Essays are the 'tie-breaker' between excellent candidates
By
MBA Admissions Studio
Business school is mostly a logical, quantitative, rational kind of place. Much of it is about making numbers work
out and you're never far from your Excel spreadsheet. So you'd think that MBA
admissions would be a logical, quantitative, rational kind of process: take an
applicant's GMAT and undergraduate scores, add a multiple-choice personality
test and a weighted average for credentials and achievements, feed it all into
a computer, admit the top 10 or 20%, and voila!
Not only would this be quick and fair, but it would make operational sense too, given the thousands of applicants MBA
admissions officers have to process each year.
But what really happens is that school asks applicants to write between three and seven open-ended personal essays on their
life, achievements, goals, motivations, failures, and so on and so on. These
essays absorb an inordinate amount of admissions staff time in assessment and
deliberations (some schools even pay adjunct essay readers to deal with the
extra workload) and introduce a large dose of subjectivity into the
applications process.
So why do they do it? Why do they make the application process longer, more subjective, and more resource intensive than it apparently
needs to be? Answering this question is the key to knowing what you need to do
to write a successful essay set.
To understand what's going on, put yourself in the shoes of the Admissions Committee (Adcom) – whose holy grail is to (a)
select the best applicants, and (b) balance the skills, aptitudes, backgrounds
and experience of the incoming class. Any decent school can take half of the applications
it receives and throw them in the bin: "not enough experience", "luke-warm
references", "poor GMAT", "too old", etc. That's the easy part. The challenge
is what to do with "the top half," that is, how to distinguish between the
quality candidates that remain.
If you are faced with a GMAT 720/ GPA 4.0 banker from Chicago and a 720/ Oxbridge graduated systems analyst from Glasgow, and a
710/ Chinese Fulbright scholar, and you can only take one, who are you going to
choose? How can you choose?
Schools set hard, open-ended, searching personal questions in order to be able to choose between good applicants. Asking "what
really motivates her, why he needs an MBA, which of her achievements matters
most and why, how he copes with failure, how she envisions her future," etc., and
reading the results over three or four pages, gives Adcoms subtle distinctions
between those with an apparently equivalent good claim to admission. Through
the essays the truly compelling candidates make themselves known.
Meeting the essay requirements
Given this specific role the essays play, it follows that your task in writing them is to provide enough differentiating,
high-quality, material about yourself so that Adcom is motivated to make those
subtle distinctions in your favor. A non-communicative statement will not put
sufficient distance between you and the competitors in the top half.
Differentiating, high-quality material is not hard to recognize: it is anything that turns you from a set of numbers and
achievements into a unique, memorable person on an interesting path.
If you have trouble knowing what it means to add value to your file in this way, imagine yourself at a cocktail party
with thirty other competing MBA applicants and one admissions officer. You all work
for the same company and you all have the identical GMAT score, but only three
can be selected. You each get about five minutes to talk to her – what do you say about yourself
that is interesting, insightful, provoking and memorable? That is your essay
material.
Your personal statement should open a window into your single and unique life, and through it Adcom should feel they
have met you and come to know you and identify with you, so that they can distinguish
you from the crowd. You achieve this by selecting and sharing personal events
and stories, and analyzing and reflecting on them in an honest way, so they get
to understand what you stand for, are interested in or are motivated to do with
your life, and why.
You've succeeded when they no longer think "MIT undergrad, science major, 3.8/710, ex-PWC," but, for example, "The guy who
majored in botanical studies, left consulting to create a successful small
business in exotic East Asian seedlings and now needs an MBA to develop a
community-friendly agribusiness worldwide. (By the way, he also has big-6
consulting experience and great numbers.)
The 5-point essay quality checklist:
- Don't repeat information from your file. Use the essays to develop, explain and positively frame the information that is already there and develop the reader's insight into it.
- Be personal. Give Adcom real insight into your character, passion, personality and self-understanding. Don't think you can escape with the standard platitudes.
- Be unique. How do you know if a statement is not unique? Easy: if what you say could be said by the next applicant or the one after that, it's generic. If what you say could only have been said by you, it's unique.
- Be yourself. Forget what MBAs are supposed to be like and supposed to want. Talk about who you are what you want. Talk about your real goals, motivations, dreams and fears. Give voice to your own values and your real ethical or personal struggles.
- Don't say too little. Seize the opportunity the essays present. If you give more than a muttered safety-first statement, you'll get more back. The reader can only get out what you put in.
Back to MBA Applicant Essay Help section
Copyright MBA Studio. No part of this document may be reproduced without the author's written permission.
