IE University: Express Yourself personal essay

Written: ~250-650 words. Video: max 3 minutes. Presentation: max 10 slides.

The personal essay (often presented as 'Express Yourself') asks you to show who you are beyond your grades and resume, and to convey your motivation for IE University and your chosen program. You may submit it as a written essay of roughly 250-650 words, a video of up to three minutes, or a presentation of up to ten slides. IE explicitly encourages creative essays and personal stories that highlight your individuality.

What it’s really asking

IE is asking two things at once: who are you as a person, and why do you and this specific program belong together? They want personality, self-awareness, and concrete motivation, not a restatement of your transcript or a generic ode to studying abroad.

Why they ask it

Because the admissions test, online assessment, and interview cover reasoning and live communication, the essay is the one place you fully control the framing of yourself. It is where IE checks whether there is a real, specific reason behind your application and whether your voice matches the entrepreneurial, international culture they are building.

Three ways in

Start from one turning point

Find the single moment you started caring about your field, tell it concretely, and connect it to a feature of this IE program.

List what only IE offers

Write down three things IE genuinely gives you that your local options do not, then build the essay around the one most true for you.

Lead with action

Identify a project or problem you actually acted on, and use it to show how you think and what you would do with the degree.

✕ Weak opening

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

✓ Strong opening

“I shut down my school's recycling fundraiser after three weeks because the numbers did not work, and that failure taught me more about business than any class had.”

✦ Annotated example · The repair shop bookkeeper. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

My grandmother runs a phone-repair stall in a market in Tbilisi, and for three summers I was her accountant. I was fourteen when she handed me a shoebox of receipts and said, in Georgian, "You are good at school numbers. Fix my real ones."¹The real numbers were a disaster. She charged whatever felt fair that day: less for a teacher, more for a man in a good coat, nothing for the woman whose son had just left for the army. Her ledger was loyalty, sympathy, and mood, written in pencil and half erased. My job, I decided, was to bring order to it.²So I built a spreadsheet. I gave every screen and battery a fixed price, color-coded the margins, and proudly showed her a chart proving she was losing money on at least a third of her repairs. She looked at it for a long time. Then she pointed at one red cell and said, "This one is Nino. Her husband is sick. The red stays."³I argued. I was fourteen and certain that a business which ran on feelings would not survive. But over that summer I watched what the red cells actually did. Nino came back not just for repairs but to send three neighbors. The teacher recommended us to an entire staff room. My grandmother was not being sentimental, or not only sentimental. She was running a customer-loyalty program with no software and no name for it, decades before I read the words in a textbook.⁴We compromised. I kept the spreadsheet for the parts she could not afford to lose money on, the batteries and the cheap glass, and she kept her pencil for the people. By the third summer the stall had a real margin and the same warm reputation. I had learned that numbers describe a business but do not, on their own, explain it. The interesting work lives exactly where the cold model meets the warm reason.⁵That is the work I want to keep doing, and it is why IE University fits me rather than just impresses me. IE treats business as something human and international before it is a set of formulas, taught by people who have actually run things. The Bachelor in Business Administration's mix of finance and behavioral courses, the case-driven classes, and a campus where my classmates will come from forty countries with their own market stalls and their own red cells, all of that is the grown-up version of my grandmother's shoebox.⁶I am applying to learn the formulas properly. But I already know the part no spreadsheet taught me: that the best models leave room, on purpose, for Nino. I want four years to figure out how to keep building both.⁷

1Opens mid-scene with a concrete, unusual image and a line of dialogue. IE rewards personality over CV, so the essay starts with a story, not a list of achievements.
2Specific, slightly funny detail (pricing by 'mood' and 'a good coat') builds a real person and a real problem, showing the applicant noticing systems in everyday life.
3The turn. The applicant's tidy logic collides with a human reason, and the grandmother wins. This sets up the self-aware tension the essay will resolve.
4Shows critical thinking and the maturity to revise a confident first conclusion. This is the 'self-awareness, not a CV' that IE explicitly rewards.
5Resolves the tension into a genuine intellectual stance rather than a tidy moral, demonstrating the communication and reasoning IE looks for.
6Ties motivation to specific, checkable features of IE and the named program, so the 'why IE' reads as researched and personal, not generic flattery.
7Closes by circling back to the opening image and naming a real person, leaving a clear, memorable picture of who the applicant is and how they think.

Stuck? Start here

What is one thing you tried, failed at, and changed your mind about, and what did it teach you about your field?
What can this specific IE program give you that your local universities cannot, in concrete terms?
If an interviewer read your essay and asked 'tell me more about that,' which sentence would you most want them to point to?

Before you submit

Does the piece name something specific about IE and your program, not generic praise?
Does it show personality and a real moment, rather than re-listing your resume?
Could you talk about every claim in it for five minutes in your interview without notes?

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