All MBA Application Related Tips

You are multitasking through projects, worrying about choosing the wrong school, keeping a low profile on your MBA plan, managing the politics in your team, coordinating with recommenders, preparing for the GMAT, collecting your transcripts, developing a plan to address your profile weakness, arranging funds and writing and rewriting essays.

Copy Paste IMPACT in essays and recommendation letter is the most common reason for REJECTION. Admission team can see through the veiled attempt at differentiating the tone. Phrases that capture IMPACT is often the same in essays and recommendation letter. We recommend that the same person review the essays and the recommendation letter. This way, the reviewer can suggest edits to differentiate style and tone.

We have come a long way in understanding what storytelling is. The influx of streaming services and movies with parallel & reverse chronology has given us the cognitive capacity to predict ending.

The Essay Reviewer might be familiar with the touristy spots. If you mention cliched experiences about New York, Paris, London or Agra, you are missing out on a chance to share a unique 'slice of life' experience in your essay.

All the hard work on the narrative can be undone with last minute edits. I am not talking about edits on sentence structure but changes in story and motivations. Even unnecessary edits on the carefully chosen phrase can affect the flow of the narrative and eventually the cumulative impact.

Two assumptions stand in the way of rewriting an essay. One - storytelling is a mash up of flowery phrases. Two - complex sentences and narratives with jargons are required to prove your expertise. When you combine flowery phrases with jargon-filled complex sentences, the results can be an eyesore for a reviewer.

The first draft of the essay should be a free flow of your inner thoughts, beliefs, and narrative excesses (blog-like). The real work starts at the Second draft.  One common mistake that I have seen applicants make is taking the shortcut and directly writing with a tone that is similar to a second draft. They all sound the same with no uniquely identifiable attributes.

I saw the Harvard MBA Admissions Director asking applicants to be genuine and the INSEAD MBA Managing Director recommending not to polish the Essay too much; hints that the edited version of the essays tends to be devoid of any personality or genuineness.

As you might have experienced by now, switching styles is not easy in MBA Application Essays. We tend to overdo the blog part with self-references, slangs, or try our hand at humor. Essays have no place for any. But with recent edits in our review service, one part that has helped my clients is the Art of Pillaring. I have included a chapter on it in Winning MBA Essay Guide. The idea is to break the expected series of events. Do parallel storytelling or jumble the sequence to such a degree that you find the perfect balance in narrative and a standard essay.