Nobody Warns You About the Video Essay
Months go into the written essays. You groan at every word, retype paragraphs in the middle of the night, and cut lines that had taken you one hour to construct. Finally, you submit. Then the school emails back with a video essay invitation — and everything you practised suddenly feels useless.
This catches most applicants off guard. Writing is something you can revisit. You draft, you revise, you sleep on it. The video essay does not work that way. You get a prompt, a countdown, a camera, and one shot at it. No rewrites, no second takes.
Schools like Kellogg, Ross, and Fuqua have made video essays a standard part of how they evaluate candidates. Some programmes use them before the interview stage. Others use them alongside the written application. Either way, they are not an afterthought for the committee reviewing your file.
This guide covers two things: how to set up your space so the technical side works in your favour, and what questions to expect once the timer starts.
Part One — Setting Up Your Space
The Camera
The goal here is not impressive production quality. Schools are not watching these videos, hoping to be blown away by your camera work. They would like to know whether you are calm, clear, and worthy of further conversation. The camera simply has to remain out of the picture.
For most platforms, a laptop webcam or a decent smartphone is perfectly adequate. If your webcam looks grainy and washed out even in reasonable light, it might be worth picking up a basic external webcam — a Logitech C920 runs around $70 to $100 and produces a noticeably sharper image without requiring any setup beyond plugging it in.
More important than which camera you use is where you put it. Eye level. That is the one rule that matters. Having a camera low on a desk looking up at your face is unattractive on the screen and appears to look disinterested. You may prop the laptop with some books. Make the lens as close to your eyes as possible, slightly higher. The contrast is more apparent than you may think.
The Microphone
The aspect most people do not pay any attention to is audio, and it is more important than the quality of the picture. A video in which the voice is articulated clearly and intimately is much easier to view than one in which the images are good, but the audio is hollow and distant.
Microphones on laptops can be used, provided the room is not noisy, and you are not seated too close to the screen. The next level is the wire earphones with a microphone – the microphone is placed nearer to your mouth, and it directly captures your voice. A USB microphone is better still, though most applicants do not need to go that far. Whatever you are using, the recording environment needs to be quiet enough for it to do its job.
The Internet Connection
When you are recording with either Kira Talent or InitialView, the connection must perform well during recording and uploading. A wired Ethernet cable is more stable to use as compared to Wi-Fi, particularly when there are other individuals in the house utilising the network simultaneously. In case a cable is not available, then sit near the router. The vast majority of platforms allow you to re-record in case the connection is lost, but it is stressful and unnecessary to do it during the session.
Lighting
This is where the majority of video essays go wrong silently, and it can be avoided completely.
The one rule: light needs to come from in front of you, not behind.
Sitting with a window behind you seems like it should work well. In practice, the camera exposes for the bright background, and your face ends up dark and difficult to see. It is the most common setup mistake. Turn your desk around and have the window before your face, and then the problem is solved.
The incoming natural daylight through a window in front of you is, in fact, some of the best light that you can capture. It is gentle, smooth and does not demand otherwise. When you are recording at night or in a place with no windows, you should have an artificial source in front of your face. A desk lamp with a warm white bulb does the job well enough. A ring light — available for under $30 at most electronics stores — clips onto a laptop screen and provides consistent frontal lighting with no guesswork involved.
Two things to avoid: overhead-only lighting, which creates deep shadows under the eyes, and side-only lighting, which creates a dramatic look that belongs in a film, not an admissions recording.
The Background
It does not need to be interesting. It just needs to not pull attention away from you.
A plain wall works. A clean bookshelf works. A tidy corner of a room works. What does not work: visible laundry, an unmade bed in the background, random clutter on shelves, or anyone walking through the frame behind you.
Solid neutral colours hold up better on camera than busy patterns. Light walls generally read better than very dark ones.
Before you start: close the door, silence your phone. Tell anyone else in the house you are recording. Most platforms give you one attempt per question. There is no recovering from a dog barking through your answer to the leadership question.
Part Two — The Five Questions That Keep Coming Up
The language used differs according to the schools, yet the questions below are very similar. Here is what to prepare for.
1. “Tell us about yourself.”
Sounds simple. Consistently trips people up more than any other question on the platform.
The open-endedness is the problem. Without a specific angle to respond to, most people either ramble through their work history or recite their CV in roughly chronological order. Neither approach works.
What the question is actually asking: who are you, in 60 to 90 seconds, in a way that makes the committee want to keep watching? They want a sense of what drives you, what you have built, and where you are going — not a list of job titles.
A good, well-standing structure: what you have started with, one or two things you have built or learnt that gave you your orientation, and what you are going to do next. Short, clear, forward-facing. Practise it out loud — to someone else, or directly into your camera. What sounds fine when you read it silently tends to run long and stiff when you actually say it.
2. “Why this MBA? Why this school?”
Generic answers to this question are immediately recognisable, and they land flat. “I want to develop my leadership skills and grow my network”, tells the school nothing about why you are applying to them specifically — it would fit any programme in any country.
The answer that works covers three things: why an MBA makes sense at this point in your career; why this particular school’s programme, culture, or specific resources fit what you are trying to do; and what you expect to contribute to the cohort, not just take from it.
Research matters here. Mentioning a specific professor whose work connects to your industry, a particular concentration or programme track, or a club you intend to lead — these details show genuine interest. A school’s general reputation is not a reason. Certain aspects of the school that match your particular objectives are.
3. “Describe a challenge you have faced and how you handled it.”
This is mentioned in almost all behavioural video essays. Schools are not looking for a story where everything worked out perfectly because you showed up. They are attempting to learn how you cope with trouble, whether you own it, what you think when things are not going on, and what you learn out of trouble.
The STAR framework is applicable in this case: Situation, Task, Action, Result. The usual error is to take excessive time on the circumstance and hurry on the section that really counts, your very own thinking and judgments. The challenge is the setup. How you responded is the point.
Pick something that was genuinely hard. Be candid about what you now would have done differently. The committees have read so many of these that they can tell when an individual is giving a sterilised report.
4. “Where do you see yourself in five to ten years?”
This is not an exercise in how well you can forecast your career. It is a test of how seriously you have thought about what you want to do with this degree, and whether your thinking holds together.
Short-term objectives – the position you are seeking once you graduate – must be specific and grounded. Long-term objectives may be broader, though they must have a logical relation with the short-term direction. MBA must be placed squarely in the middle of such an arc: a tangible action that you are required to make, rather than an amorphous degree to speed up an indeterminate career.
The most memorable answers are not the most ambitious ones, nor the most conventional ones. They are the ones in which the logic is evident, and the goals resonate with the individual.
5. “Is there anything in your application you would like to explain or add?”
The majority of applicants omit this or duplicate it in another part of the application. They are both wasted opportunities.
In case your application is causing any concern – lapse in employment, GMAT score that does not match your talent, career shift that appears sudden on paper, etc., discuss it here in a concise, unceremonious, unembellished way. It is much better to have a brief, straightforward explanation than to have the committee fill in the blanks themselves.
If there is nothing that needs explaining, use the time to reinforce something from your application that you feel deserves more attention, or to say something direct about why this particular school matters to you that did not quite fit in the written essays.
Short and purposeful is the goal. Not long and thorough.
Before You Hit Record
Practise out loud, not in your head. There is an actual disparity between what one hears when reading an answer in their mind and what one hears when uttering it. When most people attempt to say their answer aloud, they find their answer is too long or loses its train somewhere in the middle the first time through. Keep going until it feels like a natural conversation.
Do not over-memorise. Scripted answers break down the moment the prompt is phrased slightly differently. Know your material well enough to speak about it without needing to recall exact sentences — that is the right level of preparation.
Look at the camera, not at yourself on screen. Most people instinctively watch their own image while recording. On the other side, that reads as someone who cannot make eye contact. Put a small sticker next to the camera lens and look at that instead.
Take a second before you start speaking. The countdown timer induces actual pressure, and such pressure is likely to lead to crunched, off-the-record responses. There is a moment between, before you start, that does not appear on camera as it does in the moment, but the calmness of that moment does.
The Last Thing Worth Saying
Video essay applicants do not necessarily turn out to be the most confident on screen and the most practised speakers. They are the ones who got ready right–planned what to say, rehearsed until it sounded natural, and appeared to the camera like it was a talk and not a play.
That kind of preparation is entirely within reach. It is also exactly what The MBA Edge works through with candidates as part of interview coaching — mock video recordings, question preparation, and direct feedback on how you come across.
If video essays and interviews are coming up in your application cycle, get in touch with The MBA Edge before the deadline.
