Preparing for the Kellogg Video Essays

I recently wrote about the changes top business schools made to their applications this year in my post "Shaking Things Up." Video essays have become increasingly popular in recent years. MIT Sloan has had their "introduce yourself to your classmates" video for quite a while, but they made it longer this year. Chicago Booth is likely to release a video component for applicants who are invited to interview. Kellogg made some adjustments to their post-submission video essays.

After submitting the Kellogg application, applicants log into the Kira Talent portal, which will ask them five questions. Applicants have 96 hours to complete the exercise. The platform gives 20 seconds to think about each question before responding for 60 seconds.

Kellogg has confirmed that they have kept the first question fixed for all applicants again, as they did last year: introduce yourself, and tell the committee something they would not already know from your resume. The other four questions will be pulled from a bank of hundreds. Many of the Kellogg video essay questions asked in previous years were behavioral, but not all.

It can be challenging to prepare for this, especially given you may be busy working on other applications and your bandwidth may be limited, so be strategic about preparation. If you try to drill yourself on every possible question you can find on the internet, you will likely burn valuable time, and also risk being asked questions you did not prepare for. Instead, think about the handful of key selling points that you want Kellogg to know about you, and the examples that represent these. Prepare five to ten examples that you can plug in for various behavioral questions, spanning professional and extracurricular stories. This preparation will also support other schools' applications beyond Kellogg, as MIT Sloan has a similar exercise with one question, and Yale has a similar one with two questions.

Try to treat every question as a behavioral question, even when it does not look like one. If you are asked how you define leadership, an answer without an example will sound vague. Define it in a sentence, then spend the rest of your time walking through a moment showing your leadership in action. Keep an eye on the clock, to avoid spending 40 seconds describing a leader you admire and then running out of time before saying how you try to live by those principles.

Remember that there still may be surprises, as it would be difficult to prepare for every scenario. You may find that three of the five questions come easily based on your preparation, and the other two still catch you a bit off guard. This happens frequently, and I like when the questions make you pause and think a bit. I always suggest to clients that they pretend they are having a conversation with me. I ask them questions all the time, and they did not need to prepare the exact answers in advance. Their answers may not have been perfectly delivered, but they are authentic and honest, and that is what I believe Kellogg is looking for here.

Natural, even with some hiccups, is much better than overly scripted and robotic. This is also why I would not attempt to use AI here. Schools have advised that they can tell when someone spends their 20 seconds pasting the question into ChatGPT, and when the delivery seems like the applicant is simply reading a script.

While this exercise can be stressful, it is also a great opportunity. You get to bring yourself to life beyond your written application. The application reader now gets to look you in the eyes and hear your voice as you tell your story. Consider it one more chance to show them who you are.