When you read MBA Essays like me for editing, you begin to see the vast range of consciousness poured into the paper – all to get the coveted seat in an M7 or T15 school.
The open-ended type of essays like in Harvard (What More You Want to us to Know), Stanford (What Matters Most to You), Booth (Tell us Who You Are), Haas (Feels Alive Essay), Duke Fuqua (25 Random Things), Yale (Commitment Essay), Ross (Essay Prompts), Darden (About you Not in Resume), forces the applicant to show a persona outside their work self.
In all the Good MBA Essays, I could see the struggle – the struggle to find oneself.
Think about it – when you were 5, the grown-up world was an abstract concept shielded from you through parents and their filtering mechanism. But you peel each layer to find the truth, truths that take you closer to what you want, what you care about.
But then the market forces orient you to a set of skills that qualify you to make a living – be a Finance person because you love numbers, a Marketing or Consulting person because you are outgoing. And so begins the matching of personality traits to professions.
Your soul has degraded into a job rat.
You don’t see the world with the same wonderment as a 5-year-old. It is a harsh – straight line to staring at a screen. Sure, there was rebellion in your teen against the system, but you fell in line with the system. Some changes you could bring. But you want to do more.
You can’t let the earth – the beautiful green dome be dismantled into pieces for a few to build another home in the Hamptons.
You want to change how we finance green technology – an innovative mix of derivative products, crowdsourcing, and leveraging the assets of the fossil fuel industry.
You want to change how we consume media – not like the morning coffee addicts, moody and bitter until the first shot. The time on screen is an old model of monetizing new media that you want to change with microcredits.
You had enough of the dying children in an emerging economy. There is a better way to circumvent corrupt officials who eat away 80% of the donations. Better ledger systems to track even the last grain.
You've had enough of living under the shadows of your parents. You want to carve a path that is inspiring and not just chasing the dough.
You want to bridge the media bubbles and the attention economy that turns productive people into debating bots.
You are eager to change how the system works.
But all through the eagerness to change how we live, transact, explore, and travel, there has always been a larger force that is looking for the status quo.
A force that is not easy to be dismantled. These forces are integrated into the culture and psyche of people.
To restructure the culture, you need the right team and peers who faced ‘the struggle’ and overcame many.
You want funds that think beyond the obvious.
You want the support of leaders who have the vision for the 22nd century. Vision beyond themselves.
Such peer groups are rare.
But when an applicant captures the struggle to find the ideal self, the ideal peer group, and the ideal future, the reader empathizes.It connects with a self that they had abandoned a long time ago to be in line with the system.
Evoke those ideals with words.
Share the Struggle of finding a better world, a better self.
