哈佛商学院(HBS)，美国商学院三大巨头之一，也是世界上最好的商学院之一。美国教育界有这么一个说法：哈佛大学可算是全美所有大学中的一项王冠，而王冠上那夺人眼目的宝珠，就是哈佛商学院。
申请哈佛商学院不仅要求超高的成绩、完美的简历或推荐信、优秀的课外活动、工作经历，文书也是决定成败的重要影响因素。你需要在文书告诉招生官『Who are you, beyond the GMAT?』。在申请人其他条件相当的时候，文书能否打动招生官直接影响你的录取结果。
作为研究院，哈佛商学院在录取时的文书题目比本科申请题目还要宽泛、还要考验写作功底。
2015年，申请哈佛商学院的学生需要回答下面这个文书题目：
It's the first day of class at HBS. You are in Aldrich Hall meeting your 'section.' This is the group of 90 classmates who will become your close companions in the first-year MBA classroom. Our signature case method participant-based learning model ensures that you will get to know each other very well. The bonds you collectively create throughout this shared experience will be lasting. Introduce yourself.
这是你在哈佛商学院第一天上课。你在大教室会见到你的同学们，这是一个由90个同学组成的大集体，他们将在第一年MBA课和你朝夕相处，成为你亲密的伙伴。为了让你和同学们之间更好地了解彼此，现在要求你做一个自我介绍。
这个自我介绍该写些什么?如何去写?我们来看一篇范文。
"I've been to Reno, Winnemucca, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Buffalo..." What sounds like a verse from Hank Snow's "I've Been Everywhere" is actually the chain of cities I've crossed four times since 2011. You see, the first engineering position I took after college required that I relocate for new assignments every six months.
If you had peered inside my car during one of those moves, you'd have struggled to guess my age(more than 300 vinyl LPs lay stacked in the trunk), my profession (the back seat was jammed with boxes of cake decorating tools), or why a person with Illinois plates owned a Buffalo Bills football (as my Bills enter the 2016 season now having missed the playoffs for 16 consecutive years, I'm struggling with that one too).
The link behind these seemingly dissimilar interests lay on the dashboard, in a dog-eared page of Sheena Iyengar's "The Art of Choosing." On that page, a Wynton Marsalis quote read: "You need to have some restrictions in jazz. Anyone can improvise with no restrictions, but that's not jazz. Jazz always has some restrictions. Otherwise it might sound like noise."
The thing to know about me is this: my two favorite things are CHAOS and CONTROL. "Get Smart" reference aside; I love rules ("restrictions" for Marsalis), but also disorder. I love routines, but also spontaneity.
Contradictory? Not really. My desire for routine (jigsaw puzzles over coffee every Sunday) and my flair for spontaneity (impromptu urban taco crawls) at times reveal themselves in quite separate pursuits. But more and more, the two combine into structured, yet inventive projects (most recently, a Kanban inventory system for custom cookies in my four-person apartment).
My upbringing built in me the love for "control." My dad, a lawyer and a lifelong coach, taught me to trust rules and fundamentals. I started playing baseball, repeating daily the same basic drills on the batting tee. I taught myself to cook, studying family recipes and following them to a T. I listened to my parents' LPs, memorizing every lyric and mimicking every note on the violin or piano.
Routine ruled my life. And I loved it, particularly as an athlete. I was recruited to the [TOP U.S. MIDWESTERN CITY PRIVATE UNIVERSITY] Softball team, where I continued emphasizing the fundamentals: throwing, glove work, sprints. These fundamentals made the "fun" stuff — making diving catches, throwing people out, winning — possible. Where fans saw graceful, instinctive skill, I saw a series of assessments, decisions, and actions.
This unwavering faith in fundamentals would propel me to success until 2010, when, after 15 years spent perfecting the skills my sport demanded, I hit a slump. To respond, I worked harder at the same drills I had always known. I re-ran weekly our toughest workout (up every stair in the 48,000-seat football stadium) with the expectation that more practice would make me "good" again.
No effort I made led to improvement, however, and I was eventually benched.
I to that point had defined self-worth solely by athletic performance. So when I felt my career ending despite extreme effort, I almost lost faith in those fundamentals.
That same year, though, I had joined a campus group, [NAME OF CAMPUS CHRISTIAN ATHLETE GROUP]. A group leader one day called for someone to bring food to the meetings. Remembering studying family recipes as a kid, I volunteered.
I ended up cooking for [CAMPUS CHRISTIAN ATHLETE GROUP] every week for two years, earning the nickname "Chef [APPLICANT'S LAST NAME, WITH AN 'IE' AT THE END]." I quickly discovered that the thing I loved about softball, I too loved about cooking — that I could learn fundamental "rules" (like throwing a ball, or packing brown sugar) to do something bigger (like winning a game, or baking a killer snickerdoodle).
But I discovered a freedom in the kitchen that I had never experienced as an athlete. I was instinctively substituting an ingredient here, tweaking a step there, to create new recipes. Just as Marsalis and others did with their music, I was taking the cooking rules and now re-arranging them into improvised creations, such as the ever popular "Molson Maple Glazed Donut."
That small change in approach in the kitchen gave me the appetite to improvise, and even explore, elsewhere. It provoked me to take the rotational position that soon sent me packing to new cities every six months. It motivated me to embrace new cultures as I moved, rather than live inside my known rules. It led me to taste stinky tofu in Hangzhou, China, to become the biggest Buffalo Bills fan you'll ever meet, and to try hang gliding in California (I won't be doing that again).
Throughout these adventures, though, I've held onto rules, to traditions. I explore each new city by running its best stairs, to honor those [UNDERGRAD UNIVERSITY] workouts. And I fill each new apartment with my boxes of LPs and cooking supplies.
The rules, the routines are still important — in fact, necessary — for me to create.
That's what brings me here — that mix of rules and improvisation, of control and chaos. I want the rigidity of finance and engineering mixed with the volatility of interacting with real people. I want to study through Case, the perfect marriage of preparation and adjustment. I want to take my existing knowledge of operations in manufacturing and transform it to retail and consumer goods.
I hope you'll each introduce yourselves to me over the next few weeks. You can find me running Harvard Stadium on Fridays or watching the Bills at Bleacher Bar on Sundays, as I learn to combine my existing routines with this new school and new city.
And as we go through TOM, I'll create a miniature cookie "factory" in my kitchen for anyone who wants to practice the basics of production flow. I'm thinking we can make Heath Bar Sandie's.
这篇范文出自2015年的一位申请者，essay题目叫做《The Balance Act》，这篇文章成功入选HBS“essay写作指导”的最佳范文之一。哈佛商学院“essay写作指导”的编辑对这篇文章的简短评价是： 作者很好地将自己的多种兴趣爱好融合在了一起，比如有运动员的背景经历、是厨艺的爱好者，因为工作原因的旅游经历等。
除此之外，作者还展示了她这些方面的个性使她如何更好地适合哈佛商学院。
文章最后，作者以非常创新的方式回应文书主题，再次强调了哈佛商学院和她是完美匹配。
"Towards the end, the author ties in her theme with the HBS case method by describing the cases as a perfect combination of 'chaos' and 'control' — thus emphasizing, in a very innovative way, how the program will be a perfect fit for her," the guide says.
这就是这篇essay的成功之处。
以上就是小编为大家介绍的相关内容，希望可以对大家有所帮助。
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