I will teach you how to bring your life stories to essays faster with F1GMAT's essay guides. Download below or subscribe to F1GMAT's Service and work with me - Atul Jose, Author/Editor/Founding Consultant, F1GMAT(16 Years of helping applicants gain admissions to M7 and Top 30 schools) When I guide clients to write their draft MBA essays, they worry about the emotional context of the opening act.
Should it be an uplifting moment or a negative moment that depresses the admissions team?
All our distractions with social media, sports, movies, puppies, cats, and babies (if you are starting a family) are to distract us from the inevitable path to the end, but we can’t take our eyes off a train wreck.
The admissions team wants to empathize with the negative event that you experienced. Hidden beneath the need to care for another human being, we also have a desire to learn.
We keep a note of all the ways in which our body, soul, and spirit could be destroyed - to resist the path and to avoid the outcome.
When you start the narrative with a negative, follow these 4 guidelines:
1) Don’t start the Opening line with death and destruction
If you want to spot amateur writing, look at the opening line.
It will always be a motion – a bomb exploded, an accident, someone getting hurt, or a movement that shocks you. The applicant is trying to capture the attention of the admissions team with the most shocking aspect of their story – an approach that we have also shared in the Winning MBA Essay Guide. But there is a method to this shortcut.
Set Up -> Unexpected Death and Destruction -> World Shattering
I used this technique for Harvard MBA Sample Essay where the Immigrant applicant from Lebanon who saw her family’s home destroyed and her father’s livelihood upended in just a few minutes. But I didn’t start with the destruction. I had to create a build-up of what it looks like to live in a war zone.
The hours of boredom, the relationship angle, and context on the geo-political development - suddenly interrupted by the “horrors of violence.”
That is a technique you should adopt if you are planning to use War or Violence as a theme for your Essay. See how it is done in the Sample MBA Essays.
2) Anger
The opening is not just about the opening line. It is the opening paragraph. No matter how you open the line, there is always an emotion that readers feel about the opening paragraph – intrigue, sadness, joy, and anger. But in all the varied emotions I have felt reading clients’ essays, nothing kept me reading more than ‘Anger.’
Anger is unresolved hurt.
When we see the protagonist hurt, our instinct searches for redemption or ‘revenge.’
The best revenge is a better-lived life, and all those cliched lines that are now regurgitated ad nauseam as Instagram quotes come from a human’s desire to see balance.
Negative (Protagonist) -> Feeling (Anger) -> Action -> Escape (Protagonist)
The anger is against a system, an ideology, a culture, or a state of apathy in the community.
Never is the ‘Anger’ hurled at one person unless it is a horrid story of abuse.
Breaking down the anger into a meaningful narrative is the challenge.
3) Pain
There is no empathy for the applicant without capturing pain in your MBA essay.
What did it feel like to be abandoned?
Parents/Caregivers abandoning their responsibility to take care of you as a child and the never-ending switch from one foster home to another is a painful narrative.
What did it feel like when the person you cared about the most didn’t see you for who you are?
Parents and caregivers rejecting your sexuality or your search for a dream/career are two examples that show pain.
When an ideology that you cherished turned out to be built to serve a select few people in power?
The wide-eyed ideologue in your early 20s or late teens in college, fighting for a cause that turned out to be a political maneuver with sinister motives, is one of the most common narratives about pain and betrayal.
Losing a friend/family member to addiction is a moment of pain. The feeling is not just from the outcome but from the effort you took and helplessness to change the outcome.
Pain comes in physical and emotional forms.
Strangely, narratives on physical pain are the least effective.
It immediately feels manipulative, as readers can easily relate to physical pain. But our emotional pains are diverse from circumstances, worldview, and the behavior of friends, family, and caregivers.
The narrative on emotional pain has a novelty.
We are seeking that novelty in each line we read. Give the admissions team who are reading essays in the hundreds with that novelty.
4) Escape
I sat and read in shock a client’s story of escape from familial abuse. Unfortunately, the escape was to alcohol addiction from Age 13 to 15.
The details, although familiar in so many stories I have read, also felt new. There was something about the town, the skewed worldview of the parents, and the applicant’s own search that felt authentic.
I couldn’t stop reading.
I knew that the applicant was fine. But I just couldn’t stop reading.
I wanted to throw a life jacket and help the person out of the misery.
Just at that moment, a mentor came to the narrative.
That feeling to escape from the intense negative feeling is when you need to bring a positive twist to the story. This is the essence of the W-Pattern narrative that I have captured in F1GMAT’s Essay Guides.
There is a brilliant movie – The Lost Weekend (1945), where the protagonist is a chronic alcoholic.
Each sequence of events throws the protagonist down to the pits of hell. As an audience I just wanted the person to find an Escape. But the escape was not happening. I was tired of watching the downward spiral. And then it happened, not like a magical switch but with an ambiguous tone.
Some of the best negative narratives in the opening paragraph or in an essay have such an ambiguous transformation.
The person is not fully cured. But the person escaped from the spiral.
When you give your story a small escape, the admissions teams would wish to give you the full escape with an admission. There is a subtle way to reach this point in your essays. It can easily turn manipulative if the idea is adopted with an amateur essay structure.
