If you are a consultant or an Investment Banker who had a role in a deal of global reputation or you are a global citizen, some of the narratives about your personal or professional life would require interpreting events.
There are 4 contexts where MBA applicants keep making the same mistakes:
1) Complexity
Most of the mistakes on complexity are in interpreting a deal or a market development. Some of the popular deals are covered extensively in financial publications and even popular media. The admissions team, with even a slight interest in deals or a global trend, will be aware of the details.
The mistake I have seen while editing MBA essays is that applicants tend to assign one factor for a deal outcome, which limits their ability to see multiple factors influencing a deal. Such multifactorial thinking is instinctual for anyone with a Humanities or Social Science background but a tough learning curve for Finance or Engineering candidates where the search is to find that one variable with the most influence and optimize it. This practice affects even how the applicants narrate complex events.
2) World Events as a Backdrop
The 2020 pandemic is the most recent world event that affected all of us. The Event was analyzed heavily – from both aisles of the political landscape, internationally interpreted to escape or to blame one party with several catastrophic consequences to our friends and family that it would be impossible not to know deeply about the event.
You experienced them first-hand – the shock to the system, the lack of mobility, and the pace with which a solution was developed.
Such a prolonged crisis is rare.
Most crises have a news cycle of 1-2 months then people develop fatigue hearing about deaths and destruction.
See how any war or conflict is covered. The interest spikes for 1-2 weeks, slowly waning out, and by the 2nd month, the news is 2nd page.
A lot of tail events are not covered or ignored. If your story is closely tied to a tail event, it becomes a challenge to interpret it for the admissions team.
When you are shortlisting world events in a personal MBA Essay, make sure that it was a recent event or at least covered 1-2 months in a news cycle.
3) Industry Trends as a Backdrop
During the peak of the pandemic, the aeronautical industry experienced a complete shutdown for 15 days, where an entire department of a leading defense contractor was laid off.
Most might not know that or won’t care to connect the event. But if the applicant was laid off just after that Industry trend, which pushed the applicant to start a venture, the story is tied to the industry trend.
The industry trend and the associated negative outcome should be captured early to demonstrate any setback narrative, as we have recommended for the Harvard MBA Essay.
The industry trend could also be a positive outcome like the Crypto Boom, where I have read applicants managing ridiculous derivative financial products that have no value now. But that year, these tokens and currency were seen as an innovative product, and we leveraged the ‘innovation’ for the essay narrative.
Every year, there will be some fad that will be called the ‘light bulb’ or ‘airplane’ of our generation. After the dust settles on the hype that the investment firms deploy in the news cycle, you will realize that most are just tools for productivity.
Don’t worry. The admissions team is not some monks on a hill. They are also hyped by the same new cycle.
Use them.
But always remember – the recency of an industry trend is valued over the scale of the event unless the scale was a momentous world event.
To test it, just filter Google News and search for “Laid off” for the past five years. Every year, you will see the cycle of layoff and slowdown.
Don’t use cyclical narratives about Industry trends that are commonplace in MBA essays.
4) Bi-Partisan Media and Facts
Another challenge for the highly divided media landscape is the interpretation of any political event - from the conflict in the middle-east, to loan forgiveness to norms on language that evolve with each generation.
Evolution or progress is rarely the focus of any media, as only conflicts get our attention. The nuanced narrative doesn’t find any eyeballs. The admissions team is also not immune to the effects of such divided media consumption.
What you state as a fact, if it is a controversial one, will be considered an opinion if you are coming from a centrist ideology or from an opposite ideology than the admissions team.
Ideally, avoid mentioning controversial topics except those where the left and right have reached some consensus.
Climate Change is certainly one, and so are rights for LBGTQ+ despite the controversy.
Such progress is natural in every evolving society.
Interpret global events, industry trends, and progress with care. There is a certain language and phrasing that is essential to find this balance. For help, Subscribe to F1GMAT’s Essay Editing Service, where I will help you:
• Capture the most important life and professional events
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• Iteratively Edit to improve the Essay
