a detail, other people will be too. Admissions committee members are human — they respond to the same things. Most people gloss over the small, specific moments because they assume those details aren't impressive enough. But those are exactly the details that make a story real.

The Ice Cream Test

Let me give you an example. If a client tells me they grew up loving ice cream, sampling hundreds of flavors, and now they want to build a unique ice cream brand — that's real. That's specific. You can feel the person behind it. Compare that to something vague like "I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur." One of those stories has texture. The other could have been written by anyone.

You can tell when a story is fake. The person fumbles when they tell it. They can't answer follow-up questions. There's no sensory detail, no contradiction, no quirk. And here's the thing: if you can tell it's fake, the admissions committee can too. They've read thousands of essays. Their radar is better than yours.

The Most Common Mistake

The biggest mistake I see? Applicants list their accomplishments instead of telling a story. They walk me through their resume: "I was a program manager, then I moved to strategy, then I got promoted." That's not a story. That's a chronology. A story tells me why you made that lateral move. What did you want to learn? What was missing? What pattern connects every decision you've made?

The admissions committee doesn't care about your list of accolades. They care about why you made the choices you made and what those choices reveal about you. Every transition in your career should connect to the next. If your resume reads like a series of unrelated jobs, you haven't found your story yet.

A Story I Completely Reframed

I worked with a client whose father owned a company overseas. The client was working as a consultant and wanted an MBA, but only because their father said it would be a good idea. When I asked why they personally wanted the MBA, the answer was basically: "I already have a job waiting." That's not a compelling application.

We reframed it entirely. Instead of writing about the job waiting for them, we wrote about growing up watching their father build a business — how that experience planted a vision of what their life could be. How they'd been absorbing business lessons since childhood without realizing it. How getting an MBA wasn't about checking a box for their father, but about being ready to take over with a complete understanding of business from every angle. Same facts. Completely different story.

That's what I do. Not invent things. Find the real story that's already there and pull it into focus.

One Story, Multiple Schools

A question I get often: do I need a different story for each school? The answer is no — but you do need to understand what each school is really asking. Different schools phrase their questions differently, but the underlying question is often the same. "Tell me about yourself" and "Why are you sitting in this chair right now?" — those are asking for the same thing, just from different angles. I actually have a whole framework for identifying the hidden question behind every essay prompt. But that's another post.