Telling Your Story as an LGBTQ+ MBA Applicant

At Menlo Coaching, we believe the strongest MBA applications are the ones that represent you authentically. For LGBTQ+ applicants, that raises a highly personal dilemma: How much of your queer identity and journey belongs in your application?

I’m Mike Mascarenhas, a senior admissions consultant at Menlo Coaching, and I’ve wrestled with this question myself. As a gay man, I faced the dilemma of how to represent myself in my MBA applications—and in the video and article below, I want to share a framework for how I thought about it, then and now.

Broadly, there are three ways to approach your queerness in your MBA narrative: lead with it, support with it, or exclude it entirely.

It’s important to emphasize that these are all viable strategies and this decision is fully personal to you. The MBA application process is daunting enough on its own. Whatever you decide, the most important thing is to feel good about how you represented yourself in the process.

Option 1: Lead with Your Story

Leading with your LGBTQ+ journey means making it core to your application—the narrative thread that ties your candidacy together. If this feels right to you, it’s a great decision for many applicants, and there are real opportunities to tell deeply personal anecdotes across your MBA applications.

How you tell your story will depend entirely on you as an individual, but a few strategies help:

• Put pen to paper before opening any application. Do some journaling and self-reflection, and write your story down in a simple form first, before looking at a single essay prompt. Authenticity matters in every MBA application, but it’s especially important when you’re anchoring your application to a story about your personal identity. Writing it out in advance will make you more comfortable deciding where to interject different pieces of your story across different applications.
• Study each school’s essay prompts. Every MBA application is different, and schools ask very different questions. Look at where a school’s essays are more personal and narrative-driven, and write those essays first. For some schools, you may get to tell your entire story; for others, even if you’re leading with it, your story may come through in a more piecemeal way based on what the school asks.
• Focus your networking. Reach out to LGBTQ+ students at your target schools and have conversations about their experiences. By learning about the options available on campus and hearing other people’s stories, you’ll be able to speak more authentically about how you might contribute to the class as a member of the LGBTQ+ community.

And check in with yourself. Telling a deeply personal story in an MBA application is brave, and it should also be fun. If you’re writing about coming out or another element of your LGBTQ+ journey and it feels like a daily struggle or an exercise in sharing something you’re not comfortable talking about, take those signs seriously and consider whether leading with your queer identity is the right move for you.

If not, it’s absolutely OK to change course. We’re all at different places in our journeys, and there are many other things you can lead with instead.

Option 2: Support with Your Story

If leading with your journey makes it the core of your application, supporting with it means weaving it into your essays, resume, or networking strategy without making it the central focus. This is the strategy many applicants ultimately choose—though that doesn’t make it more right or wrong than any other approach.

A couple of ideas on how to approach this:

• Contribution essays. Many schools ask what you’ll do once you’re on campus. Every school has some form of LGBTQ+ club, and there are events for MBA students across programs—such as ROMBA in the US and EurOUT in Europe. Weaving these into your application shows you’re thinking seriously about the personal and professional journey you want to take during your MBA.
• Career goals and recruiting. Many companies offer diversity fellowships, and plenty of target employers are highly accepting of the LGBTQ+ community. Do some research on the companies you’re interested in; you might note that you’re looking to build relationships with professional LGBTQ+ networking groups as part of your MBA recruiting strategy.

Option 3: Exclude It Entirely

The third option is to leave your LGBTQ+ journey out of your application altogether. I want to be clear that this is a completely valid choice, not a failure or a missed opportunity.

To be candid about my own experience: When I submitted my MBA applications, I didn’t talk much about my queer identity or journey. I wasn’t at the right time and place in my life to put that on paper, and it didn’t feel comfortable. I brought it up in some interviews, but I was still coming to terms with my sexuality and who I was as a person and not ready to lean into it in this context.

If that sounds like you, know that there’s no obligation to talk about anything you don’t want to. It’s easy to get the impression from other applicants online that you have to showcase every element of yourself—that the more “diverse” your profile appears, the better your admissions chances, or that you’re leaving something on the table by omitting the LGBTQ+ story.

But if it doesn’t feel like the right moment or something you’re comfortable doing, that is absolutely fine. Trust that the other elements of your profile will help you gain admission to the programs you’re targeting. The last thing any consultant should do is push you to write about something you’re not ready to write about.

Make the Authentic Choice

This is a uniquely difficult topic. On the one hand, queer applicants want to represent themselves fully; on the other, it can feel uncomfortable—as if you’re exploiting your identity to earn diversity points and boost your chances. The decision will be different for every LGBTQ+ applicant and is rarely straightforward.

If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this: Make the authentic choice. Don’t decide based on how you imagine (or how someone tells you) it might affect your odds of acceptance.

If you’re ready to talk about your journey, it will come across as authentic and compelling. If you’re not, don’t force it; there are many other ways to build a compelling candidacy. Any personal story you bring to your applications needs to be something you can wholeheartedly stand behind.

Interested in continuing the conversation? I and the rest of the Menlo Coaching MBA admissions consulting team love to talk with LGBTQ+ applicants about their MBA journeys. Reach out and we’ll be happy to chat with you.