Without a personal crisis narrative, there is nothing at stake. Life goes linearly with no bumps to surprise the admissions team and no lessons to share for the reader’s survival machine.
Without setbacks, there is no story. Without a story, there is no essay.
Before you aimlessly include small challenges as crises, understand these 4 types of crises:
1) Health Crisis
I watched the Hollywood heroes of the 1930s and 40s puff away in style and read in horror of their last moments. The habit halved them in size before the untimely goodbye.
The many accounts of the horrors of Cancer - the chemo, the desperation, and finally, the acceptance felt impersonal until my wife and I began to care for my father-in-law.
From the jovial ‘positive’ minded former sales guy, each day’s radiation sliced the man’s optimism away. In two months, his mobility was impaired, then his appetite and the final weeks were all about dealing with hallucinations.
It is the horror of watching a man disintegrate into nothing that doesn’t leave one’s mind. But I felt happy seeing him relieved. I took the final photo – the clean-shaven face and his favorite shirt- all at peace with the still body. No more radiations. No more pain. I felt happy for him.
Applicants’ essays are not similar in trajectory at all to what I have experienced.
Some fought on longer for their loved ones. Some fought for their own life. Each battle is a mixed news of victory and tragic loss. But each outcome gave the applicant a perspective, a valuable perspective to see what is important and to prioritize.
The health setback narrative works beautifully if you write from the heart. Do it with care and sincerity. The words will flow.
2) Financial Crisis
I read an op-ed about a 21-year-old hitchhiker on her first week in a Euro trip. The hotels were overbooked, and she had to manage a hostel-like stay. The narrative is borderline comical as she points at the absolute horror of staying in a slightly inconvenient bunk bed.
Then, I read a Harvard MBA essay about an applicant from a reputed business family who lost everything in the Lebanon war of 2006. The Father came to New York with nothing in his name, got help from family and friends, set up a small Deli, built enough cash reserve to partner with a few fellow immigrants, and started a Lebanese restaurant while also orienting the applicant and her brother to a career in Finance.
The hero was the Father, but a line showing why she cared so much about ‘close out the register’ as a mantra didn’t make any sense as an opener for the MBA essay until she added the backstory.
The Father would ask the kids to sit with him and settle the books – every day. They learned financial discipline and ‘doing the work’ for the day with this practice. There was no tomorrow. All is today.
3) Career Crisis
The career crisis narrative only works for those who are in the military, sports, or creative roles.
The physical injury or emotional scars that forced veterans to switch to civilian life on short notice opens questions about fitness to join the MBA program.
That is the tricky part of capturing a crisis that affected you deeply. Care should be given not to portray in any way that the crisis was so deep that you can’t function at an intellectual and emotional level that is expected in a highly engaged M7 and Top 20 MBA programs.
Physical injury in sports is a familiar but effective way to balance competence, and the role luck plays in keeping a sportsperson’s career alive. The admissions team is most familiar with this narrative arc. Use them confidently.
The creative career crisis narrative is structured in two forms.
One is a self-reflection about one’s own competence among the best creatives in the world – an honest reflection that I have read a few times for Stanford’s What Matters essay. The reflection is soon followed by a pivot story into a business function where creativity is valued. The role tapped into another aspect of the applicant’s skill – this time around leadership or an unexplored quantitative skill.
The second one is on pursuing both careers – creative and management. These are the YouTube Creators who want to gain a business perspective and foundational skills in accounting, strategy, and operations. An interaction and a setback from a content deal often act as plot points for the creative career crisis. Missing obvious deals from a lack of perspective about the business side of content and leadership narratives to scale the content business are two approaches that applicants facing creative career crises use.
4) Value Crisis
Value crises are broad. From parents with traditional values disowning LGBTQ+ sons to suppressing freedom of speech, all in the guise of political correctness, are two narratives from the opposite political spectrum. But there is a vast number of middle narratives on value crisis.
From corruption to growth at all costs to suppressing individual rights in the name of security to horrors of discarding mental health warnings of Finance peers to policy manipulation to support the incumbent – the disintegration of values runs deep and to far corners of the world.
The challenge for the applicant is to balance the idealistic narrative with actions, stories, and words that make the idealism palatable for the admissions team. And there are no templates to connect with a person who might not agree with the value crisis you might be citing.
Understand the politics of the school you are applying to before deploying one of the four crisis stories into the MBA Essays, especially the Value crisis.
