“Answer a question you wish we’d asked.” This is a question Harvard University now regularly asks its MBA applicants.
It’s an insightful question and, if you use it, it may help you unlearn because its open-ended nature embraces the very distinct possibility that you will be exposed to insights and ideas that might never have to occurred to you otherwise.
The University of Chicago’s Booth School goes one step further and asks its applicants, “What else should we know about you?”
A banal question to be sure, but Booth takes the unexpected step and requires the applicant to answer in “no more than four slides of text or pictures.”
In other words, the answer requires the applicant to think differently about her or his answers. Its wonderful example of trying to make the familiar–strange.
Interested in other posts on how asking a new question can lead to unlearning? Check this link or these older posts:
