Cambridge Judge MBA essay 2023 – Tips and Analysis

The Cambridge Judge MBA program is a one-year program with a small class size of roughly 200 students from 40 nationalities. The Judge MBA is a highly immersive curriculum, with three mandatory team projects and a fourth optional team project that engages students with external businesses or groups.

Judge seeks candidates with demonstrated academic aptitude, aspiration, the ability to prosper under pressure, multinational experience, and excellent interpersonal skills.

Utilize your essays to prove that you possess these abilities. Keep in mind that Judge is one of the only programs with extremely strict word restrictions: no extra words may be added to the text boxes after the word limits have been reached.

Application deadline

Round	Application deadline	Interview dates
1	5 September 2022	14-28 October 2022
2	17 October 2022	25 November-9 December 2022
3	9 January 2023	24 February-17 March 2023
4	6 March 2023	14-28 April 2023
5	17 April 2023	26 May-9 June 2023

Cambridge Judge MBA essays 2022-2023

Even though some of the best business schools have been slowly cutting down on the number of essays they require, the University of Cambridge Judge Business School still asks applicants to send in four separate essays.

Here are the essay questions on the Cambridge MBA application for the 2023 admissions:

1. Please provide details of your post-MBA career plans. The statement should not exceed 500 words and must address the following:
   • What are your short and long term career objectives? How will the Cambridge MBA equip you to achieve these?
   • Looking at your short-term career goal, describe the research you have done to understand how this industry/role/location recruits MBA talent and what they are looking for in a candidate?
   • How do you meet the requirements of your short-term career goal? What preparation are you doing now?
2. Describe a difficult decision that you had to make. What did you learn from this and how have you changed as a result? (up to 200 words)
3. Describe a time where you worked with a team on a project. What did you learn from the experience and how might you approach it differently today? (up to 200 words)
4. If you could give one piece of advice to your 18-year-old self, what would it be? (up to 200 words)

Essay 1

Applicants are asked to describe their short-term and long-term plans for their careers after getting their MBA. Then, as with most schools, it’s important to show that you understand what makes Cambridge Judge’s program special in order to give a good answer to this question. 

You’ll need to show how Cambridge’s MBA program will help you reach your goals in a clear and convincing way. 

Taking the time to learn about the school’s curriculum, special programs, and extracurricular activities will pay off. You can do this by attending an online admissions event or talking to alumni.

In response to the second part of the prompt, the best way to meet Judge’s request would be to talk about research, such as looking at employment reports, career services, or networking through LinkedIn. 

Keep in mind that 98 percent of the most recent class moved to a new country, job, or industry sector. This suggests that the adcom is looking for applicants who can deal with and plan for change.

In the meantime, you will need to think about your qualifications and be careful when answering this part of the prompt, which asks you to list how you are already ready for the short term and describe what you are doing right now. 

This makes sense if you give a short summary of your career since you can point to your past actions as proof of your current skills. This is the place to talk about how you’ve taken on more responsibilities at work or signed up for a course related to your field.

Essay 2

Challenges are important ways to learn and grow. With this question, the Judge admissions committee wants to know what you learn when things aren’t as clear-cut as you’d like or when you have to make some kind of sacrifice. 

How do you think through problems and come up with answers, especially when it’s hard to do so? 

Judge doesn’t say that the story you tell in this essay has to be about your work, so you can also use stories from your personal, family, or community life. 

You might want to think about this essay and the third essay at the same time. If you choose to talk about a work-related event in this essay, you might want to use a personal story in the third essay, and vice versa.

For this essay, you need to tell a story about a time when something was at stake. The reader needs to feel and understand that your choice came with some risk. As the school’s question makes clear, it couldn’t have been too hard for you to make a choice if there was no chance of something going wrong. 

The reader needs to know that you had a clear problem and had to carefully consider your options. In your essay, tell the reader how you made your choices and a few of the possible outcomes or results that could have happened as a result. 

Keep in mind that your choice doesn’t have to have turned out to be the right one. You could even show that none of the options you had at the time were perfect and explain how you made the best of the bad ones. 

By asking about a tough decision instead of the more common “failure” topic, this essay question gives you a chance to talk about a time when you may have struggled, but it didn’t have to end in defeat or disappointment.

Lastly, talk about what you learned from the experience and how it has changed who you are or how you see or act in the world now. 

What you learned from the experience should be something that has made a big difference in who you are. Judge wants to know not only that you have been through a difficult situation and worked through it, but also how that situation has made you who you are today.

Essay 3

Describe a time where you worked with a team on a project. What did you learn from the experience and how might you approach it differently today? (up to 200 words)

As a general rule, you shouldn’t talk about a failure unless you’re asked to. Because of this, you should choose a situation where things went well. 

With such a small number of words, it will be important to set the scene quickly by describing your goal and then your team. 

Working with others can take many different forms, like coordinating with teams in other countries or working directly with a colleague on a tough consulting project. 

What matters is the goal you set and the problems you had to solve together to reach it. 

Since the focus is on working as a team, it would make sense for lessons to be about how to communicate, motivate, or lead.

Essay 4

Judge asks its candidates four essay questions, and three of them are about what they’ve learned from life. 

The school is looking for people who don’t just learn by sitting in a classroom and listening to a teacher, but also by interacting with the world around them and taking part in it. 

For this essay, you should think about everything you’ve learned since you graduated from high school, whether it was in a classroom, at work, or in your personal life. 

Then, think about which of the things you learned during that time period you think are most important or have had the most impact on you. 

Then, look into why these particular things are so important to you.

To write this essay try doing this.

Remember who you were back then. You were probably about to start college or had already gotten there. Many of us have told ourselves to stay away from a certain person or a rowdy event, but keep in mind that this is about getting into business school. 

No matter what advice you give yourself, it would be best if you followed it in the end or at least made a plan to do so soon. 

It seems like the admissions committee is trying to get you to talk about a weakness you had at the time. If this is the case, you could talk about how you have improved since then to show that you can learn and grow. 

For example, you might have told yourself to travel more. Since then, you may have taken part in international projects and planned trips. Maybe you chose the wrong major at first and would have gone in a different direction. 

Since then, you may have gone in that direction outside of work. If you had trouble in college, this could be a good place to talk about how you have become more disciplined or found a better way to learn since then.

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