There is an insightful chapter on cultures in Erin Meyer’s best-selling book Culture Map, where she demonstrates how professionals from different countries choose to offer more context or less context in conversations.
This is the one quality that separates each culture.
If you want to make sure that the person on the admissions team will understand the context behind your stories, you should do a quick research about the team – the ethnicity, the background (education and job before admissions), and most importantly – age.
Ethnicity
What we call – modern Western culture (US, Australia, Canada, UK, Germany, Netherlands) has predominantly low-context communication. This means every instruction is spelled out to the last detail, plans made around the detail, and implementation monitored to the last second. Most global economies have adopted this culture in professional life, but cultural nuances of the global team spill into relationships, interaction, and planning.
Eastern cultures never work in such isolated to the last atom detail. There are ambiguities, the whole picture, and strategies that go beyond the immediate. The Yin and Yang of these two ideologies are driving the world economy.
In MBA admissions, applicants from Eastern, Middle Eastern, and African cultures write with the assumption that an admissions person with Western culture or ethnicity will interpret a high-context description of the events around an achievement or setback. It rarely works out when the admissions team has volume goals to meet.
While writing your essays, simplify the narrative just enough for the low-context cultures to understand. Don’t simplify too down in the context scale to insult the reviewer. Just enough. If you need our assistance, Subscribe to F1GMAT’s Essay Editing Service.
Educational Background
I have been a decade and a half past my engineering career into a full-time writing and consulting career. Still, it is tough to shake off the engineering mind. Your education and the work you did with that education – even if it was for 2-5 years will have a huge impact on how you see the world, interpret a problem, communicate with clients, and see life and world events.
The systems vs application thinking is a by-product of Humanities vs Engineering education. Humanities orient a person to think about the whole (high-context) instead of just the immediate (low-context).
I can easily spot a narrative that a professional from a quant-focused education wrote versus someone from a non-technology background has written.
The emotional narrative – depending on the person’s emotional intelligence, tends to be similar. It is how each group presents the details that give away the education.
The admissions team is also not immune to such a worldview. Balancing the immediate with the long-term goals is critical to ensure that your essay is not interpreted as too ambitious or too trivial.
Age
An early 30-year-old or a late 20s applicant is highly competitive. You just have to read the popular forums to see how they interpret competition in the application or how the admissions team treated their application. The acerbic tone is a by-product of the age and has little to do with the personality. At 35, and most certainly by 40, people mellow down.
The admissions team – at least the senior manager is a person who is likely to be in their late 30s and early 40s.
The tone of your writing might not be interpreted kindly by an admissions person in their late 30s or early 40s or even someone in their 50s.
You should know the team composition before writing a flamboyant narrative about achievements.
