I noticed one stark difference between North American and Asian applicants. The Cultural notion of managing time and the impact of their contribution was hidden beneath project schedules and the microscopic responsibilities. From the smaller responsibility, the North American applicant was trying to find meaning while the Asian applicants were already familiar with the whole and the parts of the project.
The cultural outlook towards time management and task were the reason for the difference in fluency of the project responsibilities.
American companies propagate the idea that tasks sub-divided into smaller manageable chunks of sub-tasks is enough to move the project towards the right direction. Often, Project Management involves scheduling while the responsibilities to solve the problem and managing communication is with each team member.
For American applicants, the recommenders praise the productivity of the applicant. The industrial revolution is behind us by over 100 years, but the metrics used in mass production is still a metric for problem-solving at an intellectual level.
In Asian/Latin, American/Middle-Eastern companies and family-based Businesses, scheduling are rarely the responsibility of the supervisor. The focus is on the task and how to approach the stakeholders. One reason is the strong bureaucratic roots that Asian countries experienced from the residues of the British colonization. The culture still prevails, and influencing or persuading a key stakeholder while focusing on the task is the singular focus. How the applicant managed time is never part of the objective. There will always be a deadline, but the flexibility of the deadline and the chaos that ensues, a couple of days before the dates, are self-evident in the narratives of Indian and Chinese applicants. The impact, the influences, and how the applicant understood power dynamics are referred in the recommendation letters.
North American Culture
Managing time should not be underrepresented in essays and recommendation letters. Without deadline the urgency of the task or the pressure under which you excelled will never be captured in an Essay. But an iterative product development rarely was responsible for iPhone, or Tesla Roadster. A revolutionary idea is sold to all the stakeholders with little input from the customers or the marketplace. This approach adopted by the American giants is counterintuitive and uniquely un-American. But creative results rarely work in a scheduled manner. It is always a combination of accidents and persistence. So if you are using a narrative to address your creative spark, avoid mentioning schedules, and focus on the tasks, the lucky accidents, and the process that resulted in the big break.
Asian Culture
The reviewer's worldview depends on the culture she is exposed to. If influencing a stakeholder through persuasion is looked down upon as unethical, the narrative will never work. That is why understanding the culture of the school and the diversity of the admission team (demographic/gender/nationality) is important. For Asian applicants, balancing the narrative of IMPACT with the limitation of deadlines is ideal. I have seen Asian/Latin American and Middle Eastern applicants spend over 50% of the words on IMPACT without offering any context on why the task was important at that point in time for the company.
The gap in your narrative might not be self-evident on the first read. Your culture has merged with your identity. Let us help you out with a detailed essay review.