Most applicants I speak to generally plan to try to use the same essays, where possible across different MBA applications. It’s generally not a good idea to do that. And why is that?

Don’t try to get away with cutting and pasting an essay you’ve written for another school when completing your application to the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), warns Associate Director of MBA Admissions Allison Davis in her blog. “You risk not answering the question we’re asking,” she writes. “And [the] big risk of leaving the name of the other school in your Stanford essay!” she adds.

Further, even if one or two essays questions have similar or even exactly the same title across applications you may still not want to use the same essay. When thinking about your application, you need to also think about what how all the different parts of the application work together – so you need to think about your answers to each question in the application and also ensure that the combination of answers you have chosen work best together. Otherwise, you may be at risk of either offering redundant or overlapping information across essays or not talking about certain skills or experiences that you really should be highlighting.

This basically means you may need to do more upfront planning that you initially intended to. It may seem like more work – but effort is worth it!