Ivey AEO Essays: How to Answer Both Questions
The Ivey AEO application asks for two activities described as essays, up to 500 words each, with a reference behind every one. Those two essays are half of the half of your application that isn’t marks. Here is what the prompt actually asks for, two full worked essays with numbers, one weak one so you can see the difference, and an honest answer to a question you are probably already asking: will my video answers overlap with my essays, and does that hurt me?
What Ivey asks for
Ivey weighs AEO applications 50/50 between academics and leadership, and the leadership half is the written application plus the video interview. The written part, as listed on Ivey’s AEO page:
- Two activities in essay format, a maximum of 500 words each.
- Up to five more activities in point form, for a maximum of seven.
- A reference for every activity: name, role, phone number and email of someone who can verify your involvement. Ivey’s wording is that “applications without verified references will not be considered.”
- Non-academic awards and distinctions from secondary school, briefly described. Academic awards are excluded.
- The Kira video interview, five questions, done after you submit the written part. The video guide covers that half.
The prompt for the two essays, as it appears in the application, asks you to select the two activities that best demonstrate your leadership abilities and to focus each description on elements that show leadership, teamwork, initiative, achievement, commitment and breadth, one activity per essay. Ivey asks you to consider everything from the past four years: community involvement, paid and volunteer work, entrepreneurial ventures. Confirm the exact wording in the portal when you open it; Ivey adjusts phrasing between cycles.
What the prompt is really asking
Ivey coaches its own applicants toward a three-part shape it calls C.A.R.: Context, Action, Result. That’s STAR with the situation and task merged, and it tells you how the essays are read. The reader wants to know, in roughly this proportion: what was the situation (a fifth of the words), what did you personally decide and do (three fifths), and what changed because of it, with a number (a fifth). Most first drafts invert that, with 300 words of context about the club and 60 about the applicant.
Three things follow. First, “activity” is broad on purpose: a part-time job where you were trusted with something is an activity; so is a business you ran from your bedroom. Second, a title isn’t an answer. “President of DECA” is context; the action is what you did with it that a different president wouldn’t have. Third, the reference will be contacted. Every claim in the essay should be something that person would recognise.
Two worked essays
I’ve worked at a family-owned garden centre since the spring of Grade 10, starting on the till and, by last summer, running the weekend floor with three seasonal staff under me. The business makes most of its year between May and July, and the owner, Marta, had told me in April that the previous summer had been the worst in a decade: a chain store had opened four kilometres away and our weekend sales were down about a fifth.
The thing I noticed was that our returns were up as well as our sales being down. People were buying plants, killing them in two weeks, and bringing them back. I asked Marta if I could keep a tally for a month of what was being returned and why, and about two thirds of it was the same story: a full-sun plant put in shade, or a water-hungry plant left on a balcony. The chain store couldn’t fix that; its staff didn’t know a hosta from a hydrangea. We could.
I proposed a “right plant, right spot” table at the front: six laminated cards, one per common situation, with the five plants that would actually survive there, and I trained the three weekend staff to ask two questions at the till, how much sun and how often will you water. Marta gave me a Saturday and $80 for printing. I wrote the cards from the growers’ tags and checked them with her. I also changed the weekend schedule so that the one person who knew the most about perennials was always at the front rather than in the greenhouse, which meant I took the greenhouse shift myself.
Over the ten weekends from late May, returns dropped from about $400 a week to under $120, and weekend sales finished the summer up 11 percent on the year before, the first increase since the chain opened. Marta kept the table and the two questions as standard, and this spring she asked me to train the new seasonal hires on them before I’d even started back.
What I’d point to isn’t the idea, which was small. It was noticing that the returns number was a different problem from the sales number, and being willing to ask for a month to prove it before proposing anything. I’ve since caught myself doing the same thing on our student council budget: before arguing about the spending, count what actually happened last year. The other thing I learned is that the schedule was the real lever. Putting the right person at the front did more than the cards did, and it cost me the job I liked most. I’d make the same call again.
In Grade 11 I was one of two co-presidents of our school’s Model UN club, which had 22 members on paper and about seven at any given meeting. The previous executive had run it as a conference-trip club: fundraise all fall, take twelve people to a weekend conference in February, then nothing. The trip cost $2,600 the year before and we’d raised $1,900 of it, with the school covering the difference and telling us it wouldn’t again.
My co-president wanted to fundraise harder. I thought the model was the problem: seven people doing the work so twelve could go on a trip, with nothing to show for it for the other ten months. We disagreed about it for most of September, which I’m not proud of, until we agreed to try something for one term and measure it.
The something was running our own one-day conference in December, in our school, for our own members and two nearby schools. I took the logistics side: I wrote to the four closest schools and got two to commit 15 delegates each, I booked the library and the cafeteria through the vice-principal, and I built a registration sheet that charged $10 a delegate, which covered lunch and printing with about $90 left over. My co-president wrote the two committee topics and trained six of our members to chair, which she was far better at than I’d have been.
Sixty-one delegates came. Our own attendance went from seven a meeting to fourteen, because members who’d never have paid for the February trip had something to prepare for and a role. The February trip still happened, with ten people instead of twelve, fully funded from a smaller bake-sale effort plus the December surplus, and the school didn’t have to top it up. The December conference ran again this year without either of us, at 84 delegates, chaired by two of the people we trained.
The part I’d underline is the September argument. I was right about the model and wrong about how I argued it: for three weeks I treated my co-president’s plan as a bad idea instead of as a person who cared about the club as much as I did. The thing that moved us was agreeing on how we’d know who was right, which was attendance, and letting the number decide. Since then, when I’m sure and someone else is sure, I try to get to “what would we measure” before I get to “here’s why you’re wrong.”
Both essays spend under a hundred words on context, name a specific decision that a different person in the same role wouldn’t have made, give the reference something to confirm, put three or four numbers in the result, and end on a reflection that admits something. The second one also gives credit to a co-leader by name, which reads as confidence, not weakness.
The weak version
As co-president of Model UN, I demonstrated leadership by organising our school’s first ever conference. This was a huge undertaking that required teamwork, communication and initiative. I worked closely with my co-president and our executive team to plan every aspect of the event, from booking rooms to inviting other schools. Despite many challenges along the way, the conference was a great success and attendance increased significantly. This experience taught me valuable lessons about leadership and perseverance that I will bring to Ivey.
Every word of the prompt’s vocabulary is in there (“leadership, teamwork, initiative”) and none of the evidence. No number, no decision, no disagreement, nothing the reference could confirm beyond that a conference occurred. It is also 120 words, which tells the reader the applicant didn’t have 500 words of story.
Will my essays overlap with my video answers?
Yes, and that’s fine, with one rule. Ivey reads the essays and watches the video as parts of one file, and the interview questions are about leadership, judgement and quick business reasoning; the two activities you chose for the essays are, by definition, your two best leadership stories. You should use them in the video. What you shouldn’t do is recite the essay. A video answer that retells the garden centre essay top to bottom, in 90 seconds, tells the reviewer nothing new and sounds rehearsed because it is.
The way through is angle, not new material. The essays each contain three or four moments. Pick a different one for the camera. The garden centre essay is about diagnosing the returns problem; on video, when asked about tough feedback or a hard choice, tell the ten seconds where you took the greenhouse shift away from yourself. The Model UN essay is about the conference; when the interview asks about conflict, tell the September argument in detail, which the essay only summarises. Same story bank, different door in each time.
The practical version: after you finish the essays, write down every moment inside them that could stand alone, and then build three or four more stories from your point-form activities in the same C.A.R. shape. Walk into the video interview with six or seven, and the prep timer becomes a choice, not a scramble.
Mistakes specific to the AEO essays
- Choosing the impressive activity over the one with a decision in it. A national-level competition where you did what you were told is a weaker essay than a Saturday job where you changed something.
- A reference who can’t verify the story. The person listed should have seen you do the thing. A teacher advisor who wasn’t at the conference is a risk; the vice-principal who booked the rooms is a confirmation.
- Two essays about the same competency. If both are “I organised an event,” pick one and make the other about something else: a job, a conflict, a thing that failed.
- Stopping at 300 words. Ivey’s own guidance encourages using the full limit. The last 150 words are where the reflection lives.
- An AI polish that removes you. Generic prose is what a reader who has read 800 of these skims. The AI and supp apps guide covers where the line is and why your own sentences read better.
Before you close this tab
The other half of the AEO file is the camera: the AEO video guide has the five-question Kira format, fifteen practice questions in Ivey’s style and a worked answer to the business-reasoning one. If you’re unsure whether your two activities are “leadership” by an admissions reader’s definition, the leadership questions guide explains why a title isn’t an answer and what is. And since the same two stories will carry you through Schulich and Queen’s Commerce, the STAR method examples guide shows how to compress a 500-word essay to a 90-second answer without losing the number. Then put the September argument on a clock: AcceptMe’s custom interviews will ask you an unseen AEO-style conflict question with a short prep window and a timed answer, and the transcript will show you whether you told the moment or recited the essay.
Keep reading
- Ivey AEO Video Interview: Format and Practice Questions How the Ivey AEO video interview works, what Ivey listens for, fifteen practice questions in its format and a worked answer to a judgement question.
- Leadership Interview Questions for Students (With Answers) How to answer leadership interview questions without a title: eight common questions, two sample answers and what admissions actually listens for.
- Can You Use ChatGPT on a Supplementary Application? What Ontario universities say about AI in supp apps and AIFs, why your own writing gets flagged, and how to sound human without cheating.