MBA application essays

I feel it is my responsibility to share with the world what I learned during the application process. I did learn a lot and I did do certain things right. In my previous blog entry I talked about how to choose a business school. In this entry I will talk about how to write essays.

The application essays are the single most important piece according to me. They give you a chance to tell the admissions committee who you really are. But, its not just that, the essays also in a way drive your entire application. Sometimes you may want to choose a certain recommender to corroborate what you wrote in an essay. Sometimes you may want to talk about a difficult period in your life and how it affected your grades. Sometimes the essays tell you that you are not ready this year. You don’t have a complete application yet and you may need to wait another year and in the mean time work on a certain weakness.

Anyway, essays are critical and you should give due diligence. So the first question is where do you start. Usually business schools have 4 -6 essays. Which essay should you start with? What personal story should you write for an essay. The first thing I would recommend you do is pick up a copy of the book “65 successful Harvard business school application essays”. It will give you an idea about the kind of essays people write. I read the book before I started my essays. It gave me the tools necessary to write essays. I had an idea of what is OK and what is not. Obviously do not borrow any line from the essays over there. It will burn you. Just casually read them and notice interesting styles of writing.

The next step would be to open a word document and write down the essay questions on one page. On the next page write down your strengths and accomplishments. Just jot down the points. If its a strength, how did you develop it or how did you realize it. How have you used that strenght and what was the outcome. What did you learn? If it is an accomplishment then why do you consider it to be an accomplishment, what core values did you use here? What obstacles did you overcome and how did you do it?

On a third page, take a look at your life over the past 3 years. Most business schools would want you to write essays that are recent. The business school admission committee also would like to see your different shades. So divide your last three years into pieces, usually demarcated by some fixed change of event. You started a new project. You left your job. You studied. You picked up a new hobby. You overcame a personal challenge. Whatever it is, it clearly had a beginning, a body where you worked at it and an end. These are your stories. Make sure they cover the entire 3 years. Do not leave any block of time out because that could raise questions and your reader may think you didn’t do anything then.

Now here is the challenging part. You need to flesh out your stories with the points that you jotted down on the second page and answer the questions on the first page. But at this point the fantastic thing is that you know what you want to write about and it will be very logical and convincing and impressive. To match fleshed out stories to questions try pluggin in different stories to different questions and see if they answer the question to a T. Try to put yourself in the shoes of the reader and imagine what he or she will be thinking. Will she think that you answered the question with a truly impressive story that highlighted your strengths/accomplishments and showcased a different period in time over the last 3 years?

If you do, then you have your first draft! Now you need real feedback. Send these stories to your friends and relatives who know you well. Ask them if you are telling the most important stories and you have highlighted all the great moments in the last 3 year? If not revise your essays and go through the above process of using those three pages. This is your second draft.

Once you have a solid second draft, send it also to MBA students and alumni you may know who do not know you well.  They know how to take a good essay and polish it to make it sound great. But do this only after you have a very solid second draft because at this point you are not adding any new content. You just want to give it coat of polish.

So you have your third and most likely final draft. Send this draft to someone who is very good with English. Make sure you don’t have any silly spelling / grammatical errors. And that is it. You have your final draft. Submit it and hope for the best . It is a lot of work. I would give at least 3 months for the whole process.