admission essay on leadership

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Talking about Leadership in Your College Application Essay

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It’s easy to talk about being a leader, but how do you demonstrate that in your college application essay? Here are 5 successful examples from students at UPenn , Stanford , Brown , and Columbia :

To divide all mankind into such a distinctive and witty set of classes can only be the  brainchild of someone as clever as Benjamin Franklin. Still, this classification is one of profound implications. Defining oneself amongst the movers, the movable, or the immovable can reveal one’s true character. It is with this mindset that I consider myself one that ‘moves.’ Of course, as an inherently imperfect human being I cannot deny that I have been lazy or inflexible at times; nor have I not been one to follow and let others take action for me. But I the grander scope, I am definitely one who prefers to lead and be the individual to take action or make decisions. Keep reading.  

Columbia’ 17

I watch my grinning friends troop into the auditorium. Some can sense my nervousness, and call out to me reassuringly. I wonder if our relationship will change, once I become head boy. I will no longer be able to take part in all the pranks that they wanted to pull off in senior year. I just hope they will not do something so reckless that I need to march them to the principal’s office. I realise then that I would if I had to. Read more.

I stand on the peak of a mountain, 4,867 feet above the ground, accompanied by a handful of summer camp friends. From the top of the mountain, I take in the beautiful panoramic view of the Adirondacks, unfettered by pesky clouds. The sun shines directly into my eyes, forcing me to squint. Beads of sweat drip down my forehead. Although I am tired, I feel exhilarated. This particular summit is perhaps the most significant of those I have climbed as a hiker. Continue reading.

Stanford ‘17

I felt a bead of sweat tracing its way down my forehead. My legs began to twitch, as if they knew how badly I wanted to run. I stared, in desperation, back at the nine pairs of eyes that watched my every move. For a second, I imagined my escape- sprinting down the stairs, past the faded murals on the walls, out the gate and into the street. But just for a second. Read more.  

Brownandproud

Stanford ‘15.

I walk off the stage and see my nephew running to me. He says “congratulations,” and as I look around I see my 2 parents, 2 sisters, 15 cousins, 9 aunts and 9 uncles smiling at me and clapping so loud I forget where I am. Twenty five years ago, my parents decided to leave not just Mexico City but their home, family, and culture, in pursuit of a better and brighter future for their families. My father and mother worked endlessly to bring their families over to California. I envy my father’s determination, as he gave up his teaching job in Mexico and worked 60-hour weeks for a decade to provide homes for my relatives. He was the leader, the commander of the ship guiding though the rapid current. It did not matter that we had 18 people living in our home; the most important priority was that we were together. View full profile.

Liked these essay intros? Unlock them all in one go in this leadership package . Brainstorm and think carefully about what you want to write in your personal statement and how you want to share your own, unique story. For more inspiration, AdmitSee has a database of 60,000+ successful  college applications files  waiting for you! 

About The Author

Frances was born in Hong Kong and received her bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University. She loves super sad drama television, cooking, and reading. Her favorite person on Earth isn’t actually a member of the AdmitSee team - it’s her dog Cooper.

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Leadership Essay

27 August, 2020

12 minutes read

Author:  Richard Pircher

As a college student, you must write essays on a regular basis since the latter is one of the most common types of home assignments. All this means is that in order to get good grades and be successful with writing the papers, you need to have a sound understanding of the structure. Additionally, what you should never neglect is the variety of essay types. Indeed, your essay will significantly differ from one type to another: description essay will most likely have a structure that is slightly different from an argumentative one.

What you may have already encountered in your academic life is the work on a leadership essay. Although it sounds pretty complicated and vague, it is mostly possible to master an essay on leadership. Below is a guide for you to get an insight into this particular essay type.

What is a good leadership essay?

A good leadership essay is the one in which the essay writer has fully covered the topic of leadership and understood its core ideas. More specifically, to end up with a flawless leadership essay, you will need to indicate what makes a person a good leader. For achieving the latter, you will most likely need to conduct research and trace how a particular person reaches his or her goals. In other words, the task is to discover which actions the person undertakes, what their followers say about him or her, and how the person organizes the work. So, a leadership essay implies providing real-life success examples and further revealing them.

Above all, a good leadership essay is the one that follows a precise, clear, comprehensive structure. Structuring your essay about leadership in the most coherent way leads to a win-win situation: you have fewer troubles and barriers to writing a brilliant essay, and your teacher is able to comprehend the essay easily. This guide is what you will need to refer to to get an insight into how the flawless structure for a leadership essay looks like and how it will let you take a benefit.

How to write a Leadership essay?

To write a leadership essay that stands out, you first need to brainstorm all the ideas that you have and come up with a topic for your essay. If you are struggling with this step, you may think of some of the most influential people, read about them, and find out what makes them unique. Or, you can pick any topic which is mentioned at the end of this article. After you have chosen an issue, it is time to structure your essay appropriately.

As you already know, an essay constitutes three essential sections: introduction, main body, and conclusion. Below is the more detailed description of each of the parts.

Introduction

Of course, your leadership essay introduction will always vary depending on the topic of the essay. However, you can always begin by stating your vision of leadership regardless of the topic. Additionally, to motivate the reader and instantly catch his or her attention, you may use a quote of a famous leader, or simply a quote which you find relevant to the topic. Be aware that you should avoid outlining the essence and the role of the leadership in your introduction; leave it for the body paragraphs.

What you may also do in your leadership essay is ask a question, which will most likely intrigue the leader. Or it will at least give your reader an overview of what you will dwell on  in your essay.

Body Paragraphs

You will need to divide the main body into 3-5 paragraphs to make the structure more comprehensive. What you have to do at this point  is  give your reader a sound understanding of your ideas. Therefore, try to fit each idea in a single body paragraph so that you do not confuse your reader. Do not hesitate to indicate your examples to strengthen your arguments. For instance, you may explain a fact that makes a particular person you are writing about a real leader.

Also, always stick to your thesis statement and don’t forget that the body paragraphs should reveal the parts of your thesis statement.

As you may already know, you need to restate your opinion and briefly summarize all the points from the main body in conclusion. For instance, if you wrote your essay on qualities of an effective leader, state the most fundamental qualities and indicate why they matter the most. Besides, try not to copy what you have already written in the body – it is better to restate your opinion using different words. And, of course, beware adding any new and extra information; indicate only those points that you have already outlined in the text. Finally, keep in mind that it is always favorable to keep your concluding remarks short.

Leadership Essay Examples

Writing a leadership essay requires some research and time. In case you feel the necessity to go through an essay example, below is a leadership essay sample you can refer to.

Is leadership an inborn or an acquired feature?

Is everyone capable of becoming a leader, or is this ability innate? A lot of researchers have been struggling to answer this question. One assumption about leadership implies that the leader is the person who possesses particular characteristics. Another assumption claims that leaders are capable of acquiring specific features over their life span. As the evidence shows, leaders own many features that distinguish them among others and make more and more people become their followers. These might be cognitive abilities, psychological traits, professional qualities, and a lot more, and all of them will be either acquired or innate. Based on the importance of leadership qualities, such as commitment, stress resistance, and the ability to make quality decisions, it is reasonable to claim that leaders are made, not born. 

One can deem commitment as one of the top fundamental qualities of the leader. In essence, such a feature indicates that a person is passionate about the common goal, strives to be a team player, and makes every effort to reach a shared goal. As the history shows, none of the successful companies was uncoordinated by an influential, committed leader: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft – all of these companies are examples of dominant teams led by a dedicated leader. A committed leader also inspires his or her team to achieve common goals and put more effort into the shared activity. Besides, commitment is unlikely to be an innate feature; it instead comes with experience. This is so, since commitment implies dedicating oneself to the shared task, and one can reach it only via learning and continuous self-improvement.

Stress resistance is another incredibly important feature that every good leader should possess. This is because only a stress-resistant leader has sufficient capabilities to overcome any complexity and not let the anxiety and stress prevent him or her from making proper decisions. Besides, such a leader will most likely have a positive influence on the team, as long as leading by example will motivate the team members to attain the same emotional stability. What is so far familiar about stress resistance as an effective leader’s feature is that it can be either innate or attained. However, although some researchers admit that emotional stability is something one is born with, it is not entirely true; many people still put a great effort into self-improvement, changing the attitude to unfortunate situations, and so on. Therefore, being resistant to stress can be mostly attributed to a personality.

An ability to make high-quality decisions most likely determines the chances for an enterprise’s success. In particular, such quality is incredibly fundamental for a company of any size and professional orientation. Additionally, it is one of the top tasks of a good leader to make final decisions. What he or she should do implies brainstorming, discussing various opinions in the group, making forecasts, analyzing all the pros and cons. However, the leader is the one to make a final decision. Thereby, he is in charge of researching the market, discovering all the hidden truths, and analyzing the organization’s potential and capabilities to result in the most effective decision. As it flows logically from the latter, an ability to make sound quality decisions is purely a professional quality. This leads to the conclusion that one has to work hard to become a genuine leader and master the skill of making effective decisions. 

Overall, the leader may possess a multitude of different skills and master them perfectly. However, what has so far become transparent is that any leader, regardless of which team he leads, must possess three essential qualities. These qualities are commitment to the common goal, ability to handle and resist stress, and, finally, an ability to make effective decisions. All of the three qualities are most likely to be acquired over a lifetime. The statement below leads to the conclusion that even though some qualities can be innate, most are not the ones that leaders are born with. Hence, this answers an essential question: leadership feature is acquired, and not necessarily inborn.  

20 leadership essay topics

When coming up with your next leadership essay topic, it is imperative to brainstorm ideas and think of what leadership might be related to. If you are struggling with a topic of the importance of leadership essay or any relevant type of essay, you may quickly take a look at some of the possible topics we prepared for you:

• What are the main qualities of the leader?
• Successful Time Management as a feature of an effective leader
• The role that rhetoric plays in leadership
• The most exceptional leader in the history of the 20-th century
• The role of female leadership
• What are the challenges of the leader of the 21-st century?
• How college helps students develop leadership skills?
• Qualities of the leader that motivate people to follow them 
• Top things to avoid doing to become a team leader
• Examples of effective and ineffective leadership in the history
• Top techniques for developing leadership skills
• The interconnection of creativity and leadership 
• Is a university’s role fundamental in developing leadership skills?
• Dictatorship as an anti-example of leadership
• Liberal vs Authoritative leadership: which one works better?
• The influence of the leader’s role model on the followers’ mindset
• Main difficulties that the new leader may face in a new team
• Leadership of today vs leadership of the past: what has changed?
• Reasons why I want to become a member if the leadership program
• The role of cognitive abilities for the leader 

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Why You Should Showcase Leadership in a Personal Statement

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Kaila Barber, from College Essay Guy, in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info.

What’s Covered:

How to showcase leadership.

• Choosing Your Personal Statement

In this post, we will discuss some strategies and tips for showcasing leadership, and other essential values and transferable skills necessary for success, in your personal statement essays for applying to college. 

Let’s say you want to talk about leadership in your essay, there are many ways you can go about it. You can talk about leadership capabilities and experience through topics such as your organization skills, productivity and making things more efficient, communicating with people, and being a mentor. Categorizing the different skills and components of leadership can help you brainstorm potential topics that will position you as a good fit, and even an asset, for prospective colleges.

In particular, leading through mentorship is a great topic to write about as it is very important because you are creating a safe environment for those around you that fosters personal, academic, and professional growth. Building connections and community and creating a safe space where people can be authentic and feel mutual trust is what mentorship is all about, and having these abilities is a major plus.

Choosing Your Personal Statement 

Writing about a challenge.

If you choose to write about a challenge you overcame, make sure you’re talking about, and focusing on, specific actions you took, and what skill you gained from it. You can include leadership and productivity skills like time management, adaptability, or flexibility if those are relevant. 

Many students, especially during the pandemic, had to help out their families financially. If this describes your experience, or you have gone through similar challenges, you can write about it as  taking on that kind of extra responsibility is a big deal for students studying full-time. From experiences such as this, students gain a lot of real world experience applying skills essential for academic, and later professional, success and those are things colleges want to hear about.

Writing About Your Hobby

A popular topic for personal statement essays is how students turn their hobbies into an interest they now want to study in college. If you choose this topic, you want to make sure you demonstrate the insight you’ve learned from this hobby, as well as the values and transferable skills it has helped you develop. 

Similar to the way we broke down leadership, categorize the different skills you’ve gained from this hobby. You can then also talk about how these skills have influenced your decision to now study your hobby. Remember, the most important thing in this essay is to personalize it to your life story. If your hobby has affected your values and life views, that is a great way to personalize your essay.

A great example of breaking down how your hobbies can change your values is crocheting. A hobby like crocheting takes time and patience. There is a beauty and importance in taking the time to learn and practice the basics so you can then master more complex processes. Someone who writes about their crocheting hobby will be able to talk about how these values, gained through their hobby, changed their life values and helped them develop transferable skills. Crocheting is just one example, but this is the structure you should aim to have if you choose this topic. 

If you’re worried about choosing the right topic, you can always do a topic check with CollegeVine. This is a community feed where you can ask specific questions about the topic you’re considering writing about. 

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

How to write an essay about leadership

Leadership essays, or essays where you are asked about your work as a leader in your school or community, are not as common as you might imagine. Given all of the emphasis schools and clubs put on leadership roles and titles, essays asking students to dive deeply into this work are actually pretty rare in college applications. That said, it is important to consider leadership very broadly! You do not need to be the President or Founder of a club to write an effective essay for one of these prompts. In fact, sometimes the less common considerations and definitions of “leadership” can make for more compelling essays.

Example Leadership Essay Questions:

• U of California: Describe an example of your leadership and a way that you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes, or contributed to group efforts over time.
• U of Texas: How do you show leadership in your life? How do you see yourself being a leader at UT Austin?

LET'S BREAK DOWN THE ESSENTIAL POINTS YOU NEED TO HIT WHEN RESPONDING TO THIS SUPPLEMENT:

Leadership is more than titles – it is important, when you consider questions like these, that you reflect on activities where you have contributed to an accomplishment and learned something (about yourself, about your community). In fact, it would be a more powerful essay to reflect on a leadership contribution that was not connected to a title of leadership, but where you learned something important, than to reflect upon your activity where your leadership title is big “in name only.”

Sometimes leadership happens within your family – you do not need to limit your focus to leadership that happens during your school day.

You can consider this essay happening in two distinct ways: narrative structure – where you present a challenge you faced in a leadership role, actions you did that had an impact, and lessons you learned (skills you gained); OR montage structure – where you take on two different activities that both taught you a common lesson about leadership. Don’t muddle these together! Decide whether you want to write linearly (and chronologically in time) about one activity or if you want to write non-linearly about one leadership lesson.

THINGS TO AVOID:

Try to stay away from topics where your leadership takes the reader on a familiar journey. If you want to write about your leadership on an athletic team, that is wonderful, but try to avoid an essay about how your leadership of your team during The Big Game contributed to (winning/losing) The Big Game and the team becoming closer and being “one-strong-team.” Does that feel familiar to you? That’s because college admissions folks will have read thousands of essays that tell this type of story. If you select a common team to lead, take your essay in an uncommon direction.

Avoid lengthy introductions that take away from your word count and don’t actually support your essay response.

Avoid overemphasis on one aspect that detracts from your ability to talk about the other aspects of your story. In other words, if you spend half of your words outlining the challenge you faced, you only have ¼ of the remaining words to discuss your actions and ¼ to discuss the lessons you learned. This is not a good balance!

ADDITIONAL TIPS AND TRICKS:

• What did you do?
• What problems did you solve?
• What lessons did you learn?
• What impact did you have?
• How have you applied these lessons?

Answering these questions (and in this order) actually builds you an outline for this essay!

Do you have an extracurricular activity where the character count really limits you in terms of describing your work and impact? Consider using this essay to further highlight your contributions!

Do you have an extracurricular activity that speaks directly toward your intended major or field of study? This might be a great time to make your application stand out by sharing your leadership and contributions to this field! What problems have you solved? How can you use this prompt to share these solutions?

Elise holds a BA in Political Philosophy from Williams College and an MEd in Administration & Social Policy from Harvard. She has spent the past twenty years working in top-tier independent schools.

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Leadership Essay: What To Write To Put Your Best Foot Forward

EssayEdge > Blog > Leadership Essay: What To Write To Put Your Best Foot Forward

Because schools are looking for applicants who will make a contribution, it is becoming increasingly common for programs to specifically ask for essays on leadership. In this type of essay, the admissions officers are asking you to go beyond your resume, CV or activities list and provide them with a meaningful example that not only demonstrates your skills as a leader but reflects your values, ability to manage setbacks, and resilience in overcoming dilemmas. Therefore, I created these tips to guide you in writing the kind of leadership essay that will help you get noticed in the admissions process.

Table of Contents:

Choose an anecdote where you played a significant role

If you haven’t decided how to write a leadership essay. Your best anecdote may not necessarily be one where you were at the helm. Just because you didn’t have the title of President, Coordinator or Leader doesn’t mean that you didn’t take a strong leadership role in the project. The admissions officers are looking for results, and that means a situation where you were able to ensure outcomes, overcome obstacles, foster team cohesiveness, and exceed expectations. When brainstorming for your leadership essay, think more about the criteria of leadership rather than the title. The title and introduction to leadership essay will come up in your mind as soon as you understand what you want to write about.

Tackle dilemmas

An essay where you were in charge and everything went smoothly doesn’t make for the most compelling narrative. Instead, focus on anecdotes where you had to face tough choices. This could refer to interpersonal situations regarding assigning tasks, making budgetary decisions that might have displeased certain team members or even superiors, navigating contract negotiations between parties that did not trust each other or even dealing with unethical behaviors. Show the admissions officers that you can persevere despite setbacks and find a way forward to realize success in your endeavors.

Acknowledge the contribution of others

This is the most common pitfall that I see in leadership essays. Yes, a personal statement should be personal. However, when writing about leadership, it is impossible to demonstrate this if you write as if no one else was part of the situation. Be gracious in giving praise to team members for their insights, loyalty, and hard work. Let the admissions officers envision you as someone who can inspire others to collaborate and work as a cohesive whole to achieve common goals.

Need help? Check out EssayEdge editing services:

Highlight organization skills and interpersonal acumen

Depending on your personality type and individual leadership style, applicants tend to focus on either the technical aspects of leadership or the more interpersonal ones. In creating your leadership essay, remember to include both in a way that is as balanced as possible. Usually, I will recommend applicants write an opening paragraph that sets the stage, a paragraph about technical aspects such as assigning tasks and coordinating resources, a third paragraph that discusses obstacles encountered in the project, and then a concluding paragraph. The two middle paragraphs should be approximately the same length. By following this basic outline, applicants are sure to cover all bases and formulate a leadership essay that has a strong logical flow from start to finish.

Check some leadership application essay examples to understand what exactly has to be written in your paper.

Reflect on what you would have done differently

If, given the opportunity to do it again, you would have done everything exactly the same, I would advise writing about a different situation. Anecdotes where everything works out perfectly don’t typically provide the admissions officers with the information that they need to help them make a choice about your application. They will want you to engage in self-reflection either in the penultimate paragraph or the concluding paragraph. The admissions officers want to see both growth and willingness to grow. For this reason, be sure to discuss ways that you would like to continue to develop your personal leadership style so that you will be a more prepared and effective leader in the future.

Make a difference. That’s what you should do to be sure that your essay will be noticed by the admissions board. The combination of your writing skills and our guidelines must help you craft a winning paper. Keep in mind that you can always find an assistant on our essay proofreading service, trust proofreading them, and submit a high-quality leadership essay.

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• How to Structure a Leadership Essay (Samples to Consider)

Leadership is a complex concept, but it’s essential for boosting your career. That’s why a leadership essay focuses on applying the theoretical models and concepts of successful management to real-life situations. 

If you don’t know where to start writing such a paper, please read on for professional tips!

What Is Leadership Essay?

A leadership essay is a paper that analyzes leadership concepts and their application to real-life situations that may involve everyday business management, crisis situations, and other scenarios. 

Every essay on leadership is about defining a concept. Then, it’s either comparing it to similar management tools or proving that it’s useful (or not).

While some students enjoy writing such papers, other learners hate them. The below samples will come in handy, no matter which group is yours.

What Does Leadership Mean to You? (Essay Sample)

It is one of the most popular topics for a leadership essay. If you need to write a paper like that, ask yourself:

• Who is a good leader?  
• What style do they use?  
• What are the situations when they might switch styles?

You may take a more personal approach to such an essay if your professor allows you to. In the example below, you will see the academic approach to this topic. It analyzes three leadership styles to discover which one corresponds to the meaning of leadership if one thinks of it as guidance and support.

Why I Want to Participate in a Leadership Program (Essay Sample)

It’s another example of a popular topic. Such papers often have a meaning beyond the classroom since they may decide whether you plan to participate in a specific program. It’s critical to make them as effective and compelling as possible.

A personalized approach is the best when it comes to essays like this. In the example below, you will see the paper that relies on individual beliefs and a personal life story to explain why it’s so important for the specific student to participate in the chosen program.

How to Write a Leadership Essay

Like every other essay, this paper has an introduction, several body paragraphs, and a conclusion summarizing your thoughts. (1) The most important part of the introduction is the final sentence,  aka  a thesis statement. That’s where you state your claim to prove or develop in your leadership essay.

Each body paragraph should correspond to the purpose of your essay. To ensure you don’t stray from the aim you’ve established in the thesis statement, write the topic sentences for all your paragraphs in the outline . In simple words, write the first sentence of every paragraph to define its development in advance and see if you cover everything you need.

And now, to the conclusion:

Its most essential element is thesis restatement or the first sentence of that paragraph. It’s not just paraphrasing your thesis; it’s also considering the new information you’ve discovered while writing the essay.

Structure :

• Introduction (End it with a thesis statement.)
• Body paragraphs (Each one starts with a topic sentence.)
• Conclusion (Start it with a thesis restatement.)

Understand the purpose of a leadership essay

When starting to write, think about why you’re creating this paper. Before you sit down and type the words, think about the ideas you want to convey and their meaning in your life:

Can this essay teach you to take responsibility? Or maybe will it help you understand how to be a leader in crisis situations? When you’ve answered the “why” question, begin outlining.

Build a strong thesis

Always start with your thesis statement. It will help incorporate your answer to that notorious “why” question into your essay. Once done, you can plan out the rest of the paper and start working on the body paragraphs as soon as you finish the introduction.

There’s another important tip —don’t rush into writing the conclusion before you finish everything else!

It might seem like a good idea to create a thesis statement and thesis restatement right off the bat. However, you’ll find yourself with more refreshing ideas after completing all the research and thinking necessary for the introduction and each body paragraph.

Decide on a structure; format accordingly

Even if your essay about leadership seems not so formal, and you can use personal pronouns, you still need a clear structure.

The best way to write any academic paper is to keep your introduction and conclusion as short as possible. (But no shorter than three sentences and four lines of text). 

Another important tip is to try making all your body paragraphs equal in length. That way, you’ll give the same attention to all the vital points of your essay.

Ready to Write Your Essay on Leadership Now?

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand the most critical elements of a leadership essay. 

Remember the structure, grammar, and appropriate academic style to create a top-level paper. Please don’t forget to answer the “why” question and remember  why  you’re writing. Then you’ll impress everyone with your results!

References:

• https://lsa.umich.edu/onsf/news-events/all-news/directors-blog/writing-leadership-essays.html
• Essay samples
• Essay writing
• Writing tips

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How to Effectively Demonstrate Leadership in MBA Essays

May 14, 2021

UPDATE: This article was originally posted on April 12, 2019. It has been updated with new information and tips below. 

Sitting down to compose your MBA admissions essays, you may be wondering what you should write about in the first place. While there are many different strategies that can lead to an effective essay , there is one thing that you definitely need to include: a will and capability for leadership .

Leadership, more than almost any other single quality, is one of the top things schools look for in their candidates. Some schools have even decided to dedicate an entire essay to their value of strong leadership. Take Kellogg’s essay A prompt, for example, which reads:

“Kellogg’s Purpose is to educate, equip & inspire brave leaders who create lasting value. Tell us about a time you have demonstrated leadership and created lasting value. What challenges did you face, and what did you learn?” (450 words)

Other schools, on the other hand, specifically ask about leadership as an element of essays or understand leadership to be an implicit part of the answer they are looking for, like Chicago Booth’s essay 2 prompt: 

“Chicago Booth immerses you in a choice-rich environment. How have your interests, leadership experiences, and other passions influenced the choices in your life?” (250 word minimum) 

This means that it is absolutely imperative that you clearly demonstrate your leadership capabilities in your essays . 

Your essay may be a masterful piece of writing, but only with the element of leadership is it likely to be successful and land you a spot in your top MBA program. 

Why is demonstrating leadership so important for elite MBA programs?

All business schools value leadership in their candidates. However, leadership has many different facets and forms , a fact that becomes clear when looking at schools – and what they value – in depth. 

Berkeley Haas, for example, connects leadership with their value of innovation . Specifically, Berkeley’s full-time MBA program features four Defining Leadership Principles . These include Confidence without Attitude, Question the Status Quo, Students Always , and Beyond Yourself . Berkeley sees each of these as an integral part of good leadership.

London Business School , on the other hand, sees leadership as an inherent and essential value for a global outlook,  one of their most important values. They write : 

“We nurture our students to challenge the status quo, to question the norm and to develop the skills to become the world’s best business leaders. Over the years we have adopted a truly global outlook tackling challenges faced by international businesses and their leaders.” ​  

For LBS, the qualities of leadership and having a global mindset go hand-in-hand.

This list goes on and on. IESE sees leadership as an essential prerequisite for impact , one of their greatest focuses; Wharton specifically offers training for global leadership capabilities through their Leadership Ventures ; Booth – a school heavily focused on community – views leadership as a fundamental element of that value . 

Given the different forms of leadership that each school values, how you showcase your own will change depending on which application you’re completing. So be sure to choose stories and lessons learned that align with the school you’re applying to. 

Of course, not only do these schools look for leadership in their candidates, they also offer explicit opportunities for developing and polishing leadership skills in their students. 

It is clear that leadership is extremely important in MBA programs, the work you do post-MBA, and of course, to the MBA admission committee. 

Leadership comes in many different forms

As you can see from above, there is no one definition of leadership that schools adhere to . In fact, because leadership can be tied into so many different values, there are many different ways to demonstrate it effectively in your MBA admissions essay. 

Here are some ideas about how to show leadership:

1. Innovative ideas

Leadership can be shown through an ability and desire to innovate . This can be coming up with a new product at a company, developing a new idea for a business, or helping an existing company capture a market opportunity that may not have been obvious before. By coming up with a creative new idea, you can show that you took the lead to help a company become more successful. 

Take a look at this example. Here, in his essay for Harvard Business School , our client Bruno demonstrated his capacity for leadership by applying data: 

“While working on a marketing and sales project for a large telecommunications company in Brazil, I was responsible for translating all the knowledge we had created with machine learning into segmented offerings, client retention actions, and up-selling initiatives. Combining industry expertise with the insights generated, I identified a 10% margin increase in the company’s mobile business, a market that is highly competitive and usually seen as margin-deteriorating. This experience made me realize that corporations need people who can guide them to make intelligent use of data.”

As you can see, identifying an opportunity to grow a business can be used to help show off your potential as a leader, especially as an entrepreneur. 

2. Helping others

This can be applied to both personal or professional situations. Maybe there was a time when your family was struggling financially, so you stepped in to offer your support? Maybe you had a colleague who couldn’t get their work done on time, so you helped them organize their priorities better and grow as a professional? Both of these instances show how you guided others through challenging experiences by relying on your leadership skills. 

This value can also be strongly related to impact and community , ideas that are becoming increasingly important within MBA programs . In many instances, leadership skills can be connected to a professional endeavor that helped a company create value for others. This is a great way to show how helping others revealed or helped you train your own leadership skills. 

Take a look at this example from a client’s application to Wharton last year:

“To escape Rio de Janeiro’s perilous, impoverished favelas, education and employment are the only way out. During university, I came to understand this while mentoring a group of underprivileged students. Despite wanting to attend school, my students often missed class due to active shootouts between gangs and police, on top of the many other challenges of living in favelas. Through this experience, I became aware of my role in society and how I could directly impact other’s lives.”

Here, our client Conrado used his experiences of mentoring others to understand his ability for impactful leadership. Not only does this help you underline the impact of your achievements, but also reveals a deeper aspect of your personality.

3. Taking initiative

Showing your desire and ability to be proactive can easily overlap with either of the two suggestions above. Often, recognizing a problem – either in your personal life or professional environment – and deciding to do something about it is a great way to demonstrate leadership. 

This is especially true if the problem was something nobody else had identified – or even blatantly denied existed. Here, your will to take the steps to fix it might be the perfect way to show your potential as a leader and self-starter while highlighting your drive and motivation.

4. Community and teamwork

A sense of community and working in teams is an essential value for many top MBA programs. Highlighting your leadership role does not mean you were working individually or only at the head of a team. Leadership can be also demonstrated through your ability to promote teamwork and collaboration. 

An important part of teamwork is being a team member who is not afraid to speak up, proactively solve problems, include others, or put new ideas on the table . 

By taking on a leadership role, even a minor one, within your community or team, you help further collective success and often multiply your impact. This is an awesome quality to demonstrate in your MBA essay. 

This can be a great opportunity to utilize extra-professional examples in your MBA essays. Take a look at another strategy Bruno used in one of his Columbia Business School essays:

“We’ve just stopped to catch some air, a scarce resource above 6000 meters. All members of the expedition are feeling mental exhaustion, but we fight it with team spirit. I nod heads with each member, making sure signals are clear. Each and every one of us is responsible for encouraging the others not to give up and for knowing when to tell a teammate to stop because going forward might risk their life. Lucky for all of us, now is not that time.”

Here, Bruno does an excellent job utilizing storytelling to help show how he is a leader within the group. As you can see, leadership can be evident even in stories of personal and group achievement.

5. Taking a leap of faith

Good leadership is not just about making data-backed decisions. Much more, it entails taking risks and using your intuition to navigate the complicated worlds of interpersonal communication, timing, and networking. 

This can not only highlight your courage but also your ability to push the envelope and create new solutions and possibilities.

For example, you could demonstrate leadership by telling the story of how your confidence in a subordinate helped them grow to become a more mature professional and enrich your team as a whole. It may also manifest itself through the idea to start a new business, despite not knowing if you will reach success. 

6. Getting out of your comfort zone

Leadership can also be recognized in the desire to get outside one’s comfort zone. Adcoms are looking for individuals who are ready to take full advantage of their MBA programs, which requires a willingness to learn and grow. This is an especially good tactic if you want to show attributes of global or international leadership, a characteristic that is especially valuable for European schools like LBS, INSEAD, or IESE. 

For example, spending a year in a foreign country can help you understand intercultural connotations of business in ways you could never have experienced before or how to communicate in completely new ways. 

Demonstrating leadership by getting out of your comfort zone can be expanded to experiences about polishing foreign language skills, helping international colleagues understand your home region, or expanding a business internationally. All of these can reveal and train global leadership skills and intercultural competencies – something all schools are looking for in their candidates. 

7. Straightforward leadership positions

Of course, we cannot forget the most obvious way to demonstrate leadership. If you have taken on an explicit leadership position within your company or organization, this is a great way to express this value to the admissions committee. 

Professional leadership positions can include leading teams, guiding clients through transformation processes, presenting results to senior leadership, or taking on a senior leadership position itself. If you have had experiences like this, be sure to include them – and the challenges you faced – in your MBA admissions essay. 

These ideas not only help you demonstrate leadership in your MBA essay, they might also give you bonus points for connecting leadership to other values a school might share, like community, innovation, teamwork, creativity, and a drive to make an impact. 

Tips for demonstrating effective leadership

Naturally, just explaining one of the above situations in your essay will not cut it. There are a few other things that you should keep in mind and try to apply when focusing on leadership in your MBA essay. 

Use the STAR method

Telling a story that thoroughly highlights your leadership role does not automatically mean it will be compelling. Often, candidates fail to show how leadership was necessary – in other words, what the problem was that required them to take on a leadership position in the first place.

That is where storytelling – and specifically the STAR method – comes in. The STAR method will help you highlight not just the problem that you faced, but also your specific role in solving it that led to success. 

STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action , and Results . If you want to make your story about leadership convincing, you must include all of these elements. This translates to:

Situation – clearly presenting the context for your story.

Task – demonstrating that there was a problem to be solved or a challenge to be faced.

Action – showing exactly what you did to solve that problem or overcome that challenge.

Results – the outcome of your actions. This can range from personal growth to helping other individuals to producing company-wide results. 

In this example, our client Karen effectively used the STAR method in her Kellogg essay to show leadership initiative at her mother’s store:

“I learned the value of hard work early, as a child helping in my mother’s gift shop, serving customers and wrapping gifts. (Situation) Once the boom of social media started, I saw the opportunity to leverage this technology to improve our business – this could attract more customers, increase revenues, and keep our financials organized. Simultaneously, I realized I wouldn’t be able to help in the store once I left for university (Task) , so I taught my mom to use the computer to manage our Facebook page and financials (Action) . The fulfillment of providing my mother with the tools and skills necessary to run and improve her business – increasing sales by 10% – is indescribable (Results) .”

Using STAR is a great way to make your leadership role very clear throughout your essay and utilize storytelling strategies successfully. 

At Ellin Lolis Consulting , we believe that one of the keys to a compelling essay is effective storytelling. This technique transforms your example of leadership from a stale image that adcoms have heard a thousand times to a colorful journey that highlights you as unique and valuable to their community.

Highlighting your role

Your MBA essay is the place to discuss your personal achievements . Don’t sell yourself short in your essay! Telling a story about leadership that does not thoroughly explain your part will not be a good demonstration of leadership. 

This means that it is important to show the admissions committee what you specifically did in your story. Just saying that you were part of a team that produced fantastic results will not achieve this. Instead, you must show them how your work – what you did and how you did it – was essential for collective or individual success. 

Even if a success was only possible due to the work of your entire team, it’s still important to show how your actions complemented those of your colleagues. Not only does this allow the readers to see your contributions, but also demonstrates your capacity for collaboration!

Combining personal and professional examples

We have already established that leadership can manifest itself in many different forms, and that admissions committees see it that way, too. 

This means that the adcom is not only looking for your professional leadership experiences – or that they will condemn you for demonstrating leadership in your personal life. In fact, a good mix helps the adcom understand that you have a well-rounded, flexible understanding of what leadership means. 

For example, last year, our client Thais wanted to show leadership via the theme “grow by growing others”. To do so, she included the following stories in her Berkeley Haas essays :

• Teaching fellow children how to read as a child
• Mentoring younger students during university
• Professionally mapping NGO efforts to coordinate the distribution of their impact more evenly throughout Brazil

Don’t be afraid to include personal examples of leadership – this may help to reinforce your multi-faceted capabilities as a leader even more in your MBA essay. This is also a great way to show a clear pattern of leadership.

Show a pattern of leadership

When writing your MBA essay, it is good to not just show a single instance of leadership, but instead to demonstrate how your tendency for leadership is part of your brand using multiple stories. 

Of course, this only applies to prompts that do not ask for only a single experience (unlike Kellogg’s essay B!)

For example, you could show how you led a school club as a teenager, started a project at an NGO during college, and went on to lead recruiting initiates at your current consulting firm. This way, the adcom has a number of examples to go on to understand that you will make for a good leader in the future. 

Often, the greatest way to demonstrate a pattern of leadership is by establishing it via your central theme .

Leadership and theme

A theme is a great way to connect your message to your reader. A theme is a central topic that is reinforced throughout your essay via one or more stories. If you are curious about how to effectively apply a theme in your MBA essay, check out this article .

Many candidates decide to use leadership as their central theme in one or more of their essays. This is a great strategy and is definitely a winning possibility. However, you can also choose a theme with a bit more subtlety and still create an effective argument for leadership. 

To demonstrate, let’s take another look at Kellogg’s essay B. Their question specifically asks candidates to talk about a (single!) past leadership experience.

Last fall, our client Carolina began her essay with: 

“While the choreographed movements of a ballet dancer are polished and graceful, the journey to reach this result is full of setbacks. Although I no longer practice ballet, I have benefited from the discipline and determination I developed as a ballet dancer, applying these strengths to my professional and personal life.”

Here, Carolina uses ballet to help the reader visualize discipline and determination. She goes on to explain that she later used these traits to successfully demonstrate her leadership capabilities to overcome hurdles while implementing a membership program at her company. 

She ends her essay like this: 

“Although the membership program was successful, it required overcoming many setbacks through a rigorous execution process. Like ballet dancing, the completed project shows little of the work that went into it or the learnings I acquired along the way. Ultimately, it gave me the opportunity to lead a very diverse team, learn about a new industry, and strategically collaborate to achieve impressive results.”

As you can see, she uses the theme ballet to focus the reader on specific leadership qualities (discipline and determination) that helped her succeed in her career.

This strategy will work for other schools and essay prompts just as well. If your answer to Stanford’s What Matters Most to You and Why is quality leadership, you may be able to express that best with a metaphor. 

Our client Isabella, for example, began her essay like this: 

“What matters most to me is watering plants. Not any plant, but the ones that insist on growing, even when lacking nutrients and sunshine.” 

She continues her essay by explaining how, by overcoming bias and obstacles in her own life, she was able to grow into a leader who helped others overcome their own obstacles as well, thus “watering plants that insist on growing.”

As you can see, it is possible to demonstrate leadership in your MBA essay indirectly and implicitly – and even in unique, creative ways. Choosing your theme like this may even help reveal a new side of your personality that the admissions committee might not have otherwise been exposed to.

Don’t be afraid of conflict

In life, we work hard to avoid conflict as much as possible, yet when it comes to stories, conflict and tensions are not only important, but essential to captivating attention. 

Would Breaking Bad have been as interesting if Walter White was already an established drug lord when the show started? Probably not. Watching him take the news of his cancer diagnosis and find an unusual way to drum up the money for treatment is just what makes the show so addictive. 

Conflict and how our “hero” (in this case, you!) solves the challenge is at the core of any good story, so make sure you use the STAR method to clearly set up the conflict you needed to navigate and then show how you took steps to turn this roadblock into one of your standout moments. 

Let’s take this essay for example. In an early version, the story was conflict-free. 

Upon joining MBB after graduation, another experience inspired personal growth. While abroad, I participated in recruiting processes for top consulting firms, and saw firsthand that MBB lagged behind in recruiting students pursuing dual degrees abroad. After joining, I created a dedicated process to recruit these top performers. Four months later, we had the first online connection event, which attracted more than 40 interested students. The program has since become an essential recruiting tool. I am proud to lead this internal team in contributing to MBB’s long-term success as we attract the talent we need to deliver high-impact results to clients.

Though this shows initiative on the applicant’s part, it is far less compelling than this version of events:

After graduating, I joined MBB, as it allowed me to channel my intellectual curiosity, explore various sectors and be an agent of change. While abroad, I participated in recruiting processes for other top consulting firms, and saw firsthand that MBB lagged behind in recruiting dual-degree students. After joining, I spoke with several partners about creating a program to solve this issue. The partners were hesitant, however, concerned they could not adequately evaluate candidates remotely. After demonstrating the implications of overlooking these high-potential candidates, I received permission to create a dedicated dual-degree recruiting process. Four months later, I had mobilized 10 colleagues, leading them in organizing BCG’s first online connection event. The program has since become an essential recruiting tool, bringing in more than 10% of our hires since inception.

Here, not only does she show initiative, she also shows she has an ability to clearly communicate and add value to her firm , even when the odds are stacked against her. This tactic shows development and engages the reader, making your story more memorable.

So, when writing your leadership essays, make sure to give your stories some much-needed drama to really demonstrate how much impact your actions generated!

Still struggling with leadership in your MBA essays?

There are many factors to consider when deciding how you will demonstrate leadership in your MBA essay. 

On the one hand, it is good to consider the multi-faceted nature of leadership. You will want to demonstrate multiple environments and ways in which you have been able to create impact. And just because you have never managed a team or become the leader of a school club does not mean you cannot show your leadership capabilities to the admissions committee. 

In fact, you may be able to prove to them that you are a leader through a number of other situations, like taking the initiative or innovation, and even simultaneously connect those situations to other things the school values. 

On the other hand, just selecting a story that demonstrates leadership is not enough – you must also present it in a way that is convincing . Using strategies like STAR, a mix of professional and personal examples, and reinforcing the message through your theme, you can make sure that the admissions committee remembers your unique value as a leader. 

Of course, understanding these concepts and applying them is not the same thing. 

Even more importantly, we can help you effectively highlight your desire to grow as a leader in your top MBA program and the global world of business beyond. After all, as Kellogg’s admissions point out , growth is a challenge confronted by every organization – and every leader. 

If you still find yourself struggling with these issues, we are happy to help! Our MBA essay editors at Ellin Lolis Consulting have the expertise you need to identify the right stories and approaches to discussing leadership for each school you’re applying to. We can help you polish your essay to really make your leadership experiences shine. 

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Showcase Your Leadership Experience for College Admissions: Examples for College Applications

Leadership skills. It’s something that all prospective college students should have listed on their applications.

Why is it so important? In today’s competitive college admissions landscape, demonstrating strong leadership skills can give applicants a significant edge.

But to really showcase your leadership experience and skills, you need to know what leadership truly means–and get a little creative.

Simply put, leadership is service. Andrew Malrux said, “To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.”

But can talking about service really help you?

According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling ( NACAC ) 2020 State of College Admission report, yes. More than half of colleges and universities surveyed consider a student’s demonstrated leadership qualities as a significant factor in their admissions decisions.

These institutions understand that leaders not only contribute positively to campus life but also go on to make a difference in their communities and excel in their careers.

This blog post aims to guide students on effectively showcasing their leadership skills during the college application process. In addition, applicants can demonstrate their commitment to leadership through extracurricular activities, volunteer experiences, and personal narratives.

Let’s dig in.

Importance of Leadership Skills in College Admissions

Leadership skills refer to a set of abilities that enable an individual to effectively guide, influence, and motivate others toward achieving a common goal. These skills play a crucial role in the college application process and in helping students excel throughout their higher education journey and impress employers upon entering the workforce.

You attract leadership opportunities when you use these skills to serve a purpose. You don’t have to be certain age or member of a specific club or organization to do that. Student leaders from all walks of life can develop and strengthen these important skills. This, in turn, shows employers (and the admission committee) that you have what it takes to be a good team member, finish a group project, and set a great example on campus.

Examples of Leadership Skills

Some key leadership skills include:

• Communication: Effective communication involves clearly articulating ideas, actively listening to others, and adapting one’s message to suit diverse audiences. Strong communication skills are essential for leaders to convey their vision, facilitate group discussions, and maintain open channels of dialogue with team members.
• Decision-making: Leaders often need to make quick, informed decisions while considering various factors and potential consequences. The ability to assess situations and make sound judgments is vital for successful leaders.
• Problem-solving: Leaders must identify issues, analyze information, and develop practical solutions. Problem-solving skills allow leaders to navigate challenges, overcome obstacles, and find new ideas for achieving their goals.
• Teamwork: Effective leaders know how to collaborate with others, delegate tasks, and foster a supportive environment where team members can thrive. Being a team player involves recognizing and valuing the contributions of others, resolving conflicts, and promoting a culture of mutual respect.
• Empathy: Leaders who demonstrate empathy can understand and relate to the feelings, perspectives, and experiences of others. This quality allows them to build strong relationships, offer support, and lead with compassion.

What Does This Look Like?

Let’s say you’ve served as a student orientation leader at your school. There are many situations where you would need to utilize a variety of skills to ensure the successful orientation of new students.

During the orientation process, an incoming student approaches you, expressing concern about a scheduling conflict between a required course and a part-time job. The student is worried about losing their job but also wants to ensure that they fulfill all academic requirements.

To address this issue, you listen attentively to the student’s concerns and ask clarifying questions to understand the situation entirely. Then you explain the options available to the student, such as seeking a course override or looking for a new job that accommodates their schedule.

Using problem-solving skills, you help the student weigh the pros and cons of each option and provide guidance on how to make an informed decision. You also encourage students to communicate with the appropriate academic and career services departments to explore additional resources.

Throughout the interaction, you demonstrate empathy by acknowledging the student’s worries and fears and offering emotional support. You make sure the student feels heard and validated while also providing practical solutions to address the issue at hand.

By utilizing effective communication, decision-making, problem-solving, and empathy skills, the orientation leader is able to help the student navigate a difficult situation and feel more confident and supported during their transition to college life.

Although you might not have this same leadership experience for college just yet, you probably have one you can use similarly.

What about a community service project or time spent on a sports team? Volunteer experience requires you to talk the talk while getting to contribute to causes you are interested in, even if for a short period of time. The same for part-time jobs that allow you to earn both extra cash and confidence.

Identifying Your Leadership Experiences

What qualifies as a leadership role? Does it have to be a student government position or a paid job? The answer is no! Here are a few examples.

Extracurricular Activities

Extracurricular activities play a significant role in helping students develop and showcase their leadership skills. For example, participating in student government, sports teams, cultural events, or clubs and organizations provides opportunities to hold leadership roles such as team captain, club president, or event organizer.

These experiences allow students to gain hands-on experience in decision-making, teamwork, and communication, demonstrating their leadership abilities to college admissions officers.

Community Service

Community service and volunteer experiences also offer a platform for students to exhibit their leadership skills. Students can make a difference in their communities while building valuable skills by participating in community service projects or taking the initiative to create and lead their own projects.

This could involve organizing a fundraiser for a local organization, coordinating a neighborhood clean-up effort, or mentoring younger students in after-school programs. These experiences demonstrate a student’s commitment to community engagement and highlight their ability to lead, problem-solve, and work with diverse groups of people.

Work or Internship Experiences

Work or internship experiences are another avenue for students to gain leadership experience and showcase their skills. Whether it’s a part-time job during the school year, a summer internship, or a volunteer position, these experiences often present opportunities for students to take on responsibilities, manage tasks, and collaborate with team members.

By taking the initiative to lead projects or contribute new ideas, students can demonstrate strong leadership qualities, such as time management, interpersonal skills, and the ability to adapt to a professional environment.

Including these experiences on college applications and resumes will impress both admissions officers and future employers, signaling a student’s potential for success in higher education and the workforce.

How to Showcase Your Leadership Skills in Your Application

College application.

To effectively showcase your leadership skills in your college application, strategically highlighting your experiences and personal growth is essential. College applications, such as the Common Application or individual university applications, often include sections dedicated to extracurricular activities, work experience, and community service. Be sure to emphasize the leadership roles you’ve held and your impact in these areas. A college admissions consultant can help you with all aspects of showcasing your leadership skills and much more with the admissions and application process.

Essays and Personal Statements

College admissions essays and personal statements provide an excellent opportunity for you to delve deeper into your leadership experiences.

Choosing a Leadership-Related Essay Prompt

Begin by selecting a leadership-related essay prompt or crafting your own if the application allows for open-ended topics. This gives you a chance to showcase your unique perspective on leadership, share personal anecdotes, and highlight the qualities that make you a great leader.

Crafting a Compelling Narrative

When crafting a compelling narrative, focus on telling a story that demonstrates your leadership growth. Describe the challenges you’ve faced, the lessons you’ve learned, and the impact you’ve had on others. By illustrating your journey and the obstacles you’ve overcome, you can demonstrate your resilience, adaptability, and problem-solving abilities.

Showcasing Your Leadership Growth

Showcasing your leadership growth is an essential component of your application. It not only highlights your past accomplishments but also indicates your potential for continued development and success in college and beyond. By weaving your leadership experiences throughout your application, you can paint a vivid picture of your strengths and potential, ultimately making a lasting impression on college admissions officers.

Letters of Recommendation

Letters of recommendation play a crucial role in showcasing your leadership skills to college admissions officers.

To ensure your letters effectively highlight your abilities, it’s important to choose recommenders who have directly observed your leadership experiences, such as teachers, coaches, or supervisors. These individuals can provide specific examples of your leadership qualities, interpersonal skills, and problem-solving abilities, giving admissions officers valuable insight into your potential.

When requesting letters of recommendation, provide your recommenders with context for your leadership experiences. Share your resume, a list of your extracurricular activities, and any relevant accomplishments or projects you’ve led. This will enable your recommenders to craft a well-rounded, detailed portrait of your leadership abilities, which will strengthen your application .

Extracurricular Activities and Leadership Positions

Selecting meaningful extracurricular activities that align with your passions and interests is vital in developing your leadership skills. By engaging in activities that genuinely interest you, you’ll be more likely to demonstrate commitment and consistency, which are important qualities of successful leaders.

Seek out leadership positions within your chosen activities, such as becoming a club president, team captain, or event organizer. To obtain these roles, show initiative, contribute new ideas, and actively participate in meetings and planning. Demonstrating your dedication and enthusiasm can increase your chances of being selected for leadership roles.

Balancing your extracurricular responsibilities with your academic performance is essential. Ensure that you allocate sufficient time to both your leadership pursuits and your studies to maintain a strong application.

Pursuing Leadership Positions

Obtaining leadership roles within your chosen activities can significantly enhance your college application and demonstrate your commitment to personal growth. Here are some tips to help you secure these positions:

Tips for Obtaining Leadership Roles

• Show initiative: Be proactive in your involvement with clubs, organizations, or teams by contributing new ideas, volunteering for tasks, and actively participating in meetings and planning sessions.
• Build relationships: Establish strong connections with other members, mentors, or advisors within the organization. This will demonstrate your teamwork and interpersonal skills, which are essential qualities of a leader.
• Be reliable: Consistently fulfill your responsibilities and meet deadlines, showing that you can be trusted to take on more significant roles within the group.
• Seek feedback: Ask for input from your peers and mentors on your performance and how you can improve your leadership abilities. This will show your dedication to growth and self-improvement.

Developing Your Leadership Skills

Attending leadership workshops and conferences.

To further develop your leadership skills, consider attending workshops, conferences, or training programs that focus on leadership development. These events can provide valuable insights, resources, and networking opportunities to help you refine your leadership abilities. Many schools, universities, and organizations offer such programs, which can cover topics such as public speaking, time management, and effective communication. Participating in these events not only enhances your skills but also demonstrates your commitment to personal growth and continuous improvement.

Participating in Mentorship Programs

Mentorship programs can also play a significant role in developing your leadership skills. By connecting with experienced leaders or professionals in your field of interest, you can gain practical advice, guidance, and support as you navigate your leadership journey. Mentors can offer valuable perspectives on overcoming challenges, setting goals, and building on your strengths as a leader.

Engaging in Self Reflection and Seeking Feedback

Engaging in self-reflection and seeking feedback from peers, mentors, and supervisors is another crucial aspect of leadership development. Reflect on your experiences, identify areas for improvement, and set actionable goals for growth. By actively seeking feedback from others, you can gain insights into your strengths and weaknesses and develop a plan for further improvement. This ongoing process of self-reflection and growth will not only enhance your leadership abilities but also showcase your dedication to personal development, setting you apart from other applicants in the college admissions process.

Showcasing Your Leadership Skills in Interviews

In addition to highlighting your leadership skills in your college application, it’s essential to showcase these qualities during interviews with college admissions officers or potential employers. Proper preparation is key to making a lasting impression and effectively conveying your leadership experiences.

Preparing for Interviews

Begin by preparing for college interviews by researching the institution or organization and reflecting on your leadership experiences. Develop a list of potential leadership-related questions that you might be asked, such as “Can you describe a time when you faced a challenge as a leader and how you overcame it?” or “What qualities do you believe make a great leader, and how do you embody them?” Practice your responses, focusing on providing specific examples that demonstrate your leadership abilities.

Answering Leadership Related Questions

When answering leadership-related questions during interviews, be sure to communicate your experiences effectively. Use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, and Result) to structure your responses, clearly describing the context, your role, the actions you took, and the outcomes of your leadership efforts. This will provide a comprehensive and engaging narrative of your experiences, showcasing your problem-solving, decision-making, and teamwork skills.

Get Help From College Admissions Consultants With Your Leadership Skills

Showcasing your leadership skills in college applications is crucial, as it demonstrates your ability to contribute positively to the campus community and excel in your future endeavors. By embracing and developing your leadership potential, you can stand out from other applicants and increase your chances of success in higher education and beyond.

Remember that showcasing your leadership skills involves not only highlighting your experiences but also continuously refining your abilities through workshops, mentorship, and self-reflection. Embrace your potential and become the leader you aspire to be.

Leadership experience for college can encompass a wide range of activities, including extracurricular activities, community service, work or internship experiences, and volunteer opportunities. Any experience in which you have taken on a leadership role, demonstrated initiative or contributed to a team’s success can be considered leadership experience.

To gain leadership experience in high school, you can participate in extracurricular activities, join clubs or organizations, volunteer in your community, or pursue internships or part-time jobs. Seek out leadership positions within these activities, such as club president, team captain, or project leader, and actively contribute your ideas and efforts to make a difference.

Even if you haven’t held a formal leadership position, you can still showcase your leadership skills by highlighting instances where you took the initiative, collaborated effectively with others, or made a significant impact within a group or project. Focus on specific examples that demonstrate your problem-solving, decision-making, and teamwork abilities.

Yes, you can still develop your leadership skills even if you’re not naturally outgoing or assertive. Leadership comes in many forms, and different situations call for different leadership styles. Focus on developing your unique strengths, such as active listening, empathy, or creative problem-solving, and seek out opportunities to practice and refine your skills in various contexts.

To improve your communication skills as a leader, practice active listening, ask open-ended questions, and provide clear and concise instructions. Be receptive to feedback from others and be willing to adapt your communication style based on the needs of your team or audience. Participating in public speaking workshops or joining clubs like Toastmasters can also help you develop your communication skills.

Some common mistakes to avoid when showcasing leadership skills in college applications include being overly vague about your experiences, focusing solely on your accomplishments without discussing the challenges you faced, and neglecting to mention the impact your leadership had on others or the organization. To effectively showcase your leadership skills, provide specific examples, discuss the lessons you’ve learned, and highlight the positive outcomes that resulted from your efforts.

Bryce Welker is an active speaker, blogger, and regular contributor to Forbes, Inc.com, and Business.com where he shares his knowledge to help others boost their careers.  Bryce is the founder of more than 20 test prep websites that help students and professionals pass their certification exams.

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Feb 15, 2023

Essays on Leadership for Students | 200 - 500 Word Essays

Are you writing an essay about leadership? Check out these examples!

Leadership is often defined as "the action of inspiring others to act in concert to achieve a particular goal." It signifies the harmony in actions that lead to a common objective. A genuine leader not only exudes confidence but also paves the way for their followers towards triumph. Over the years, various leadership styles have been identified and discussed by psychologists.

 Qualities such as intelligence, adaptability, extroversion, innate self-awareness, and social competence often emerge as the hallmarks of impactful leaders. There's a consensus that these traits mold an individual into an effective leader. Interestingly, some theories suggest that extraordinary situations can thrust an ordinary individual into the spotlight, bestowing upon them the mantle of leadership. It's also believed that leadership isn't a static trait but an evolving journey. It underscores the belief that with dedication and the right resources, anyone can hone their leadership abilities.

 True leadership goes beyond merely advocating for a cause. It involves taking responsibility, igniting motivation in others, and differentiating oneself from just being a 'boss'. A leader's essence lies in their ability to inspire and propel people towards grand visions, whereas a manager typically focuses on oversight and operational aspects.

What Is a Leadership Essay?

A leadership essay falls under the category of student application essays and serves to provide student admissions officers with insight into your past leadership experiences. Despite appearing to be very specific, this type of essay acknowledges that the nature and perception of leadership can vary significantly depending on the individual and the context.

 If you find yourself in need of further insights or a unique angle for your leadership essay, consider exploring an expert essay-writing tool designed to assist students in crafting compelling narratives by analyzing vast data and generating fresh ideas within minutes. In this article, we'll also delve into various leadership essay examples to offer a clearer understanding of the genre and inspire your writing journey.

4 Examples of Leadership Essays

Qualities of a good leader, introduction.

Confidence is the most important attribute first of all. One of the most important qualities in a leader is confidence in one's own abilities. A lack of self-assurance is fatal to a person's leadership potential. If you want others to follow you, you need to exude self-assurance. It's imperative for a leader to have faith in his own judgment and actions. How can people want to follow him if he doesn't even know what he's doing?

Every effective leader knows that they need to be an inspiration to their followers. A leader needs to set an example for his team. In addition, he ought to inspire them whenever feasible. A leader must also maintain optimism in trying times.

What qualities a good leader must have?

Leadership is the ability to influence and guide individuals or groups toward a common goal. A leader must possess several qualities to be effective, including:

Communication skills: A leader must be able to communicate their vision and goals clearly and effectively, both verbally and in writing. This requires excellent listening skills, empathy, and the ability to adapt to different communication styles.

Emotional intelligence: A leader must be able to understand and manage their own emotions, as well as those of their team members. This includes being able to understand and respond to the emotions of others, and handling conflicts in a constructive manner.

Visionary: A leader must have a clear and inspiring vision of the future, and be able to articulate this vision in a way that motivates others to work towards it.

Strategic thinking: A leader must be able to think critically and creatively to identify and solve problems, make decisions, and develop plans and strategies to achieve their goals.

Flexibility: A leader must be able to adapt to changing circumstances and be open to new ideas and perspectives. This requires the ability to embrace change, be innovative, and continuously learn and grow.

Integrity: A leader must have strong ethics and values, and be willing to make difficult decisions that are consistent with their beliefs. This requires honesty, transparency, and accountability.

Decisiveness: A leader must be able to make tough decisions quickly, without undue hesitation or procrastination. This requires courage and the ability to take calculated risks.

Empowerment: A leader must be able to delegate responsibilities, give team members the resources they need to succeed, and foster a sense of ownership and accountability among their team.

Conclusion 

These qualities are essential for effective leadership, and when combined with hard work, determination, and a commitment to excellence, can help leaders to achieve great things.

How one can be a Great Leader?

Leadership is the act of performing the duties of a leader. In the business world, for instance, it is essential to have someone in charge of a team to ensure everything runs well. Effective leadership is essential for any group that wants to maximize its prospects of success.

Leadership Comes from Experience

As we've shown, leadership can be innate in some cases but is more often learned through practice and exposure. Sometimes the best traits of a leader must be learned over a lengthy period of time, so that one can become a notable one, proving that leadership is not always about a person's innate qualities. Leaders should continuously be on the lookout for opportunities to grow their leadership skills.

Nobody can disagree that experience is a key component of leadership. Numerous examples exist to back up this claim, such as:

Instance 1:

Our school's head boy or girl has traditionally been an older student who has been around for a while and thus has a better grasp of the ins and outs of school politics.

Instance 2:

When there is a vacancy for a team leader, it is common practice for the employee who has consistently put in the most effort and attention to the office job to receive a higher number of votes than their coworkers. 

“The best teacher for a leader is evaluated experience.” - John C. Maxwell

How one can be a Great Leader/Skills to be a Great Leader?

Effective leadership is a skill that develops through time. Developing into a leader with all the qualities that are needed takes a lot of hard work and potential. Being a prominent leader calls for a wide variety of traits. Some of these characteristics are addressed in further detail below:

One should be a Good Communicator

To be an effective leader, one must be able to convey his thoughts clearly to his/her/its subordinates.

Should have Confidence

The individual should have faith in what he says and does.

Give Credit to other Team Members too

A leader not only needs to impose his viewpoints and opinions instead he must also hear to the suggestions of other members of the team and offer them credit if their concept is appropriate.

Good Bond with the Team

A leader's ability to command respect from his team members depends on his ability to develop and maintain positive relationships with them.

Leads with Responsibility

A leader needs to be completely committed to his position. It's important that he takes on responsibility so that he can effectively deal with the various challenges he will inevitably face.

Any group or organization needs a leader above all else. Leadership development takes time and effort. One needs to have lived through a lot to be an effective leader. It's not enough to simply have years of experience in the field; one must also have the traits that make one an effective leader. You can't be a great leader unless you possess certain traits.

What makes a Good Leader?

Trying one's hand as a leader appears easy when viewed through this lens. Is that so tough? Of course not; leading is difficult, and not everyone aspires to be a leader. The vast majority of us have settled into well-established careers where we report to superiors and make a living. Still, not everyone is content to go along with the crowd. They become leaders in whatever field they pursue. A leader is an example to followers and will prioritize the needs of those around them.

Some Unique Qualities of a Leader

Many individuals resort to their leaders to vent their frustrations, therefore it's important for them to be good listeners.

A leader ought to be completely forthright; they can't play favorites or give anyone preferential treatment. One of the most essential qualities of a strong leader is the ability to make decisions with integrity.

They need to be aware of the bigger picture and understand what makes an individual stand out or become a leader. It's their expertise in addition to other distinguishing traits. Their awareness of current events and the results of recent studies is essential. In many ways, this is helpful, and it's the leader's responsibility to stay current.

Since some might not understand them, they should utilize straightforward, easily comprehended language. Leaders need to be able to communicate effectively at all times. In reality, what sets them apart is their exceptional communication skills. Adolf Hitler was such a gifted orator that his followers believed every word he said.

No matter how you're feeling or what's going on in the world, if you listen to a leader, they may make you feel energized. Since leaders are in charge of inspiring confidence in their followers, they can't afford to be wary or unsure of themselves. People tend to blindly follow their leaders.

Whether you're a leader or a doctor, you should devote yourself completely to your chosen field. Everything we do is for the benefit of others; engineers, for example, spend much of their time designing and constructing buildings for other people. So, take pride in what you do, and if you possess the aforementioned traits, you are also a leader who doesn't have to rely on others to succeed. No matter what you do, aspiring to leadership positions will always benefit others.

What is Leadership in Management and what are the weaknesses and strengths of a Leader?

Simply said, leadership is acting as a supervisor or manager of a group. Different mental pictures pop up when we hear the word "leadership" used in conversation. One might think of a political leader, team leader, corporate leader, school leader, etc. Leaders facilitate order and efficiency in the workplace. Teamwork and success are fundamental to effective leadership. Leaders utilize their managerial abilities to establish courses and guide their teams to success.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Leadership

Able to express oneself more clearly

Growth of character.

Self-awareness.

Possession of teamwork skills.

Gain assurance in yourself.

Weaknesses:

Acting favorably toward one's teammates.

Having no faith in the leader.

Thinks they're better than everyone else, but act hypocritically.

Not living up to the promised standard.

Insufficient morals.

Leadership and Management

Management and leadership are inextricably linked to one another. Leadership and management are both vital to the efficient operation of an organization; but, they accomplish very different things in the process. Leadership is a necessary skill for anyone aspiring to be an effective manager. The terms management and leadership are synonymous with one another. In this manner, we are able to draw the conclusion that a manager who demonstrates the traits of a successful leader is, in fact, a manager who is effective.

Leadership in School

Leadership is essential in nearly every group, as we've seen above. That group includes one's educational institution. Every school needs an outstanding figure to serve as its head of school. Class monitor, assembly captain, cultural leader, etc. are all examples of leadership roles that can be taken on at school, but this raises the question of what makes a person a successful school leader.

Any student hoping to be chosen as a student body leader will need to demonstrate a wide range of competencies. He or she needs to be a consistent student who pays attention in class and does well in extracurricular activities. For the simple reason that no intelligent and hardworking kid would ever be considered for leadership. Student leaders are most often selected from among those who participate fully in all activities.

Leadership in Organization

Leadership in an organization, also known as organizational leadership, is the process of establishing long-term objectives that further the company's mission and help it reach its ultimate destination. This is a classic illustration of how Bill Gates often works with his team: they agree on a strategy, and Gates implements it. To the same extent, it is the responsibility of the leader in each given organization to determine what it is that the group is trying to accomplish.

Leadership in Politics

Leadership in politics, also known as political leadership, is the process of becoming actively involved in a political party in the role of a party leader. Knowledge of political processes, their outcomes, and the political agenda is central to the idea of political leadership.

An effective leader can be developed in anyone who has the determination and drives to do so. Both the strengths and the areas for improvement should be nurtured. Whether in the classroom, the workplace, or the political arena, leadership is always necessary. Therefore, one can exercise leadership anywhere they like inside their own organization.

What are the types of Leadership?

The ability to lead is a rare trait that not everyone possesses. The ability to do so is a gift, so count your blessings if you possess it. It's recommended that you hone it even more so that you can propel your career forward and serve as an example to people around you. However, it is crucial to grasp the various leadership styles before you go ahead and polish your skills.

Types of Leadership Styles

Democratic Leadership

In this style of management, subordinates are given a voice in decision-making. Although the subordinates' efforts are highlighted, the leader is ultimately held responsible for the group's actions. Many people find this type of leadership to be effective.

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leaders motivate and inspire others to adopt new behaviors and ways of thinking in order to improve their own performance and that of their teams and organizations. A transformational leader is someone who encourages their team to strive for greater things and works to boost morale and output.

Team Leadership

A good leader fully incorporates his team into the task at hand. Members of the team are motivated to reach their goals and advance in their careers thanks to the leadership of the group.

Strategic Leadership

It requires a chief executive who doesn't restrict himself to brainstorming sessions with his superiors. He contributes on every level of the team. He is well-liked for his ability to unite the need for fresh ideas with the necessity of grounding them in reality.

Autocratic Leadership

The leader in a command and control structure is the center of attention. The chief executive has absolute power in this setting. He decides things on his own, without polling his staff. He relays this information to his staff and stresses the importance of swift action. The buck stops with him, and he alone must answer for his actions. Not much room for negotiation exists. It's no secret that this method of leading has its detractors.

Visionary Leadership

This kind of leader appreciates the abilities and requirements of his team members. He describes his ideal outcome and the teamwork that will be necessary to attain it.

Coaching Leadership

Leaders who coach their teams do so regularly in an effort to raise output. He inspires his employees to do better and works to keep them motivated. This approach to leadership has been much praised.

Facilitative Leadership

With occasional guidance, a facilitative leader ensures that the process runs smoothly for his team. As a precaution in case his team is ineffective. If the team is highly effective, the leader will take a hands-off approach.

Cross-Cultural Leadership

The leadership of this type is necessary when interacting with people from various cultural backgrounds. Because of the wide variety of cultures represented in the workforce across the United States, many managers and executives hold cross-cultural positions.

Laissez-Faire Leadership

The members of the team are given responsibility in this style of management. They are free to choose how they spend their time at work, with minimal oversight from the boss. It's not a good way to lead, according to experts.

Transactional Leadership

An interactive approach is integral to this kind of leadership. When team members successfully implement their leader's ideas and choices, they are rewarded with immediate, material benefits.

Charismatic Leadership

In order to bring out the best in his followers, this kind of leader makes the effort to change their attitudes, values, and actions.

This article should dispel the notion that leadership qualities can't be further subdivided. It should also assist you in pinpointing your own personal brand of leadership so you can perfect it over time.

Final Words

In conclusion, leadership is a complex and multifaceted concept that involves various qualities and skills. Effective leaders possess traits such as integrity, vision, empathy, decisiveness, and the ability to inspire and motivate others. They are able to navigate challenges, make difficult decisions, and lead their team toward success. Leadership also involves continuous learning and self-improvement, as leaders must adapt to changing circumstances and remain relevant. Effective leadership can have a positive impact on both individuals and organizations, fostering growth and creating a culture of success.

You can use Jenni.ai to quickly compose an essay on leadership, or any other topic, of your choosing. It's a fantastic choice that promises convenience and relief. Create an essay on any topic in a matter of minutes with the help of our AI-powered program. Membership is immediately available upon your free registration here.

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Writing an Essay About Leadership: A Complete Guide for Students

Leadership is typically defined as the capacity of a person (as well as a group of people or organization) to “lead” others, influence their opinions, or guide them. A good leader must be able to rally people around a shared cause or goal, help shape a vision, and motivate and inspire others to attain that goal.

For decades, leadership has been one of the most sought-after abilities. It is considered one of the primary driving forces of humanity and progress. Leaders foster innovation, growth, and a goal-accomplishing attitude. So, this quality is highly valued in all areas of our lives, including in school, at work, and in one’s personal life as well.

Being such a pivotal skill, leadership often becomes a topic for academic essays. Although the topic is incredibly popular, writing a compelling paper on this subject might be uneasy. Yet, this doesn’t mean that there are absolutely no ways to ease the process.

In the guide below, we are going to answer some of your biggest questions about this type of assignment and provide actionable tips for writing a good paper. Also, we are going to give you some leadership essay examples and ideas that should help inspire your own writing.

What Is Leadership Essay?

The first big question students face when assigned this task is ‒ “What is a leader essay, in the first place?” So, let’s start from there.

In a nutshell, a leadership essay is a short piece of writing focused on the topic of leadership. Just like any other essay, it can serve multiple purposes. For example, if it’s written as a part of your class or homework, it can be:

• Informative;
• Persuasive;
• Argumentative;
• Compare and contrast, etc.

Depending on the type of assignment, your task might be to define leadership, compare different leadership styles, reflect on real-life applications of this skill, etc.

Alternatively, this type of work can be a part of the college admission process. Leadership is a common topic for admission essays. In this case, the primary goal of the paper is to show the admissions officers that you are a true leader. You might need to explain what personal traits make you a good leader and showcase real-life examples of situations when you demonstrated this skill.

In both cases, this type of essay requires you to understand the nature of leadership and communicate it in your paper, following the provided prompts and guidelines. 

Read on to learn how!

How to Write a Leadership Essay Step by Step

Typically, a leadership paper is a short essay that follows the traditional essay structure. It consists of three main components: an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Traditionally, an introduction and conclusion take up one paragraph each. The number of paragraphs in the body of your paper can vary depending on the given word count. In any case, there should be at least two body paragraphs.

The writing process for this type of paper is also pretty conventional. It requires decent planning and organization to convey your ideas efficiently. Here are the core steps that should be involved in the process:

• Reading and analyzing the prompt and assignment guidelines;
• Brainstorming ideas and selecting a relevant topic (unless you are assigned a specific subject);
• Researching the topic and collecting valid sources of information that will help you answer the primary essay question and justify your ideas;
• Crafting a detailed outline to organize your ideas and streamline the writing process;
• Writing the essay following your outline;
• Proofreading and editing your first draft until it looks perfect.

These are the main steps to handling this task, and they look pretty simple. Nevertheless, the task itself often turns out to be rather challenging. So, let us give you a few extra guiding tips to help you ace your essay.

How to Start a Leadership Essay

It’s hard to call a more crucial part of a leadership essay than its intro. This part of the paper aims to introduce the readers to your topic and make a logical transition to the ideas and arguments you are going to provide. But most importantly, this section should grab the readers’ attention and spark their desire to read your work to the end.

To grab the attention instantly, you should start your intro with a hook. Traditionally, there are six types of effective essay hooks:

• A rhetorical question;
• An impressive fact or statistic;
• An anecdote (as long as it’s relevant and appropriate);
• A common misconception about the topic;
• An imagery description of the subject.

Depending on your task, pick a hook that has the highest likelihood of engaging your readers. Then, use a few sentences to create a topic onset and give your readers an idea of what you will be talking about in your paper:

• If you are writing an admission essay, design the setting of your story.
• If you are writing an informative or another type of work for the class, provide some background info on the subject matter and state your thesis.

Most importantly, keep your intro short and straight to the topic.

The Perfect Length of a Leadership Essay

Now that you know how to start your paper, we also need to take a moment to clarify the ideal length of your work.

The length of this type of work can vary significantly depending on its type and purpose. Most often, if you are writing for an admission committee, schools will ask you to stick with a 250 word essay on leadership. However, if you are writing for a class, the word count can go up to 1000 words.

As was mentioned earlier, your essay might come with a specific word count. Whether it’s written for admission or a class, you might be given a set of instructions with a specific limit of words. In this case, you should carefully study the guidelines and stick to the word count indicated in them.

In the rare case that the word count isn’t specified, stick to the general rule of thumb and limit your essay to 500 or 600 words.

How to Write a Killer Conclusion for Leadership Essay

While the body of your essay will be unique, which means we can’t give you much advice on how to handle it, the conclusion always follows a traditional structure.

The conclusion of a paper is its final clause. It aims to wrap up everything you’ve discussed in your paper and give it a sense of a logical ending. Often, you will also leave your readers with some food for thought to ensure that your essay makes a lasting impact. Now, let’s define how to write this part of your work in detail.

The first and most important rule for writing a conclusion is to summarize the information from your paper without introducing any new data. Providing new information will only make your readers confused and destroy the effect your essay has on them. So, keep this tip in mind.

Also, when writing a conclusion for your college essay, you should begin with a restatement of your thesis. This trick will logically link your conclusion to the intro.

If you are writing for a class, you can end your final clause with suggestions for further research. For students writing an admission paper, the best way to finish this essay is to emphasize how you plan to apply your leadership skills discussed in the paper to your education, future career, and community in general.

Leadership Essays Examples: Ideas and Topics

Unless you are provided with a specific prompt, question, or topic that you need to address in your essay, you will have to generate ideas for your work on your own. This can feel rather overwhelming. So, let us give you a few thoughts on what you can write about in your paper.

If you are writing an admission essay, the best way to handle it is to tell a story about your own leadership skills. There are a few ways to do this. For example, you can talk about:

• A specific challenge that you faced, overcoming which required you to demonstrate your leadership abilities;
• Your leadership style and, if applicable, how it was shaping and changing throughout your life;
• What, in your opinion, makes an effective leader, and how you relate to the qualities and personal traits you provide;
• How your own leadership skills can be used to make a positive change in your community or the world in general, etc.

If you are writing a paper for a class, the choice of ideas can be even more extensive. Depending on the type of your paper, you can write about the great leaders from history, business, or other areas. Also, you can define and analyze different leadership skills, styles, theories, etc.

Winning Examples of Leadership Essay Titles to Consider

To help you get started with your paper, we compiled a list of good leadership topics that you can try for your essay:

Homework leadership essay topics

• The Difference Between Ethical and Unethical Leadership
• Leadership Throughout History
• The Role of Gender in Leadership
• An Evaluation of the Key Leadership Styles
• Theories of Leadership
• The Key Differences Between Autocratic and Democratic Leadership Styles
• The Most Common Myths About Leadership
• The Role of Leadership in Organizations
• Different Styles of Leadership Adapted to Cultural Differences
• The Role of Leadership in the Political Landscape
• The Key Leadership Skills and How to Develop Them
• The Roles of Ethics and Emotional Intelligence in Effective Leadership
• Female and Male Leadership: Compare and Contrast
• The Core Challenges of Leadership

Admission essay leadership topics

• What Makes Me a Great Leader?
• My Personal Model of Leadership
• Changing My Leadership Style
• A Challenge I Had to Overcome That Made Me a Leader
• My Personal Leadership Role Model
• How Can I Change the World With My Leadership Skills
• The Most Valuable Leadership Experience I Had in My Life and How It Changed Me

Now that you have some general topic samples, let’s look at the complete essay example to help you find inspiration.

The Concept of Leadership: Common Styles and Qualities of a Good Leader

Introduction.

“Great leaders are not defined by the absence of weakness, but rather by the presence of clear strengths.” ‒ John Peter Zenger. Leaders motivate, inspire, and guide others to greater achievements. They foster innovation, communication, and progress in every landscape. But what exactly does it mean to be a great leader? From Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln to Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher ‒ these exceptional leaders have been shaping the history of humanity for many years. They all had different styles of leadership, values, and vision. Yet, they also had a lot in common. Regardless of the type and style of leadership one chooses, it’s personal skills and traits that make a true leader.

What Are the Main Leadership Styles?

It’s possible to define over ten different styles of leadership. These styles have been shaping and changing throughout history, affected by a variety of factors, including the overall structure of the world and the mood of society. In the 21st century, one of the most widespread types of leadership styles is democratic leadership. This style implies that the decision-making power is never concentrated in one person’s hands. Instead, all subordinates of the leader with this style are given a voice in the process of making decisions. Yet, the responsibility for the actions of the entire group is still on the leader. Throughout decades, this form of leadership has been considered one of the most effective and humane ones. No wonder so many impressive leaders in history relied on it, including Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi, Barack Obama, and many others. Due to its nature, the key characteristics of a good leader with this style include teamwork, empathy, and a fair mind.

An opposite of the democratic style is autocratic Leadership. This style implies that the entire control, command, and power are concentrated in the hands of a leader. In this setting, the leader makes all decisions on their own, without giving their subordinates much room for negotiation or objections. And the responsibility is also fully on the leader. Due to its somewhat tyrannic nature, this style of leadership has a lot of detractors, especially in the modern world. Nevertheless, it still has some adherents. Some of the most famous leaders who used this style and believed in its effectiveness include Queen Elizabeth I, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, and others.

Apart from democratic and autocratic, there are also many other leadership styles, including transformational, team, visionary, strategic, and other types of leadership. Each of them has certain pros and cons. And each has its own adherents and detractors. Yet, in broader terms, it’s not a leadership style that determines a good leader but their qualities and the way they use their styles.

Top Qualities of a Good Leader

Regardless of the leveraged style of leadership, a good leader is determined by a set of personal traits, qualities, and skills. A good leader must be self-aware, resilient, accountable, and confident. Most importantly, they must possess such qualities as empathy and emotional intelligence. After all, a leader must motivate and inspire people to follow them, which is impossible without these two skills.

As for important leadership skills, they include decision-making, critical thinking, and problem-solving. Yet, the two essential skills are active listening and communication.

How to Start a Leadership Essay for College?

How to write a leadership essay step by step, what skill makes a good leader.

Leaders come in many shapes and kinds. Some of them are in-born, whereas others overcome a long and thorny path of self-exploration and development. They also use a variety of leadership styles, such as democratic, autocratic, and others. Yet, if you have to describe a good leader, it’s their qualities and skills that matter the most.

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A Blue Print for the best Leadership Essay

Leadership encompasses a variety of tenets. It includes leadership approaches or styles, leadership development, types of leadership, leadership principles, leadership values, and leadership theories. These are but a few concepts that any college student must be acquainted with to be able to complete an essay on leadership.

As complex as writing a leadership essay sounds, it is simple when you know how to write an essay about leadership. You must begin by understanding who a leader is and the entire concept of leadership.

When writing an essay about a leader, it is akin to writing a profile essay about a certain leader or yourself. Leadership essays for college require a special type of keenness. While there are many scholarly sources you can use, it takes expertise to knit together a great leadership essay introduction.

This guide helps you write the ?what is leadership? essay effectively. It also enables you to write the best nature of leadership essay. If you are stuck with choosing leadership essay topics, our guide has over 89 essay topics on leadership and ideas that you can use to brainstorm. From today on, write the best leadership essay conclusion. And if it is a leadership essay for a scholarship, admission, or personal statement, we have experts that can help. We also have proofreading and editing professionals to help edit and proofread your leadership thesis and dissertation.

Read on and see what we have for you.

What is a Leadership Essay?

A leadership essay is somewhat a unique assignment assigned to college and university students. It can be part of the admission or scholarship essays or part of the coursework. Naturally, it is an assignment assigned to students pursuing different courses such as business, management, human resource, organizational behavior, economics, psychology, or political science, among others. A leadership essay encompasses exploration:

• The concept of leadership
• Nature of leadership
• Stories on prominent leaders
• Leadership traits and qualities
• The link between leadership and development, success, performance, and improvement
• Leadership abilities
• Facts and events of an individual?s leadership experience

To write a good leadership paper, a student must begin by reading the essay prompt and the rubric. A student should then think critically and logically on what to include in their paper. Like other exceptional essays, a good essay on leadership must have credible facts from scholarly sources. The instructor/professor is always testing for your evaluation, assessment, analytical, and presentation skills.

Tips when Writing Leadership Essays for College

Creating a perfect leadership essay is easy when you follow these predetermined success-assured steps.

1. Choose a leadership Topic that interests you

When assigning leadership essays, most professors and instructors alike give prompts with a list of topics to choose from. Go for topics that impress you and ones that you can find great information from books, journals, credible websites, and other scholarly sources.

2. Research Online and Get enough insights

After selecting a particular topic, ensure that you go a step higher to conduct research online. Gather as much information from the available literature as possible. The research process, when writing leadership essays, helps in generating ideas for the introduction, body, and conclusion of the essay. It also helps define the scope of your essay and come up with a thesis.

3. Create an excellent thesis statement

Your thesis statement in your essay on leadership should reflect the outlook of the entire essay. Format it to feature your major argument in an intelligent and reasoned way. An excellent thesis statement defines a good essay any day.

4. Draft the Leadership Essay Outline

Every great essay begins with an outline. Creating an outline for your leadership essay helps you draft a blueprint for the entire essay. Outline what will go to the introduction, the thesis statement, and the background information.

5. Write your First Draft

With the arguments reflected on the outline, you can choose to use any format for the body paragraphs. A common approach is to use the PEEL writing strategy for coherence in your paragraphs. You can also use the Schaffer strategy. The choice is yours. Above all, ensure that facts from scholarly sources are cited in-text in MLA, APA, Harvard, or Chicago formats.

6. Edit, Proofread and Revise your Essay

After writing your essay, it is always great to edit and proofread. If you have no confidence in your leadership essay, you can hire someone to edit your leadership essays . If you are an MBA student, we can help you correct mistakes on your paper. Always submit a paper you are confident will pass Turnitin and get you great grades.

How to Begin a Leadership Paper - The Introduction

You are probably reading this because the question of ?how do I start my leadership essay?? is bothering you. Well, even though the question seems ambiguous, we have an answer for you right here.

Every great leadership essay has an excellent introduction. Your introduction should be well-written to the extent that it grabs the attention of the reader and entices them to stay through the end. Ideally, the introduction sets the mood of the entire paper.

As with other types of essays, a leadership essay can commence with a great essay hook or a grabber . It could be an anecdote, a statistic, quote, phrase, or a catchy word.

The hook should be preceded by a few sentences that act as the background to your essay. The aim of the background sentences, in the introduction, is to set the context of the essay.

The background is then followed by an excellent thesis statement . The thesis statement gives a sneak peek into your essay in a snapshot. It can either be one or two last sentences in the introduction. The thesis differs depending on whether the essay is descriptive, classification, narrative, argumentative, or persuasive essay.

If you follow these steps, you will write an outstanding essay on leadership. Make it count right from the beginning.

How to Ace a Leadership Experience Essay

When writing application essays, scholarship essays, or school transfer essays, you can be asked to write an essay about your leadership experience. It is always imperative to make your essay as unique as the Costco application essay. Here are some tips to use when writing your leadership essay:

• Begin by reading the leadership experience essay prompt to understand exactly what you are being asked to write about.
• Come up with an excellent essay hook for your essay. It could be an anecdote, a quote from a great leader, a simple statistic, or an observation?.
• Write the thesis of your leadership experience essay, which should cover the gist of the entire essay.
• Write the introduction of the essay as though it is to be published among the best sellers.
• Make sure each of the paragraphs outlines your leadership experiences. Each of the paragraphs should have leadership experience, illustrations, and examples.
• Keep the flow within the paper by using appropriate transitions.
• Avoid using jargon in your leadership essays. In most cases, simplicity wins the day, and after all, a successful leader expresses themselves in just a few words.
• If there are references used, be sure to cite the essay in APA, MLA, Harvard, or Chicago.
• Make the conclusion count. Restate the thesis and write a summary of the entire paper.
• Most leadership essays can be anything between 150 words to 2000 words. Depending on the essay prompt, always be sure to meet the word count.

Remember, if the leadership experience essay is a scholarship essay, personal statement, statement of purpose, or an admission essay, it should be written in the first person. Otherwise, you must stick to the third person, which is a preference in academic writing.

Leadership Essay Topics and Ideas you can choose for your Paper

Are you wondering about the best leadership essay topics? We have your back on this. Here are some essay topics on leadership to kick start your topic choice process. We answer the question of ?what are some essay topics on leadership??

• The ability of women in leadership to successfully steer progress and success in organizations.
• Role of leaders in the community
• Charismatic, transformational, and transactional leadership
• Characteristics of a good leader
• Features of supportive leadership
• Leadership and Power
• Women in leadership
• Breaking the glass ceiling
• Role of ethics in leadership
• Gender differences in leadership
• Importance of team leadership in virtual teams
• Role of leaders in group formation
• How leadership brings diversity in an organization
• Corruption among public leaders
• Are leaders made or born?
• Can situations define a leader?
• Leadership succession and its importance in organizations
• Do you consider yourself to be a leader or a follower?
• An example of a 21 st -century exemplary leader
• Challenges leaders face
• Importance of listening for leaders
• Are transformational leaders better than transactional leaders?
• How to improve leadership skills
• Great leaders should be great communicators
• Who do you look up to as a leader?
• Importance of self-confidence among leaders
• Which leader do you admire? Please write a letter to of gratitude for their influence on your life
• The importance of leadership in schools
• Historical leaders
• Think of a leader you admire and list three of the qualities that make him or her a good leader. Which quality do you share with him or her? Which quality could you improve upon?
• How can you improve your own leadership skills?
• Role of military leadership
• Do entrepreneurs need to be leaders?
• An integrative theory of leadership
• The impacts of national culture on corporate and public leadership
• Leadership and organizational development
• How leadership affects the morale of employees
• Does leadership competence define the organization of choice for employees
• The link between leadership and organizational citizenship behavior
• Leadership and organizational loyalty
• Variation of leadership behavior depending on the culture
• Leadership processes and self-identity of followers
• Leadership style and organizational commitment
• The prospective of future leadership
• Role of strategic leadership
• The Influence of democratic leadership on Employee performance: A case in Saudi Public Sector
• Business leadership and culture
• The normative approach to business leadership
• Comparative analysis of the world?s greatest military leaders
• Understanding combat leadership
• Role of military leaders in strategy and policy implementation
• Meyers Briggs Type Indicator best for military leadership
• Understanding the art of command in military leadership
• How school leadership works
• Does the leadership styles of a school principle define the success of a school?
• Are collaborative school leaders successful?
• The role of power, culture, and people in educational leadership
• Leadership and policy implementation
• Leadership style of educators
• School leadership in the 21 st century
• Teacher leadership for professional resilience
• Qualities of exceptional school leaders
• How professional school leaders deal with dilemmas
• Leadership and the glass ceiling
• The performance of indigenous communities in political leadership
• Sustainable environmental leadership
• Corporate leadership
• The psychology of leadership
• African-American women executives and organizational leadership
• Ethics as the heart of leadership
• Servant leadership
• Leadership challenges in virtual teams
• Leadership development and growth
• Evolving human resource practices in succession planning
• Contemporary issues of leadership
• Leadership investment
• Importance of leadership for nurses
• Are leadership traits inherent, or can people be molded into good leaders?
• Are meetings the only effective way for sound leaders to disseminate information?
• Compare and contrast the effectiveness of dictatorial and servant leadership
• Explore the church leadership approach
• The foundation of biblical leadership
• Compare business and political leadership
• The bureaucratic structure of government and their impact on leadership in the public domain
• Best leadership styles for diverse teams
• Impacts of technology and social media on the leadership style of millennial leaders
• Compare and contrast formal and informal leaders
• The leadership philosophy of great leaders
• Critical analysis of leadership styles and organizational culture that enables the implementation of a proposed local project of advancing the Nursing practice

Contact us for the best topics and help with your MBA leadership essays or essays for school on leadership. Our professional essay writers can always help.

Top 30 Leadership Qualities to Include in a Leadership Essay

As a student undertaking a leadership course, completing an essay, term paper, or a research paper on leadership is mandatory. When asked to write an essay on leadership, it would be best if you used some of the leadership traits.

The common traits include

• Transparency
• Conscientious
• Excellent communication
• Decision-Making Skills
• Problem-solving capacity
• Accountability and responsibility
• Delegation and empowerment
• Emotional intelligence
• Creativity and innovation
• Decisiveness
• Unselfishness
• Dependability

These are some of the powerful traits of successful leaders . Of course, there are many other traits that you can research and include in your leadership essays. Effective leaders need to be very tactical when influencing their followers. They need to foster teamwork where necessary and use their wisdom to solve conflicts among the followers. It is great to have empathy or fit in the shoes of a leader when writing your leadership essay. Sometimes, even as simple as a biography essay, a leadership essay needs to be well-organized such that there is flow and a good explanation of the traits is inevitable.

Help with Writing Leadership Essay for College

You might have read the entire article but still cannot comprehend how to write a leadership essay. It is always time to get a great leadership essay sample to understand how one is written. If, even with the leadership essay example, you cannot write the essay, you need help.

Related Reading: Descriptive essay writing process and topics .

Luckily, we have writers for hire who write various types of essays on leadership. The leadership essays we can help with include: narrative, how-to, compare and contrast, classification, exemplification, descriptive, persuasive, argumentative, and reflection essays on leadership.

You can pay our paper writers to write the best leadership essays for school. If you are doing an MBA leadership essay, you can always consult with our writers for the best insights and advice.

Even with this ultimate guide for writing a leadership, things can get thick. Getting help with writing college essays is not illegal. Get a great homework helper or an assignment helper from our website to help you write a custom leadership essay, today!

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Sample Leadership Admission Essays You Can Follow to Write Better

74 samples of this type

Do you need to prepare a leadership essays for college application but don't know how to tackle this task? Unlike a personal statement, which mostly focuses on an applicant's personal experience, an admission essay (otherwise called an application essay) commonly has a limit of 650 words and should respond to one of the pre-defined essay prompts. This means that you'll need to compose a relatively short, apt piece that reflects on your skills, reveals your writing mastery, and helps you stand out from a crowd of other applicants. Sounds like a bewildering task? Don't worry!

Here at WowEssays.com, we've created an extensive directory that compiles thousands of the most versatile free essays, including excellent college application essay samples about leadership. Having looked through this selection, you'll be able to pick some creative ideas and decide on the future topic of your own work. Besides, using one or several such pieces as a prompt will let you develop a comprehensive outline of your future essay.

Got no time to learn by the essay examples and wish to ensure your academic success? In such a case, you can count on professional help from our writing service. Upon your request, our experienced writing masters will tailor an impeccable leadership application essay example that will take you one step closer to the start of the desired leadership program training.

Free Admission Essay About Global Awareness

Good business administration admission essay example.

Values are the master players in most business decisions made. For example, value is one of the factors influencing consumer’s purchasing decisions. An organization reaches strategic decisions based on the organization’s values. Lastly, an individual takes decisions based on his personal values. What distinguishes personal values from social values?

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Free Admission Essay On The Most Significant Accomplishment

Every time I reflect on the words of E. E. Cummings, I realize that I have been on the same career development in my whole life. Cummings indicates that “To be nobody but yourself, in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting”. These words reflect the story of my life in curriculum and career development.

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I have been taught since my childhood that it is extremely important to be a team-player, irrespective of the roles and responsibilities. There is a proverb ‘A problem shared is a problem halved; indeed, when a person is working in a team, he is destined to reach success much faster, rather than working on his/ her own. Even though I am a leader inside, as I always set myself clear targets and manage to reach them, I have tries both roles – a leader and a member.

My Dream of Being an Engineer Admission Essay

Through the mentorship of my high school physics teacher, I developed a scintillating desire to become an Engineer. He realized my aptitude in understanding the working mechanisms of various physics components during practical sessions and embarked on a mission of making me realize my potential. This, he told me, was only possible if I realized that I had a promising future in a career that involves the application of physics knowledge. It was not long before his efforts fructified and it was a matter of time before i topped the physics class. I had eventually realized my potential.

Why Do You Wanna Attend Admission Essay

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My mentor used to say to me: My son, life is precious, live it to the fullest; however, always make sure every decision you make is worth it. A small mistake can ruin your entire life. Although his words were precious to my ears, I was naïve and I did not think of their importance until a certain decision almost changed my life completely. My mentor passed on at the age of fifty three when I was in my third grade. Every time I remember of him, his words always come back to me.

Leadership Abilities: Admission Essay You Might Want To Emulate

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In what industry, role and where (companies, locations) do you see yourself working immediately after graduation from London Business School? What motivates you to join this industry and how will your academic, professional, and personal experiences help you achieve this career goal? What is your alternate career plan? How will the Masters in Management contribute to your personal and professional development and why is this the right time for you to pursue this degree?

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An issue of great importance to me is how media and its current portrayal of teenagers affects them. Issues like alcohol consumption, drug use, bullying, teenage pregnancy, violence, gangs, etc. are frequently shown on the airwaves, and often even on programs aimed at teenagers. Frequently, it even seems to be glamorized (as in many video games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series). This leads to a perception of these behaviors as “normal” and abstaining from them, by default, “abnormal”. This leads to peer pressure and pressure from society for teenagers (and others) to partake in such activities.

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Tips for an Effective MBA Essay on Leadership

Do you want to get admitted into your dream business school? Doing so requires a good deal of forward thinking, especially when it comes to crafting a winning MBA essay on leadership. While there’s no miracle formula that guarantees acceptance, applying the right tips and tricks can give you an edge and make your application stands out from the rest.

If you’re wracking your brain for creative angles and insights about what makes great leaders tick, don’t worry – we’ve got some amazing advice that will help boost your chances of submitting the best possible leadership essay!

What is leadership and why is it so important in the MBA application process?

Leadership is an important quality to possess, especially when it comes to the MBA application process. Leadership is generally understood as the ability to motivate and guide a group of people towards a shared outcome or goal. Strong leadership skills are essential for any business professional because they demonstrate that you have the energy, confidence and organizational skills necessary to be successful in a managerial role.

In the MBA application process , admission committees look for applicants who have established leadership credentials through their academic and professional accomplishments, extracurricular involvement, community service and entrepreneurial activities. They also consider how applicants interact with peers during interviews and assess their communication, problem-solving and decision-making abilities. These qualities can be demonstrated through examples of leading teams in any context: professional, academic, extracurricular activities, community or volunteer work.

The size of the project or team doesn’t matter as much as your commitment to taking initiative and driving progress. The committee is interested in seeing how you have handled obstacles and challenges and worked towards positive outcomes. They want to see that you have actively sought out leadership roles and taken on responsibility for your success, no matter how small or large the project was. Ultimately, MBA admissions committees are looking for evidence that you are a leader who is capable of bringing vision, energy, and innovation to your studies and future career.

Here are a few tips to highlight your leadership skills in your MBA essays:

Prepare Ahead of Time

Starting early is important when it comes to writing an MBA essay on leadership that effectively presents your skills and experiences in a unique and compelling way. The earlier you begin the process, the more time you have to brainstorm ideas, research topics, edit drafts, and perfect your essay. In addition to having plenty of time to craft an exceptional essay, starting early allows for ample feedback from peers or mentors who could help identify any areas of improvement or provide additional insight into how best to highlight relevant experiences. By beginning the MBA essay-writing process early on, you can get an edge over other applicants by ensuring your application stands out for its originality and quality. This will not only make your application stronger but will also create a lasting impression on admissions readers—something that could make the difference between getting accepted and being rejected .

Showcase Your Vulnerability

It’s often easy to think of leaders as untouchable, all-knowing beings who possess all the answers. To effectively demonstrate leadership in your MBA essays , start by showcasing your vulnerability. Admissions teams are looking for individuals who can lead by example and inspire others to follow their lead. Therefore, it’s crucial to show that you’re human, just like everyone else.

This involves acknowledging personal weaknesses and mistakes that you have experienced in the past, as well as demonstrating how those experiences have shaped your ability to lead with confidence and humility. Additionally, talking about any moments of self-reflection or growth when it comes to developing your leadership skills is a great way to demonstrate vulnerability. Don’t be afraid to talk openly and honestly about the challenges you’ve faced while attempting to develop yourself into a better leader; such stories will show admissions officers that you are not afraid to take risks and that you’re willing to accept constructive criticism.

Lastly, make sure to emphasize how these lessons have informed your current leadership style so that it’s clear you have come a long way since the moments of vulnerability. Doing so will show that you are confident and resilient in the face of any leadership challenges you may encounter in the future.

Emphasize On Your Strengths

When writing your MBA essays , focus on your strengths as they directly align with leadership. Enumerate how you have applied these strengths in your professional or personal life, and how you plan on utilizing them in your MBA program and beyond.

You should focus on the ways in which you have effectively managed teams or projects in the past, how you have demonstrated a capacity for creative problem-solving, and how you have successfully communicated with colleagues and stakeholders. Examples of such strengths could include motivating those around you to strive for excellence, inspiring others to work collaboratively towards a common goal, or making sound decisions quickly under pressure. Additionally, when discussing your achievements be sure to provide specific details rather than generalizations as this will help create a stronger case for your candidacy.

Demonstrate Selflessness

To stand out, showcase your willingness to serve those around you, rather than solely focusing on your achievements. Leaders who are selfless are often given the most significant tasks and responsibilities. Highlight your contributions to your workplace or the community at large, and how your actions helped those around you. Additionally, highlight how you seek out the opinions of those you lead in decision-making processes.

For example, you can highlight how you took initiative in organizing volunteer activities or encouraged a team to work together towards shared goals despite personal sacrifices. Other examples may include how you used your expertise and resources to help those less fortunate than you and how you were able to generate enthusiasm within a team even when faced with great challenges.

In addition to showcasing tangible examples of selfless leadership, your should also be sure to explain why you chose to act in a selfless manner. By writing about your motivation and thought process, you can better illustrate the depth of your character and commitment to serve others.

Make your essays thoroughly engaging

Writing MBA essays can be challenging as they can seem lengthy and uninteresting. To capture the attention of your reader and avoid rejection, it’s important to make your essays engaging and unique. One way to achieve this is by using wit and humour while remaining relevant and professional.

To make an MBA essay on leadership truly engaging, it is also important to focus on developing a well-structured argument that carefully considers both the practicalities and theory of leadership. Begin by outlining your main position regarding leadership, then use evidence from personal experience as well as examples from notable leaders in history to back up your arguments. Make sure to utilize data and research whenever possible, as well as provide clear explanations for why you believe your specific approach is effective.

Finally, don’t forget to include relevant anecdotes or stories that illustrate how the ideas discussed can be applied in real-world situations. By taking this comprehensive approach when writing MBA essays on leadership, readers will find them far more engaging and interesting than if they were simply a list of facts.

Another great way for your essays to be engaging is to avoid rambling and stay on course.You can achieve this by using the STAR method. The STAR acronym stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result; each word representing an aspect of a successful application essay. By considering these four components together when crafting essays, you can create an impactful narrative that highlights your individual accomplishments in a cohesive manner.

The Situation component describes the context and circumstances surrounding the accomplishment or experience being discussed in the essay; this includes when and where it occurred.

The Task outlines what was expected from you in regards to the situation at hand; here you explain what obstacles had to be overcome to reach success.

The Action portion details how you went about completing the task – including any strategies adopted – to reach the desired result.

Lastly, the Result part of the STAR method is where your write about what was achieved and you demonstrate why it was a success.

By following this format, you can effectively highlight your achievements while also exhibiting strong storytelling skills that will help set you apart from other candidates. Ultimately, utilizing the STAR method when crafting an essay ensures that both admissions officers receive a comprehensive overview of an your capabilities as well as how you approach difficult challenges in your work environment.

Show your leadership values

Leadership is more than just power and authority. It’s also about possessing crucial values like integrity, empathy, and accountability. In your MBA essay on leadership, showcase how you incorporate these values into your leadership style. For instance, share stories about times when you took initiative by initiating projects or solving problems. Talk about instances where you displayed strong communication skills in order to effectively collaborate with others. Showcase any moments where you demonstrated resilience while overcoming difficult challenges or tasks. All of these examples will help emphasize your leadership capacity and prove that you are prepared to take on the demands of an MBA program. By effectively conveying your leadership values and qualities, you can make a strong case for yourself as an ideal candidate for admissions.

Additionally, providing examples of how you have led in past experiences can also be beneficial to demonstrate your commitment to becoming a better leader. Talk about any opportunities or initiatives that you took part in that helped build up your skills such as joining student organizations, attending seminars and conferences, or participating in team projects. These activities help showcase your drive and capability to continue learning and growing which makes for an even more compelling essay.

Highlight your unique leadership style

Every person is different; similarly, every leader has a distinct style that suits them. Highlighting your leadership style in your MBA essay will show the admission committee how you differ from other applicants and your potential as a future leader. This can be done by discussing specific examples of occasions when you have demonstrated leadership qualities such as taking initiative in a difficult situation, demonstrating creativity and problem-solving skills, or displaying strong communication and interpersonal skills. You may also want to discuss how you have learned from mistakes or challenges which were difficult for you at first, but that you overcame successfully. Doing so will help demonstrate that you are self-aware and reflective about your own strengths and weaknesses as a leader. Highlighting these moments in your essay will give admissions officers a better understanding of the type of leader you are and how well you will fit into their program.

Show how you plan to grow as a leader

Your MBA program is an opportunity for you to grow into a better leader. So, use your MBA essay to show the admission committee how you plan to take your leadership skills to the next level. You can talk about the specific skills you want to learn or the challenges you want to take on in the program. This will demonstrate your eagerness to grow and be a standout leader in your field.

Examples of ways to demonstrate this could include discussing how taking courses related to leadership will help expand your knowledge and understanding of the topic, or how participating in professional development activities such as conferences and seminars can help hone existing abilities and develop new ones.

Additionally, showcasing examples from past experiences of when you have successfully navigated difficult situations by demonstrating strong leadership qualities can be a powerful way to demonstrate your commitment to improving yourself. These types of anecdotes provide a tangible example of the kind of growth you are willing to pursue and provide an opportunity for the admissions committee to envision you as a successful leader in the future.

By demonstrating your desire and ability to grow, you can show that you are serious about developing yourself as a leader and will be ready to take on any challenges that may come with it once enrolled in an MBA program.

Demonstrating your leadership skills effectively in your MBA essay on leadership is a must to stand out from other applicants. It’s not just about displaying how great or impressive you are, but rather how you can lead and add value to the MBA program and the business world. When you focus on your individual power and potential, your story can be empowering and engaging. Your journey has its own value, so share it when you are writing about leadership. Believe in yourself and have confidence in the story you want to tell. Make a memorable essay that showcases your leadership abilities and sets you apart from others. If you need further help with crafting your MBA essay, don’t forget to check out our MBA essay services . We’ll make sure your application essays show off the very best of who you are – taking your application to the next level! Got questions about the application process or would like to get a quick assessement of your existing draft? Sign up for a consultation or send us your draft for a free assessment, it’s FREE!

With a Master’s from McGill University and a Ph.D. from New York University, Philippe Barr is the founder of The Admit Lab . As a tenure-track professor, Philippe spent a decade teaching and serving on several graduate admission committees at UNC-Chapel Hill before turning to full-time consulting. With more than seven years of experience as a graduate school admissions consultant, Philippe has stewarded the candidate journey across multiple master’s and Ph.D. programs and helped hundreds of students get admitted to top-tier graduate programs all over the world .

Follow me on Instagram and TikTok for tips and tricks on navigating the grad school application process and weekly live Q&A sessions!

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Medical School Leadership Essay: Complete Guide

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One of the most challenging parts of the application process for many candidates is composing the leadership essay. They find it difficult to define what leadership is. 

Saying you have "strong leadership skills" is simple, but what does that entail? 

Does that imply you guided a 400-person team toward impossible, lofty objectives? 

Does that mean your chances of demonstrating leadership are zero if you have yet to do that? 

No, definitely not.

It is possible to be a leader in any capacity. However, finding or analyzing one's leadership experiences is not always straightforward. 

Still, it is crucial to ace this essay and convince the admissions committee that you are a determined, goal-oriented leader.

This article will guide you through composing your leadership essay. We have gathered the best tips and sample leadership essays to make it easier.

What is a Leadership Essay for Medical School?

Leadership is an essential skill needed in medical school. Moreover, effective leadership is critical for the healthcare industry to execute reforms and change its corporate culture. 

It is because the current state of the American healthcare system is plagued by several issues, such as rising healthcare expenses, unequal access to care, and racial discrimination in medical practice. 

Hence, you must ensure that when you compose your leadership essay for medical school, the admissions committee will know you are ready to take the challenge. 

Consider Paul Farmer , Vivek Murthy , and Atul Gawande as physicians who have sparked change. These physicians are leaders in their fields and have influenced structural change in particular branches of medicine, whether through study, writing, or policy. 

Like the physicians mentioned above, medical institutions seek out students who are willing to put forth an effort to address issues.

Tips for Writing Medical School Leadership Essays

Your medical school secondary essays will flood your inbox once you hit submit on your primary medical school application . 

If you apply to more schools, you will undoubtedly increase your chances of being accepted somewhere. Still, there is a catch: you will proportionally receive excessive secondaries.

How can you maximize your success when 75+ essays fall into your lap simultaneously? 

Keeping in mind that you should apply to 25–30 schools to be on the safe side and that each program has anywhere from one to nine secondary prompts, the question is: how can you?

We have listed some tips for writing secondary essays for medical school to help you get through the writing process.

Plan Your Time Accordingly

You might wonder how long the application process takes before you compose leadership essays for medical school. 

Your medical school secondary essays will trickle in throughout the summer after you submit your primary, usually starting at the end of June.

You will quickly experience writing fatigue because most medical schools automatically send secondaries back to every primary that has been finished. Therefore, your secondary timetable should be carefully thought out. 

Schools will assume you do not care about your essays if you take too long to send them. 

If you send them in a day but do not take the time to proofread them for grammar and other issues, you will come across as a careless applicant.

Think the Way an Admission Committee Would

Professors and students make up a large portion of admissions panels. They will also read countless leadership essays for medical education. 

Reading applications after application, 75% of which sound the same, will make them incredibly bored.

They will undoubtedly have glazed eyes. With your beginning and introduction, in particular, you need to catch their interest. You definitely do not want your reader to yawn straight away! 

Keep your vocabulary straightforward and your grammatical construction simple throughout your answers.

Avoid Reiterating Yourself

Your AMCAS application is already on file with the selection committee. You will benefit from repetition when composing leadership essays for medical school. 

Admissions officers will become tired and unimpressed if you restate what you said in the personal statement with your secondaries.

You must instead present new knowledge. That does not mean you cannot discuss the same experiences or activities; you most definitely can. However, it implies that you must examine each event differently.

Answer the Prompt Clearly

Too many students when writing leadership essays for medical school, too many students get caught up in what they want to say and fail to answer the question. As a result, similar topics for many essays will have minor variations. 

Ensure you respond to each query even though they are essentially asking the same thing.

Before beginning to write, underline each keyword and sentence. 

When writing your leadership essays, be aware of the questions the school is asking, and structure your essay appropriately. Then, make sure your response directly addresses the query and avoids any major detours.

Do Not Forget to Edit and Proofread

You will grow weary of writing once you have gone through many prompts for each of your institutions. 

The temptation, however, to send the first draft should be resisted. Your chances of obtaining an interview may depend on how well your leadership essays are written.

So, if you require a pause, do so. After that, go back and look over the work for any mistakes. 

Your word processor might have missed a grammatical or spelling mistake that you made. For example, it is possible that you wrote the name of one institution by mistake rather than the other. 

You are human, so errors like this can occur. However, if the admissions committee sees them, you will appear to lack professionalism. So do your best to edit.

Enter your text here...

Leadership Essay Sample Prompts 

Writing a leadership essay can be nerve-wracking. You have to impress the admissions committee while being humble at the same time.

 Hence, it would help if you put a lot of thought into developing a brilliant essay. 

To get you started, here are a few leadership essays prompts that you may encounter during your medical school application:

• How can a good leader improve the healthcare system in your country?
• What are your unique leadership skills? How will you apply it in medical school?
• What are the characteristics of a good leader and follower? Which among these qualities do you have and not have? How can you improve?
• Leadership, Curiosity, and Commitment are the three pillars of our program. Describe how you have exhibited one or more of these qualities on your journey to becoming a doctor. Which categories offer the most tremendous potential for personal development, and why?

Sample Medical School Leadership Essays

Your leadership essay plays a crucial role in your medical school application. Remember that you are competing against hundreds of candidates and must find a way to stand out.

Here are a few model leadership essays you could get ideas for your reference.

Leadership Essay for Medical School Sample 1:

I was chosen to serve as the executive director of BerkeleyShelter. During my second year of college, this undergraduate volunteer group runs a shelter for students facing homelessness. The following year, I established HealthGroup, a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding access to reasonably priced medications for people with chronic illnesses. My perception of what it means to be a leader has started to shift due to these activities. 

By creating legislation, collaborating with elected officials, and launching campaigns to increase public knowledge of the problems related to medication prices, HealthGroup attempted to effect change. As the company's creator, I took it upon myself to develop a strategy that other employees and members could adhere to. I believed that as a boss, I was responsible for overseeing the organization's operations. 

However, HealthGroup found it challenging to make any noticeable difference in the cost of prescribed drugs. There were too many barriers brought on by pre-existing issues with the American healthcare system. In reality, not much had altered a year after HealthGroups was founded. So, naturally, I didn't expect the healthcare system to be fixed immediately. Still, I didn't anticipate my efforts to have been so ineffective. 

Before my final year of college, I started considering what I could do as the organization's leader to alter HealthGroup. I realized that I hadn't allowed others to express their opinions; instead, I had presumed that I needed to lead the group by myself. Maybe my role as a leader was to foster an environment where others would voice their opinions rather than to determine the organization's course on my own.

Leadership Essay for Medical School Sample 2:Enter your text here...

"Laura needs the ball, please!" "Okay, keep moving forward; don't let her grab the ball!" "You can outrun her by moving your thighs and putting more effort into running." 

My soccer friends frequently overheard these words during practice and during games. I've played soccer for my school for the past two years. I have forged strong relationships with my colleagues over the past two years and have observed that one of a leader's qualities is the capacity to inspire others. John Quincy Adams once said,  "You are a leader if your actions motivate others to dream bigger, learn more, do more, and become more."

I always wanted to be a leader in any circumstance as a young child. When my class was split into groups to work on projects, for instance, I wanted to be the leader—not bossy or overbearing, but rather to make sure my group produced the finest work. When we have group activities, my peers want me to be in charge because they know I'm smart and will push them until the task is completed.

I was a sophomore in college when I decided I wanted to play on an athletic squad. I knew I wouldn't be our top scorer as a rookie player, but I was confident the experience would be helpful. I stood at the sideline on my first day on the field and carefully observed each squad move.

Even though we worked together, I observed that we weren't playing as a team. We were missing a crucial component. After days of research, I concluded that motivation and unity were the keys to building a stronger team. I inspired my peers to push themselves past their comfort zones during practice. After training, I made them run an additional lap or course for ten more minutes. Even though I occasionally annoyed them, they eventually realized how much my persistence had helped them.

I developed into a leader by inspiring my team members. Leadership capacity is more important than subject-matter expertise for someone to be a good leader. Although I didn't have the best performance or the most goals scored on the squad, I did help the team as a whole. We played as individuals at the start of the season but as a team toward the finish. 

Because I'm always willing to assist others, my leadership abilities and experiences in soccer and the classroom have helped me improve. I need to be able to do that if I want to become an excellent orthodontist. I have acquired it and proven it throughout my existence. I'll keep leading by example and pushing others and myself forward as I have so far.

Additional FAQs – Medical School Leadership Essay

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Essay on Leadership: Samples in 100, 200, 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Oct 7, 2023

The concept of leadership has been known to us since ancient times, from Ashoka: The Great to modern-day democratic leaders. Whether it’s politics or business, sports or entertainment, leadership is an essential part of human society, Leadership is the art of inspiring and guiding people towards a common goal. 

Critics might argue that being a leader is just about holding a prestigious position and living a fancy life. That might be 1 in 1000 cases, as leaders across the globe work for the welfare and development of their people and country. Below we have discussed some essays on leadership where the multifaceted roles of this position are highlighted. 

This Blog Includes:

Essay on leadership in 100 words, essay on leadership in 200 words, essay on leadership in 300 words.

Also Read – Essay on Summer Vacation

Leadership involves a set of qualities, values and actions, which are focused on the benefit of people and their country. A person holding the position of a leader plays a pivotal role in every facet of life, influencing the direction and success of organizations, communities, and nations. To become a leader, one must have a clear vision to understand a future state that is better than the present and communicate that vision to their team or followers.

A leader’s actions should be aligned with their words, and they must demonstrate their honesty, transparency and ethical behaviour. Trust is the foundation for any successful leadership, and it is built through consistent ethical conduct. 

Leadership is a complex and multifaceted concept and is an essential part of developing a society or organisation. Leadership can involve various positions and types, from democratic to autocratic, where the leaders inspire and empower their teams, fostering an environment where individuals can thrive and achieve their fullest potential.

Effective leadership involves skilled communicators to can convey ideas, expectations, and feedback clearly and persuasively. They also listen actively to their team’s input and concerns. A great leader empowers a team of professionals by entrusting them with responsibilities and decision-making authority. With the formation of delegates, the power of leadership is divided among different authorities who are responsible for fostering growth and development among team members, making the organization more robust.

Some of the fundamentals of leadership are authenticity, integrity, ethical behaviour, a clear vision and other vital traits. Trust is the bedrock of leadership, and it is built through honesty, transparency, and consistency in actions and decisions. A leader who understands and cares about the needs and concerns of their team fosters strong relationships, promoting collaboration and cohesion.

At last, leadership is more than a title; it’s the embodiment of vision, integrity, empathy, communication and resilience. Effective leaders work to bring positive changes, inspire people around them and create a sense of purpose and direction in their terms and organizations.

Also Read – Essay on Cricket

Leadership is a vital concept for the welfare of a society, community or country, depending on what the leadership is about. A leader transcends boundaries and is fundamental to human endeavours in various domains. Their job involves the ability to influence and guide a group of individuals toward achieving a common objective. Effective leadership is characterized by a combination of qualities, skills, and behaviours that inspire, motivate, and empower a team.

The first and most important aspect of a successful leader is having a clear vision. A clear vision works as a guiding light, outlining the desired future and providing a sense of purpose and direction for the team. Leaders with a compelling vision can inspire and rally their followers, creating a shared sense of purpose. 

The other cornerstone of leadership is integrity. Leaders must demonstrate honesty, transparency, and ethical behaviour. Trust, which is essential in any team or organization, is built on the foundation of integrity. When people believe that their leader acts with integrity, they are more likely to follow willingly and commit to the cause. 

Another trait that is essential for effective leadership is empathy. Leaders with empathy understand and connect with the emotions, needs, and perspectives of their team members. By showing compassion and actively listening, they create a supportive and inclusive environment that fosters trust and collaboration.

Apart from these traits, other important qualities for effective leadership include effective communication and interpersonal skills. A leader must be able to articulate their vision, goals, and expectations clearly and persuasively. 

In conclusion, leadership is a multifaceted concept that plays a pivotal role towards the positive growth and development of organizations, communities, and societies. Effective leaders inspire their teams, create a sense of purpose, and drive positive change. Leadership is not merely a position; it is a journey of personal growth and a commitment to serving the greater good.

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Some of the synonyms for a leader are: Coach, Captain, Principal, Chairman, Kingpin, Boss, CEO, etc.

What makes a good leader is their ability to persuade people using their effective communication skills, having a clear vision working towards the welfare of society, and taking responsibility for their actions.

Writing an essay on leadership in 200 words must include the fundamental aspects of leadership and the qualities they must possess. Effective leaders around the world create a supportive and inclusive environment where people can thrive and contribute their best efforts. They inspire a shared sense of purpose, foster collaboration, and guide their teams toward achieving collective goals.

For more information about such informative articles, visit our essay writing page and make sure to follow Leverage Edu .

Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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Home — Application Essay — National Universities — Women’s Leadership: My Journey and Aspirations

Women's Leadership: My Journey and Aspirations

• University: Wellesley College

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Words: 717 |

Published: Feb 15, 2024

Words: 717 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

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One particular leadership experience, in addition to my role on student council, at wellesley college, in addition to being involved in student organizations, as a woman leader, furthermore, i am passionate about mentorship, beyond campus, in conclusion.

I have had numerous opportunities to develop my leadership skills and exhibit them in various settings. From organizing school events to leading community service projects, I have always been driven to make a positive impact on those around me. These experiences have solidified my belief in the power of women's leadership and empowerment, and it is this belief that draws me to Wellesley College.

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that stands out to me is when I took on the role of president of my school's student council. This position required me to work closely with my fellow council members to plan and execute school-wide events. I had the opportunity to lead meetings, delegate tasks, and ensure that everyone's ideas were heard and considered. This experience taught me the importance of effective communication, collaboration, and decision-making in a team setting.

I have also been actively involved in my community. Last summer, I initiated a community service project where a group of students volunteered at a local nursing home. As the team leader, I was responsible for coordinating schedules, delegating tasks, and ensuring that everyone had a fulfilling experience. This project allowed me to not only develop my leadership skills but also to witness the impact that small acts of kindness can have on others.

I plan to further develop my leadership skills through involvement in various student organizations and clubs. Wellesley's emphasis on women's leadership is something that greatly resonates with me, and I believe that being surrounded by like-minded individuals will only enhance my growth as a leader. I am particularly interested in joining organizations such as the Women in Business club and the Women's Empowerment group, as they align with my personal values and aspirations.

I am eager to take advantage of the leadership development programs offered at Wellesley. These programs will provide me with the necessary tools and resources to further enhance my skills and understanding of effective leadership. I am particularly excited about the opportunity to participate in workshops and seminars that focus on women's leadership and empowerment. I believe that these experiences will not only help me grow as an individual but also enable me to make a positive impact on campus and beyond.

I aspire to make a lasting and meaningful impact on the Wellesley College community. One way I hope to achieve this is by promoting inclusivity and diversity on campus. I believe that every student's voice should be heard and valued, regardless of their background or identity. By actively engaging with students from different cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds, I hope to foster an inclusive environment where everyone feels welcome and appreciated.

and the power it holds in empowering others. As a woman leader, I understand the importance of supporting and inspiring those around me. I plan to seek out mentorship opportunities both within and outside of the college to guide and uplift younger students. By sharing my experiences and knowledge, I hope to encourage and motivate others to pursue their passions and achieve their goals.

I aspire to be a woman leader who advocates for positive change on a larger scale. I am passionate about social justice and equality, and I believe that women have a unique perspective and voice that needs to be heard. I plan to use my leadership skills to actively engage in conversations and initiatives that address societal issues such as gender inequality and discrimination. Whether it be through participating in activism, conducting research, or pursuing a future career in public service, I aim to contribute to the empowerment of women and the promotion of equal rights.

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, my leadership experiences and qualities have shaped me into a passionate advocate for women's leadership and empowerment. I am drawn to Wellesley College because of its emphasis on these values and its commitment to fostering women leaders. Through involvement in student organizations, participation in leadership development programs, and engaging with the Wellesley College community, I plan to further develop my leadership skills. I aspire to make a positive impact on campus and beyond by promoting inclusivity, engaging in mentorship, and advocating for positive change. As a woman leader, I believe that together we can create a more equitable and empowered society.

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Should College Essays Touch on Race? Some Feel the Affirmative Action Ruling Leaves Them No Choice

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When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action . The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

Wondering if schools ‘expect a sob story’

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford, and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. ... I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

A ruling prompts pivots on essay topics

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Ore., had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process . They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

Spelling out the impact of race

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black .

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

Will Schools lose racial diversity?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair . She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those, too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

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Guest Essay

Elite College Admissions Have Turned Students Into Brands

By Sarah Bernstein

Ms. Bernstein is a playwright, a writing coach and an essayist in Brooklyn.

“I just can’t think of anything,” my student said.

After 10 years of teaching college essay writing, I was familiar with this reply. For some reason, when you’re asked to recount an important experience from your life, it is common to forget everything that has ever happened to you. It’s a long-form version of the anxiety that takes hold at a corporate retreat when you’re invited to say “one interesting thing about yourself,” and you suddenly believe that you are the most boring person in the entire world. Once during a version of this icebreaker, a man volunteered that he had only one kidney, and I remember feeling incredibly jealous of him.

I tried to jog this student’s memory. What about his love of music? Or his experience learning English? Or that time on a summer camping trip when he and his friends had nearly drowned? “I don’t know,” he sighed. “That all seems kind of cliché.”

Applying to college has always been about standing out. When I teach college essay workshops and coach applicants one on one, I see my role as helping students to capture their voice and their way of processing the world, things that are, by definition, unique to each individual. Still, many of my students (and their parents) worry that as getting into college becomes increasingly competitive, this won’t be enough to set them apart.

Their anxiety is understandable. On Thursday, in a tradition known as “Ivy Day,” all eight Ivy League schools released their regular admission decisions. Top colleges often issue statements about how impressive (and competitive) their applicant pools were this cycle. The intention is to flatter accepted students and assuage rejected ones, but for those who have not yet applied to college, these statements reinforce the fear that there is an ever-expanding cohort of applicants with straight A’s and perfect SATs and harrowing camping trip stories all competing with one another for a vanishingly small number of spots.

This scarcity has led to a boom in the college consulting industry, now estimated to be a $2.9 billion business. In recent years, many of these advisers and companies have begun to promote the idea of personal branding — a way for teenagers to distinguish themselves by becoming as clear and memorable as a good tagline.

While this approach often leads to a strong application, students who brand themselves too early or too definitively risk missing out on the kind of exploration that will prepare them for adult life.

Like a corporate brand, the personal brand is meant to distill everything you stand for (honesty, integrity, high quality, low prices) into a cohesive identity that can be grasped at a glance. On its website, a college prep and advising company called Dallas Admissions explains the benefits of branding this way: “Each person is complex, yet admissions officers only have a small amount of time to spend learning about each prospective student. The smart student boils down key aspects of himself or herself into their personal ‘brand’ and sells that to the college admissions officer.”

Identifying the key aspects of yourself may seem like a lifelong project, but unfortunately, college applicants don’t have that kind of time. Online, there are dozens of lesson plans and seminars promising to walk students through the process of branding themselves in five to 10 easy steps. The majority begin with questions I would have found panic-inducing as a teenager, such as, “What is the story you want people to tell about you when you’re not in the room?”

Where I hoped others would describe me as “normal” or, in my wildest dreams, “cool,” today’s teenagers are expected to leave this exercise with labels like, Committed Athlete and Compassionate Leader or Environmentally Conscious Musician. Once students have a draft of their ideal self, they’re offered instructions for manifesting it (or at least, the appearance of it) in person and online. These range from common-sense tips (not posting illegal activity on social media) to more drastic recommendations (getting different friends).

It’s not just that these courses cut corners on self-discovery; it’s that they get the process backward. A personal brand is effective only if you can support it with action, so instead of finding their passion and values through experience, students are encouraged to select a passion as early as possible and then rack up the experience to substantiate it. Many college consultants suggest beginning to align your activities with your college ambitions by ninth grade, while the National Institute of Certified College Planners recommends students “talk with parents, guardians, and/or an academic adviser to create a clear plan for your education and career-related goals” in junior high.

The idea of a group of middle schoolers soberly mapping out their careers is both comical and depressing, but when I read student essays today, I can see that this advice is getting through. Over the past few years, I have been struck by how many high school seniors already have defined career goals as well as a C.V. of relevant extracurriculars to go with them. This widens the gap between wealthy students and those who lack the resources to secure a fancy research gig or start their own small business. (A shocking number of college applicants claim to have started a small business.) It also puts pressure on all students to define themselves at a moment when they are anxious to fit in and yet changing all the time.

In the world of branding, a word that appears again and again is “consistency.” If you are Charmin, that makes sense. People opening a roll of toilet paper do not want to be surprised. If you are a teenage human being, however, that is an unreasonable expectation. Changing one’s interests, opinions and presentation is a natural part of adolescence and an instructive one. I find that my students with scattershot résumés are often the most confident. They’re not afraid to push back against suggestions that ring false and will insist on revising their essay until it actually “feels like me.” On the other hand, many of my most accomplished students are so quick to accept feedback that I am wary of offering it, lest I become one more adult trying to shape them into an admission-worthy ideal.

I understand that for parents, prioritizing exploration can feel like a risky bet. Self-insight is hard to quantify and to communicate in a college application. When it comes to building a life, however, this kind of knowledge has more value than any accolade, and it cannot be generated through a brainstorming exercise in a six-step personal branding course online. To equip kids for the world, we need to provide them not just with opportunities for achievement, but with opportunities to fail, to learn, to wander and to change their minds.

In some ways, the college essay is a microcosm of modern adolescence. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a forum for self-discovery or a high-stakes test you need to ace. I try to assure my students that it is the former. I tell them that it’s a chance to take stock of everything you’ve experienced and learned over the past 18 years and everything you have to offer as a result.

That can be a profound process. But to embark on it, students have to believe that colleges really want to see the person behind the brand. And they have to have the chance to know who that person is.

Sarah Bernstein is a playwright, a writing coach and an essayist.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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3 Things Early Results Indicate About Regular Decision Ivy League Admissions Trends

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Ivy Day is swiftly approaching, and when it arrives, students across the country will receive their Ivy League admissions decisions. Anticipated to be on March 28th, Ivy Day marks the end of months of waiting. Many students are eager to know what they can expect from this cycle’s results. While we cannot be certain of what to expect from one cycle to the next, Early Action (EA) and Early Decision (ED) results can lend insight into the trends we may see in the regular decision round.

As students look forward to the release of admissions decisions, here are three things that EA and ED data indicates about the trends to look for on Ivy Day:

1. Schools reporting ever-larger applicant pools

Students and families should expect to see Ivy League schools report record-breaking applicant pools, a trend that has continued over the last few regular decision cycles at Ivy League schools, as well as in the early cycle in 2023. This is due in large part to the prevalence of test-optional policies at top schools, which tend to result in a greater number of applicants. Larger applicant pools often correlate to smaller acceptance rates. During this year’s early application cycle, Yale announced that they accepted 709 of their 7,856 applicants, amounting to a 9.02% acceptance rate—the lowest in over 20 years, topping the precedent set last cycle. While Columbia did not announce its official acceptance rates for the early application cycle (some numbers should be released in April alongside Regular Decision data), the university noted that their early decision applicant pool increased by 5% over last year’s. Students can expect these competitive schools to announce larger applicant pools for the regular decision round once more. At the same time, with schools such as Dartmouth and Brown reversing their test-optional policies, the 2024-25 application cycle may see applicant pools begin to thin.

2. Top colleges will continue to distance themselves from their reputations for exclusivity.

While the admissions landscape at elite institutions continues to be competitive, many top schools are seeking to distance themselves from their exclusive reputations. Harvard University, for instance, announced in December that their early acceptance rate had risen to 8.74% , up from 7.56% in the 2022–23 early admissions cycle. The percentage of first-generation college students accepted into Harvard’s Class of 2028 increased to approximately 15.5% in this year’s early acceptance pool. While Harvard announced its increased acceptance rate for the early round, other schools, including the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, declined to release their admissions data altogether. Princeton Dean of Admissions Karen Richardson articulated the reason for the lack of data during the 2021-22 cycle: “We know from our interactions with prospective students, families, and counselors that highlighting an admission rate and framing the admissions process through a list of statistics instills anxiety and fear. We do not want to discourage prospective students from applying to Princeton because of its selectivity.”

3. Elite schools outside of the Ivy League will become even more competitive.

As it becomes increasingly difficult to secure a coveted acceptance to the Ivy League, and as applicant pools continue to grow, other top schools outside of the Ivy League—such as Emory, Duke, Washington University in St. Louis, Carnegie Mellon, and NYU—are becoming ever more competitive. This trend toward greater exclusivity is already evident—for instance, NYU’s acceptance rate plummeted to 8% for the Class of 2027; ten years ago in 2013, the admissions rate was 35% . In this year’s early decision cycle, Duke reported a record low acceptance rate of 12.9% after receiving over 1,000 more applicants than in any previous Early Decision round (a 28% increase in applicants from 2022).

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While it is important to note that EA/ED outcomes are not determinative of Ivy Day results, they serve as important indicators of competitiveness and can often offer valuable insights for students navigating the college admissions process.

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Should college essays touch on race? Some feel the affirmative action ruling leaves them no choice

Hillary Amofa listens to others member of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. (AP Video: Noreen Nasir)

Hillary Amofa listens to others member of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

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Hillary Amofa, laughs as she participates in a team building game with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait in the school library where he often worked on writing his college essays, in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa, second from left, practices with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, stands for a portrait outside of the school in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

*Hillary Amofa, reflected right, practices in a mirror with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait outside of the school in Portland, Ore., Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

Hillary Amofa, left, practices with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Hillary Amofa sits for a portrait after her step team practice at Lincoln Park High School Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

FILE - Demonstrators protest outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, in this June 29, 2023 file photo, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, saying race cannot be a factor. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

CHICAGO (AP) — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all.

“I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I’m just like, this doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just starting to think about her essay when the court issued its decision, and it left her with a wave of questions. Could she still write about her race? Could she be penalized for it? She wanted to tell colleges about her heritage but she didn’t want to be defined by it.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays that all seemed to focus on some trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life’s hardest moments to show how far she’d come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.

“For a lot of students, there’s a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This year’s senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action . The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going back to the 1970s, but this court’s conservative supermajority found it is unconstitutional for colleges to give students extra weight because of their race alone.

Still, the decision left room for race to play an indirect role: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote universities can still consider how an applicant’s life was shaped by their race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability.”

“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Scores of colleges responded with new essay prompts asking about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity.”

Hillary Amofa, reflected right, practices in a mirror with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

WONDERING IF SCHOOLS ‘EXPECT A SOB STORY’

When Darrian Merritt started writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever because of the court’s decision. His first instinct was to write about events that led to him going to live with his grandmother as a child.

Those were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might expect a sob story or a tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior in Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide that, then maybe they’re not going to feel like you went through enough to deserve having a spot at the university. I wrestled with that a lot.”

He wrote drafts focusing on his childhood, but it never amounted to more than a collection of memories. Eventually he abandoned the idea and aimed for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music.”

“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to write this for me, and we’re just going to see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned “to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter. ... I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”

Max Decker, a senior at Lincoln High School, sits for a portrait in the school library where he often worked on writing his college essays, in Portland, Ore., March 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)

A RULING PROMPTS PIVOTS ON ESSAY TOPICS

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, had drafted a college essay on one topic, only to change direction after the Supreme Court ruling in June.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood surrounded by constant change, navigating his parents’ divorce, the games he took from place to place on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to colleges focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young Black men in Portland.

As the only biracial, Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote he constantly felt like the odd one out. On a trip with Word is Bond to Capitol Hill, he and friends who looked just like him shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, changed how he saw himself.

“It’s because I’m different that I provide something precious to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker thought about the subtle ways his peers seemed to know more about navigating the admissions process . They made sure to get into advanced classes at the start of high school, and they knew how to secure glowing letters of recommendation.

Max Decker reads his college essay on his experience with a leadership group for young Black men. (AP Video/Noreen Nasir)

If writing about race would give him a slight edge and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he wanted to take that small advantage.

His first memory about race, Decker said, was when he went to get a haircut in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity that moment created led him to keep his hair buzzed short.

Through Word is Bond, Decker said he found a space to explore his identity as a Black man. It was one of the first times he was surrounded by Black peers and saw Black role models. It filled him with a sense of pride in his identity. No more buzzcut.

The pressure to write about race involved a tradeoff with other important things in his life, Decker said. That included his passion for journalism, like the piece he wrote on efforts to revive a once-thriving Black neighborhood in Portland. In the end, he squeezed in 100 characters about his journalism under the application’s activities section.

“My final essay, it felt true to myself. But the difference between that and my other essay was the fact that it wasn’t the truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region’s diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”

Demonstrators protest outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, in this June 29, 2023 file photo, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, saying race cannot be a factor. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

SPELLING OUT THE IMPACT OF RACE

Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.

As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she’d have an easier time getting into college because she was Black .

“I didn’t have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University, and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.

“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”

Hillary Amofa stands for a portrait after practice with members of the Lincoln Park High School step team, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

WILL SCHOOLS LOSE RACIAL DIVERSITY?

Amofa used to think affirmative action was only a factor at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to find that race was taken into account even at some public universities she was applying to.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered if mostly white schools will become even whiter.

It’s been on her mind as she chooses between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, both of which have relatively few Black students. When she was one of the only Black students in her grade school, she could fall back on her family and Ghanaian friends at church. At college, she worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “Going and just feeling so isolated, even though I’m constantly around people.”

Hillary Amofa reads her college essay on embracing her natural hair. (AP Video/Noreen Nasir)

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom with her brother and grandmother. But it didn’t tell colleges about who she is now, she said.

Her final essay tells how she came to embrace her natural hair . She wrote about going to a mostly white grade school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her back with braids or cornrows, they made fun of those too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and found beauty in the styles worn by women in her life. She now runs a business doing braids and other hairstyles in her neighborhood.

“I stopped seeing myself through the lens of the European traditional beauty standards and started seeing myself through the lens that I created,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism will persist, but it loses its power when you know there’s a crown on your head!”

Ma reported from Portland, Oregon.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

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Why Some Companies Grow Amid Uncertainty — and Others Don’t

• Simon Freakley
• David Garfield

A survey of 3,000 global executives suggests that it’s not strategic thinking that sets them apart. It’s their inclination to move quickly.

When you cannot base strategy on reasonably certain premises — or when those reasonable premises are undone by unforeseeable events — what is a company to do? You still have to make plans, allocate capital, and invest for the future. Some argue that agility is the key to thriving in disruptive times, but if all you do is pivot, you are just going around in circles. The annual AlixPartners Disruption Index surveys 3,000 global executives about what is knocking them sideways. Among other things, it shows that three out of five say that it is increasingly challenging to know which disruptive forces to prioritize. Amid all this, there is a group of companies doing very well: about one in five said their companies lead their industry in revenue growth. In this article, the authors dig into that 2024 data to find out what sets these companies apart, and what other companies can learn from them about setting growth strategy in an uncertain world.

Strategic planning plays a key role in helping companies anticipate and manage business cycles. But forces like emerging digital technologies, climate change, and deglobalization — not to mention “black swan” events like the Covid-19 pandemic and wars — have turned a rolling sea into a choppy one, where companies are beset by currents, crosscurrents, riptides, and squalls. This multiplicity of related, unrelated, and inter-related difficulties have one thing in common: They are unpredictable.

• SF Simon Freakley is the Chief Executive Officer of AlixPartners, a post he has held since 2015. He is based in New York.
• David Garfield is a Chicago-based partner and managing director of AlixPartners, and the global leader for the firm’s industry practices.

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