Personal Statements for Business Programs: 3 Great Examples of Writing
by Michelle P.
Our previous essay blog post focuses on how to write a great personal essay on a business or entrepreneurship interest if you’re a student.
Building off of that, what are some great examples of writing that students can look at, to inspire themselves when writing personal statements for summer business programs of a business major?
You can analyze 3 examples of writing from articles below which focus on business, each with different strengths. As you are reading, consider: why are these specific paragraphs about business interesting? What elements help make the writing work?
Example 1:
“Just like Brandma Made” – TASTE
“Freiman always wanted to work in a company’s test kitchen. Sitting around the dinner table when she was growing up, she was fascinated by the stories her father would tell about his day working at Corning Glass Works, where he got to pop into the test kitchen and maybe bring home some photos of a shoot or strawberries from the set. Determined to break into this field, Freiman studied home economics and took an internship at Good Housekeeping, but she found the magazine industry too fast-paced for her liking.”
From reading the above excerpt, how does a reader find out why Freiman wants to work in a test kitchen? How does the writing succinctly describe who had inspired her to do so? What did Freiman do that related to that specific field of economics and cooking?
You can apply these same kind of questions to thinking on how you first became interested in an area of business or finance or entrepreneurship. Then, you can figure out how to incorporate that into your own personal essays for a business summer program or business as a college major.
Example 2:
“Why there’s lead in Stanley water bottles” – Vox
“That’s the crucial thing: While lead in a Stanley is sealed off and, as the company has reiterated, poses virtually no risk to buyers, there’s still a human impact.
“We’re ignoring the realities at both the production facility of workers’ exposure and the worker and the community exposure surrounding the facilities that recycle these,” said Tom Neltner, a chemical engineer and the national director of Unleaded Kids, a nonprofit organization that seeks to change and improve lead policy in the US.”
In this section, while it sticks with the main topic of Stanley Cup water bottles and lead, the writing expands from that point by connecting this product to a social issue or problem. Specifically, about lead exposure to those who are creating Stanley water bottles.
If you’re applying for a summer program or college in an area related to business, it’s not just enough to demonstrate your own business experiences and expertise. If there’s a social issue or cause related to business that you care about, your own personal essay could be a good place to consider exploring that, from your musings over the right-to-repair to accessibility in technology.
Example 3:
“Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple” – GQ
“If you ask Cook, a notoriously private person himself, why this subject is so important to him, he will pivot the conversation back to Apple. “It’s personal for Apple in that we’ve been focused on it from the start of the company,” he told me the first time we met, for an interview in 2021. In Cook’s tenure, Apple has adopted a set of public values and practices that are particularly rigorous around privacy. “We feel privacy is a basic human right,” Cook says. “And so we try to design our products to where we collect the minimum kind of data, and as important, that we put the user in the control chair, where it’s the user’s data and they’re deciding what they want to do with it.” Think of, for instance, the recently rolled-out prompt, the tool Apple calls App Tracking Transparency, that allows you to ask not to be tracked while you’re using any given app.”
This last excerpt about Tim Cook, related to Apple, links together both business and a value. For Tim Cook, that value would be privacy, and how the company expresses that through their products.
If you’re a future business student, what values would you want to express as being important to you? Perhaps business and the community? Or business and creativity?
From going into a backstory related to business to exploring the values that matter most to you, these examples will hopefully give you a stronger picture as an Essay Narwhal on how you can write the best personal essay possible for a business-related program.