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ESADE  /  Essays  /  Prompt 1

ESADE: Motivation essay

No single official word count is published; the motivation essay is part of the online application. Aim for a focused, well-structured piece (roughly 500-650 words is a sensible target). Confirm the exact field length when you open the form.

Tell us about your background, your motivations for choosing ESADE and the BBA, your professional goals, and what you will bring to the ESADE community.
What it’s really asking

This is the heart of the application. ESADE is asking, in one piece of writing, who you are, why you specifically want ESADE and the BBA, where you are heading professionally, and what you will add to the community. It is a motivation and fit essay, not a personal-narrative essay.

Why they ask it

The same readers who score this essay will interview you. It sets the agenda for that conversation and is your one chance to sound like a specific person with a specific reason for being at ESADE, rather than a strong but interchangeable applicant.

Three ways in
Start from a real moment

Begin with a real moment when business, economics, or building something clicked for you, then trace a straight line from that to the BBA.

Research ESADE properly

Pick two or three concrete things (a track, a value, an exchange, the case method) that genuinely fit your direction, and say why each.

Name what you bring

List the two or three things you would actually add to a team or class, with a real example behind each, instead of adjectives.

✕  Weak opening

“Ever since I was a young child, I have been passionate about business and dreamed of studying at a prestigious international university.”

✓  Strong opening

“I learned how a market really works the summer I helped my aunt move her tailoring shop online and watched a single Instagram post triple her weekend orders.”

✦ Annotated example · From a market stall to ESADE's BBA. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
Every Saturday since I was eleven, I have worked my mother's spice stall in the Tetuan market in Madrid. I weigh saffron, count change in three currencies because our suppliers are Moroccan and our customers are everyone, and I argue, gently, about the price of cumin.1It took me years to notice that the stall was teaching me economics. When the peseta-era regulars complained that I rounded up, I learned about price sensitivity. When I convinced my mother to bundle slow-moving turmeric with our best-selling ras el hanout, I learned, without the vocabulary, what a loss leader was.2That gap, between doing something well by instinct and understanding why it works, is what pulls me toward a Bachelor in Business Administration. I do not want only to run the stall better. I want the frameworks behind the instinct, and then I want to build something larger than a single table in a single market.3I chose ESADE specifically, and not business school as a vague idea. I sat in on a session of the first-year Business Lab last spring, where teams were asked to solve a real brief for a Barcelona retailer rather than a tidy textbook case. I watched a Brazilian student and a German student disagree sharply about pricing, then build something neither would have alone. That collaborative friction is exactly what I am missing working a stall by myself.4ESADE's strength in international management and its exchange network also matter to me concretely, not as prestige. Our suppliers sit across the Strait of Gibraltar, and the future I imagine, a small importer connecting North African producers to European retailers, is unavoidably cross-border. A degree taught in three languages, in a school where most of my classmates will have grown up between cultures, is not a nice extra. It is the training the business I want to build actually requires.5My goal after the BBA is to spend a few years in retail or supply-chain operations at a company that moves goods across borders, learning the machinery from the inside, before returning to the family trade with the scale and the network to grow it. I am not chasing a title. I am chasing the difference between a stall and a supply chain.6What I will bring to ESADE is the stall itself. I will bring the habit of negotiating in two languages before noon, the comfort of being the bridge between people who do not quite understand each other, and a stubborn curiosity about why things sell. I have spent my childhood listening across a counter. I would like to spend the next three years learning, with people from everywhere, what to do with what I heard.7
  1. 1Opens with a concrete, sensory scene instead of a thesis statement. It earns attention and immediately signals the international, multilingual texture ESADE prizes, without announcing it.
  2. 2Turns the anecdote into intellectual reflection. It shows the applicant deriving real business concepts from lived experience, which reads as authentic motivation rather than borrowed ambition.
  3. 3States the motivation for the degree itself, connecting the personal story to a clear academic want. The 'why a BBA' question is answered through the narrative, not as a detour.
  4. 4This is the decisive ESADE-specific move: a named program (Business Lab), a firsthand observation, and a reason it matters to this applicant. It proves real knowledge of the school, which the rubric rewards above generic praise.
  5. 5Ties professional goals directly to specific ESADE features (trilingual teaching, international focus) and to a believable, modest, well-defined ambition. Honest direction beats grand vagueness here.
  6. 6Gives a staged, realistic professional plan rather than a leap to 'CEO.' The restraint signals self-knowledge, which is part of ESADE's 'honest motivation and direction.'
  7. 7Closes by answering 'what you will bring to the community' with a distinctive, specific contribution rooted in the opening image. The callback to the stall gives the essay structural unity and a memorable final line.
Stuck? Start here
  • What was the exact moment business or building something became real for me, and can I tell it in three sentences?
  • Which two or three specific features of ESADE (track, value, method, exchange) do I genuinely want, and why each?
  • What would a teammate honestly say I add to a group, and what is the example that proves it?
Before you submit
  • Does my essay name ESADE-specific things, not just 'a top international school'?
  • Can I defend every claim and story in this essay out loud in an interview?
  • Did I spend more words on motivation, fit, and goals than on repeating my grades?

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