Storytelling in MBA Essays

Capturing sad moments in MBA essays can seem manipulative. But when you write the first draft, don’t worry about censoring such thoughts.

Remember these 4 points while capturing sad moments:

1) Emotion vs. Mood

2) Personal Loss

3) Sad Moments and Identity

Storytelling is an outline of your relationship with time, world, future, and yourself. 

The inner conflict between your ego and the challenge put forward by the outside world is similar to the turmoil that the reviewers go through on a daily basis while reviewing your essays or pondering over their future. 

When the story is about your life journey, the essay should demonstrate why you are interesting. Focus on 5 Strategies:

1. Differentiate Just Enough

“The man - shirtless, grease all over his body with a facemask jumped on to the window, barely holding onto the bars. He scanned the room from right to left. I sat at the left corner, two feet away from the Window. We looked at each other with shock and surprise waiting to see who will start the conversation.

5 seconds passed.

Who are you?

“I heard a burglar was in the neighborhood. We were just checking.”

I began noticing a pattern in our conversation when the topic is outside kids. She goes into explaining the molecular level whenever the subject is about hardcore science or drug discovery. By the time she breaks down a reaction, I am thinking about the topic for my next email newsletter. Whenever I go into the intricacies of storytelling and planning transitions in an essay, I could see her eyes glaze over a pending task she has to do.

The admission team has to go through at least twenty essays before they can find a genuine narrative that looks honest and interesting. Story format in itself will not guarantee you admission. You have to meet the entry criteria (GMAT, GPA, and Experience) for the program while differentiating from other similar profiles, but storytelling by itself can act as a differentiator if your profile is weak or your achievements have a low recall within your profession.

Effective Storytelling for MBA Essays

While reviewing essays for the 2014-15 admission season, we noticed a common thread – applicants were trying to bring elements of storytelling by introducing informal conversation into the essays. Somehow, they mistook storytelling to casual conversation. With the ‘post-MBA goals’ and ‘Why MBA’ essay shrinking to 500 words, the opportunity to include storytelling let alone casual observation has come down.

Here are a few tweaks that you can do

An MBA essay will fail to connect with the reviewer if you don’t define your goal in the first paragraph. It can be achieving deadlines under extreme circumstances, learning new skills, or achieving a noble goal. Unfortunately, noble goals are hard to find in a routine project, be it Finance, IT, Marketing or Consulting. Only candidates working in non-profit have an inherent advantage.

Learn how to Define Goals with Storytelling

When the word count goes down, the natural approach is to make the narrative more “resume like.” This is far from the right approach. Storytelling is more relevant now than ever. When AdCom read 1000s of “short resume summary” with essays, your ability to stand out with an interesting narrative will matter.

In this article, we will cover the importance of conveying struggle in the essay.

Harvard Business School hosts one of the most popular MBA programs in the world. On an average, every year, they get over 9000 applications and corresponding essays. No matter how strong the AdCom Essay review team is, one Essay Reviewer is likely to read 100s of essays.

No matter how good you are with GMAT, GPA, and Diversity of experience, the essays still matter.

So what do you mean by Emotional connection in an essay? Find out!

Storytelling as an art form is not limited to movies, news, radio, TV, and sales pitch but plays an important role in MBA Application Essays. With the word limit going down by 50%, applicants might think that story telling as a writing style might not be effective for the current admission season.

Find out how to use the following five Simple steps to make the Essay more interesting