What Makes You Unique? How to Approach the LBS MBA Essay

When London Business School asks, “What makes you unique?” in the LBS MBA essay, many applicants start looking for an impressive achievement, an unusual hobby or a personal story that nobody else can tell. This guide to the London Business School MBA essay explains four ways to find that story, plus a simple test to check whether your answer is truly your own.

I would start somewhere else.

What makes you unique is often not what you have done, but how you think because of what you have experienced.
You may be a software engineer, a consultant or a finance professional. None of those backgrounds is particularly unusual in an MBA classroom. What can distinguish you is how you approach problems, what you notice that others miss, the values that shape your decisions or the perspective you bring from a part of your life that others may not have experienced.

LBS MBA Essay Tips: How to Answer “What Makes You Unique?”

The LBS what makes you unique essay, often called LBS Essay 2, is written in 200 words alongside the 500-word post-MBA goals essay. With so little space, these LBS MBA essay tips focus on choosing one clear idea about how you think, rather than listing achievements. LBS’s own admissions team says this is the essay where it wants to see more of who you are. Check LBS’s application page for the current prompts and limits.

Here are a few ways I would look for that story.

Look at How You Solve Problems

An engineer who fixes a production issue is doing their job. But what if they discover that the problem is not actually technical? Perhaps a manufacturing defect keeps recurring because the procurement team is incentivised to buy the cheapest component, while the production team bears the cost of failures. The engineer could fix the immediate issue, but identifying the incentive misalignment would reveal a different level of thinking.

The interesting part is not that the applicant solved a problem. It is what they noticed that others had overlooked.

Think about your own work. Have you questioned the obvious explanation, connected dots across functions or challenged an assumption that everyone else accepted? You do not need a breakthrough innovation. Sometimes a small observation tells us much more about how you think than a large achievement does.

This is also what makes a strong MBA essay for software engineers, consultants and finance professionals: the problem you solved matters less than what you noticed along the way. Choose one small observation you can explain clearly, and the LBS 200 word essay becomes much easier to write.

Look at What Your Experiences Have Taught You to Notice

Your background can be a source of uniqueness, but simply describing where you grew up or what your family did is rarely enough.

Consider someone who grew up helping in a small family business. They may have watched their parents extend credit to regular customers, manage unpredictable cash flows and make decisions without access to the data available to larger companies.

Years later, while working in a corporate role, they may instinctively look beyond the headline numbers to understand how a decision affects customers, cash flow and day-to-day operations.

The family business is not the story by itself. The story is how that early exposure shaped the way the applicant now thinks about business.

Ask yourself: What did I grow up noticing that someone with a different background might take for granted? And can I see that influence in the decisions I make today?

A family business MBA essay can work well, but the same rule applies to any background: describe the habit of mind it gave you, not the biography. In 200 words there is no room to explain where you grew up unless it changes how you think today.

Your uniqueness may lie in a tension or contradiction

Applicants often try to present a consistent, flattering picture of themselves. But some of the most interesting qualities emerge from tensions.

Consider a high-performing analyst who was known for getting things done independently. After repeatedly taking on work herself, she realised that her team had become dependent on her, and junior colleagues were not developing the skills to take ownership.

She had to learn that being the person who could solve every problem was not the same as being an effective leader.

That experience could reveal something more meaningful than simply claiming to be hardworking or collaborative. It shows how the applicant’s strengths can become limitations, and how she has learnt to recognise that.
Self-awareness is not just knowing your strengths. It is understanding when those strengths can work against you.

Look for moments when you changed your mind, recognised a blind spot or had to rethink something you had always believed about yourself.

This is why self-awareness in an MBA essay is more convincing when it includes a limitation. Naming a blind spot you have recognised shows more about how you think than a general claim to be hardworking, and it fits comfortably in a short LBS MBA essay.

Look for the Connection Between Different Parts of Your Life

Sometimes uniqueness comes from combining experiences that do not usually sit together.
Imagine a finance professional who has spent years analysing business performance but also volunteers as a sports coach for children. Coaching may have taught them that people do not respond to the same incentives, feedback or measures of progress.

That understanding might later influence how they manage a team or evaluate performance at work.

Neither finance nor coaching is unique on its own. The interesting part is what the applicant has carried from one experience into the other.

This is worth exploring if you have a serious interest outside work, a personal responsibility, an unusual educational background or an experience that changed how you see people.

But do not force a connection simply because it sounds good. It should be something you can explain honestly, with examples.

If your example comes from outside work, check that it does not simply repeat other parts of your application. Use LBS Essay 2 for a connection the rest of your application does not already show.

So, What Should You Actually Write?

Do not pick a trait like resilience, curiosity or resourcefulness and then search your life for evidence. Start with your experiences and look for patterns.

Ask yourself:

• What do I tend to notice or question that others may not?
• What experiences have shaped how I make decisions?
• When have I changed my mind or recognised a limitation in my own approach?
• What do I bring from my personal life into the way I work?

If someone who knows me well had to describe how I operate, what might they say that goes beyond my job title?

You do not need to fit five qualities into one essay. One clear idea, supported by a few relevant experiences and honest reflection, can be far more convincing than a catalogue of achievements.

The real test is this: could another applicant with a similar job title and similar achievements write essentially the same essay?
If the answer is yes, you probably have more digging to do.

Your LBS essay should leave the reader with a specific understanding of how you think, what has shaped you and what perspective you would bring to the classroom. You do not need to have lived an extraordinary life to achieve that.

You need to understand what is distinctive about the way you have lived yours.

Use these LBS MBA essay tips as a brainstorming checklist, then read your draft once more. If it still sounds like a generic MBA essay that another applicant could have written, keep going. A strong answer to what makes you unique at London Business School sounds like one person’s way of thinking, and it should be easy for the reader to picture that person in the classroom.

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