An essay without any conflict is just a rephrased MBA Resume – the most boring essay. Now, with creators uploading their stories with just a click of a button, diverse themes, and storylines are part of popular consciousness.
At the core of the thumbnail strategy, where the creators put hands in their heads with the ‘all is lost’ theme, is a trick of the trade to artificially create conflicts. Such cheap tricks don’t work in essays where you must take the admissions team through a journey.
There are 3 better ways to share conflicts - not with another person but with oneself:
1) Finding One’s Values
We all have that one moment where if we didn’t act, we would never look at ourselves in the mirror. These are incredibly uncomfortable moments where one must stand up against the tribe and risk being castigated or, even worse - made into an outlaw.
I have read several examples where applicants stood up for a value that put them at risk of treading a path that was right but wrong for the culture. A job switch happens soon to a company that matches the person’s value.
Many times, the value might be atypical for your family. I read an extremely personal narrative about a person who stood up to their family’s political beliefs that sidelined people from a particular ethnicity. The interesting part of the essay was that it was never expressed in simple black-and-white terms but had historical context, the complexity around land deals, and influences that colored the parents’ perspective. There were family members from other ethnicities married to the family, which made the narrative extremely interesting.
Keep all the nuanced family and personal dynamics in the essay to turn it into a believable essay.
2) Finding One’s Tribe
The mismatch in values forces one to find one’s tribe. Many find it through a nonprofit engagement, many through college, and many later in life through work.
Even the search for an MBA culture that matches the applicant’s goals is an exercise of finding one’s tribe. Schools know this and include the goals essay or how you will contribute an essay, subtly in one of the application questions or directly as the essay question. They ask you to list your nonprofit engagements or extra-curricular or volunteering – all to measure whether you would fit with the tribe.
The school’s culture, experiential learning, partnerships with nonprofits, global engagements, professors (and their qualifications), and the school’s position as a finance, consulting, general management, PE/VC, Marketing, or Technology school are all branding exercises to find the right tribe.
When you narrate your search for the tribe, include values that are a fit for the school’s culture. This is easier said than done. You need a careful eye for the subtle qualities that show fit – one of my focuses when I edit MBA essays.
3) Finding One’s Purpose
Most of you in your late 20s or early 30s are unlikely to find a purpose. You might be confused as to where you are heading or where your ideal career lies, but your purpose is beyond the goals that you cite in MBA essays or personal milestones that you have set for the next 1 to 5 years.
The purpose is a deep yearning to apply a consistent set of values that gives you Joy and a feeling that you are doing something beyond yourself - your ideas and actions are changing the world for the better.
Such purpose is often the motivation for Entrepreneurial pursuits. But even in a traditional career – a purpose guides an MBA candidate to choose an employer, a job function that was not planned as part of the MBA essays, or a location that was never in the person’s imagination. All these searches for purpose start early for many, definitive during the 1st year of the MBA program, and reach a penultimate end with an offer in hand. It doesn’t end with the first job. Subsequent life and career decisions are all guided by this purpose.
It is very easy to read an essay and see if the applicant has the restless energy to fulfill that purpose or optimize for a job market. There is no harm in the latter as 80% of applicants have such a mindset. But for the 20%, a larger purpose is driving their behavior, goals, and ambitions.
