Avoiding Essay Pitfalls
Use Your Personal Stories
MBA candidates often fixate on their professional and community-based stories when writing their application essays. Many fail to even consider personal stories as possible differentiators. Because so many candidates have similar professional experiences, personal dimensions should be highlighted whenever possible (as few examined lives can truly be said to be similar). Stories of commitment to oneself or others can have a strong emotional impact on the admissions committee and can help distinguish you amid the mass of applicants.
What types of experiences should you discuss? Well, this question has no easy answer. For these stories to successfully set you apart from other candidates, they need to be truly distinct. An example of a unique personal story might be that of an individual who helped an adopted cousin relocate his birth mother; another story might be one of an individual who took a six-month leave of absence to take his disabled grandmother on a tour of her home country. Clearly, not everyone will have these exact experiences, but each of us has interesting anecdotes we can tell about ourselves. These kinds of stories can be showcased in your essays with a little bit of thought and creativity.
Connect with Your School
Although admissions officers want to know that you are interested in their school, they are not interested in reading about your love for their school at every single turn. Some candidates mistakenly believe that they must aggressively and enthusiastically state how they will improve their skills at their target schools in every essay, regardless of whether the school has asked for such information or not.
As you write your essays, always focus on answering the essay questions as they are written and do not try to anticipate any unstated questions. So, if your target school does not explicitly ask, "Why us?"—Harvard Business School (HBS), for example, does not—do not try to find a way to sneakily answer that question in your other essays. The admissions committee is not asking this question for a reason. (And, yes, we have helped many candidates successfully apply to HBS without responding to this unasked question.)
Of course, if your target school explicitly asks, "Why us?", then you should certainly do your homework and answer the question. Many business school candidates unwittingly discuss their personal experience with a specific MBA program in the most vague and general way. Because they are writing from memory and discussing their authentic experience, they often do not realize that they are not being specific enough. Consider the following example:
"During my experience at Cornell, I was struck by the easygoing classroom discussion, the warmth of the professors and the time spent by the first-year student who not only toured the facilities with me, but also took me for coffee and asked several of his colleagues to join us."
Although these statements may in fact be true, the text contains no Cornell-specific language. If Yale, Michigan or the name of any other school were substituted for Cornell here, the statement would otherwise not change at all. It could easily apply to any other school—and this is not good. In contrast, the following statement could refer only to Darden:
"While on Grounds, I was impressed by Professor Robert Carraway's easygoing and humorous style, as he facilitated a fast-paced discussion of the 'George's T-Shirts' case. Although I admittedly felt dizzied by the class's pace, I was comforted when I encountered several students reviewing the finer points of the case later at First Coffee. I was impressed when my first-year guide stopped mid-tour to check in with her learning teammate and reinforce the case's central point. It was then I recognized that this was the right environment for me."
If you were to substitute the Darden name and even the professor's name with those of another school and professor, the paragraph would no longer work. The Darden-specific information regarding the day's case, First Coffee and learning teams ensures that these sentences have a sincere and personal feel—showing that the candidate truly understands what the school is about, and resulting in a compelling personal statement that will catch the attention of the admissions committee.
Limits
Candidates often worry about exceeding schools' requested word limits, even by a mere word or two. Although we certainly feel that staying within the stated limits is best and advise candidates to do so, we also believe that admissions directors are rational individuals and are not unnecessarily punitive; we doubt any admissions director would ever say, "We think this candidate will be the next great CEO, but he exceeded the limit by 20 words, so we don't want him." Basically, we recommend that candidates not exceed word limits by more than 5%, but we also suggest that applicants use good judgment and try to avoid consistently exceeding the limit on every essay.
Although we invite candidates to be judicious with regard to word limits, we feel differently about page limits. We insist that our candidates stay within established page limits, because the admissions committee can clearly tell when an applicant has exceeded them. Adding an additional page, even for just an extra sentence or two, sends a clear message to the admissions committee that you are disregarding the rules—something you obviously do not want to do!
Review
After you have completed your application(s), we recommend that you find one individual (two at the most) you trust—whether a professional consultant or someone with insight into the application process—to read your essays one last time and give you feedback. However, we strongly suggest that when you do so, you limit yourself to requesting feedback from just one or two individuals.
Because the application process is subjective, you will discover that as you add readers, you will also add new and different opinions. Soon, a multitude of alternatives might appear, and although these varying ideas will not necessarily be "right" or "wrong"—considering that a single candidate's stories can be marketed in countless ways—they can create unnecessary uncertainty.
So, we do not propose that you ignore critical feedback, but instead that you not complicate the final days before you submit your application and create doubt where it may not be due. If one or two readers support your ideas and emphasize that your application needs minimal work, you are probably best off ending your feedback loop there and pressing submit.
