Used to writing with the soft touch key of an Apple Magic keyboard, working with the harsh touch on tools, nails, and sharp blades felt like a boot camp for my hands that have been shielded away in the cozy click-clack pattern of a keyboard.
Now, if I try to include this as my biggest act of resilience – switching from a white-collar to a blue-collar job for 3 hours on a weekend, the admissions team will treasure my essay for comic relief.
Many applicants use similar narratives about resilience.
We are the biggest heroes in our life.
Even the most self-critical person has tales of glory and redemption that keep them from going into pits of depression.
We as humans need to protect ourselves with tales of our resilience and come back.
Many applicants confuse their psychological need for safety with the truth about their resilience.
Many face real dilemmas while writing MBA essays.
Once, a client – right in the middle of writing the essays, had this realization that “her accomplishments were all mediocre.”
As someone who only wants the client to be in their best mental state to write clearly, I didn’t have any words of wisdom or comeback lines. I just listened to her train of thoughts going from aspirational to highly self-critical.
After that she never came back to her old self – ambitious and positive to face the challenges of M7 MBA application essays.
This is a scary thought for many and could derail your writing process. So tread carefully while adopting the challenges of incorporating genuine resilience.
For easy interpretation, understand these three best practices:
1) Generational Shift – Physical Resilience to Mental Resilience
I have been on a Humphrey Bogart binge-watching to see how the US has changed from the 1940s, the attitude of the society around World War 2, and how each generation has ‘their war,’ activism, and attitude around it.
When protecting the body wasn’t the highest priority for the silent generation, the advancement in medical care brought new sensitivity toward one’s body. No more were heroes on the screen puffing away and drinking to ease the stress. As a society, people moved towards less self-destructive hobbies. Now, with travel and sports, we seem to have evolved to protect and seek genuine pleasure that triggers our subconscious need for exploration.
I am sure the tales of resilience for the admissions team in the 1950s would have been around real physical threats and challenges.
For our generation, the harm is mental, from an overabundance of ‘access’ – access to ‘friends,’ ‘home delivery’ services, and chauffeurs at the press of a button.
The comfort of modern civilization makes the interpretation of physical resilience a stretched narrative unless the applicant was from a developing economy where the quality of the infrastructure hasn’t reached the same reliable standards as a developed economy. Even in that environment, the old tales of starvation remain less believable old tale. That limits the threat of physical harm to only those applicants in war-torn regions/countries (Middle and Eastern Europe) or from countries with high levels of corruption or from the military.
For everyone else, tales of resilience are around mental health.
How many mental health variations can an admissions team read without raising their eyebrows?
I have added my share to the consciousness as well with:
- Sample HBS MBA Essay - Mental Health Awareness (774 Words)
- Sample Booth MBA Personal Growth Essay - Opioid Crisis and Innovation
- Sample Darden MBA Diversity Essay (Fear and Overcoming It)
- Sample Tuck MBA Who You Are Essay: Music as Healer (294 Words)
These are not directly related to mental health – except for the Harvard MBA Essay but are narratives around coping mechanisms for traumas.
2) Learning Curve and Discomfort
Every learning experience has some form of discomfort.
When I advised my wife to learn stick shift driving, her reasoning went into the future of cars and how none of the cars would have stick shifts.
Every industry and function has its own uncomfortable building blocks that are taken over by AI or some automation tool. But still the management expects you to know the fundamentals. Even the MBA curriculum’s core has statistics and accounting despite most of the functions taken over by online tools.
Like Pigeons losing their ability to build nests with generations of co-habitation with humans, our learning of old skills is part of the discomfort narrative.
When applicants include overcoming the discomfort of learning a new function or an outdated process, technology, or system as signs of resilience, they have lost the credibility to take on the rigor of an MBA program.
3) Everything is Comparative
That is the beauty of MBA essays – you can beat a better academically oriented peer with tales of resilience and courage. How you offer the context about the challenges will validate whether the resilience was genuine or made up for MBA essays.
