Transcript
M7 MBA Essay Secret
In this deep dive into MBA Essay writing, I explain why the STAR framework is insufficient for M7 and top MBA essays and why high reflection, high empathy MBA writing is the secret to an M7 admit. STAR framework was built for behavioral interviews. An interviewer asks questions to measure your past behavior. The candidate chooses a situation, converts it into tasks and then maps them to their right actions. The actions they took are now evidence of how they will behave in the future.
The same essay again
But if you adopt these frameworks from interviews to MBA admissions essay writing, you will soon realize that your peers are also adopting a similar framework where they talk about their career growth and similar exposure with a STAR framework. They use it for case interviews and yearly reviews. So when Adcom reads all these essays written with STAR framework, they will struggle to find why you are unique. A few years ago, I worked with a client, a smart consultant who had streamlined the proposal creation for a large technology company. She had bought into this idea that every paragraph needs a STAR framework. When she sent me the first draft, I could see the pattern everywhere. Every single paragraph had this STAR framework, situation, task, action, result with token empathy lines about the beneficiary.
The stereotype
She was applying to an MBA program where historically women applicants were low in representation, school stereotype male and female applicants for their innate behaviors, high agency, high risk taking for men, high agency, high empathy for women. This doesn't mean that there aren't women who are high risk takers or there aren't men who are high in empathy. When I read the client's essay, the writing was competent, the grammar was good, the achievements were real. But when I read the essay in one sitting, it felt like watching someone performing an autopsy on their own life with no empathy, clinically evaluating a situation, inserting herself into the narrative as a variable instead of showing her humanity and then underlining what she had achieved.
Two modes of thought
Human thought runs in two modes, paradigmatic and narrative. The paradigmatic mode is what we use for categorizing, verifying and logically connecting events. The narrative mode constructs meaning through stories where we dissect human intentions, dramatize events, neither should be the core framework for MBA essay writing.
Both Don't Guarantee a Win
A logically structured essay doesn't make a great MBA essay. An emotional story with no logical connections also doesn't make a great MBA essay.
Empathy is the foundation
Empathy is the solution. Van Laer and colleagues elaborated the role of empathy through their transportation theory in 2014 where a good story is all about transporting the reader to feel what the writer is expressing. They have to enter your world. The role of the supporting characters you have written about, the constraints, the challenges and setbacks should feel their own. Empathy is not a sprinkle on your logically structured essay. Empathy is the foundation. So a better alternative is the high reflection, high empathy MBA essay writing. Empathy can be overdone too. The instinct to replace star framework is to go high on empathy. Resist it. Because the problem was never that you couldn't add an empathy line to a star framework. The problem is a lack of balance between reflection and empathy.
Reflection points inward
Reflection points inward. What did I learn about myself at the end of a setback? Did anything I believed turned out to be true? Did I hold the values that I lived by during a challenging part of my life? Empathy points outward. What was it like for the other person? What are their constraints? Did I take them seriously? Did I help them? Did I guide them?
Quadrant: STAR
Reflection and empathy are separate check boxes. Star is the low empathy, low reflection essay. It's clinical but you will not understand what the applicant was going through or the applicant has not empathized with the beneficiary or the supporting characters in an authentic way.
Quadrant: journey
The low empathy, high reflection is the journey essay. The applicant is obsessed with the hero's journey, reflecting on their life, most likely chronologically but when you read the essay, there is no one behind the story. It feels mechanical.
Quadrant: savior
The other end of the spectrum is the high empathy, low reflection essays. This is called the savior narrative. It's all about the beneficiary. You make the beneficiary the hero. You are minimally captured. In an MBA Admissions essay, you are the hero. You have to bring the story back to you.
High Empathy High Reflection
That leaves us with the high empathy, high reflection quadrant. Your essay should have the right balance between your journey through high reflection and beneficiaries or secondary characters captured through high empathy.
Work with an editor
If you need my help in balancing high empathy with high reflection Subscribe to F1GMAT's Essay editing service store.f1gmat.com/essay-editing Atul Jose at [email protected]
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