I discourage clients from starting with the motivation in the opening line, except for schools where the goals essay is limited to 250 or 200 words. In such cases, you don’t have much of a choice but to be direct and then expand on the circumstances that led you to believe that your goals are important and why an MBA is the tool that you need now to achieve those goals.
Importance of Chronology
A client, while discussing my essay structuring strategy, shared how he is worried about the chronological approach for the strengths essay. I assured him that life’s movement from limited awareness to a deep awareness of the world as we age is a pattern of learning that is easy to understand. We have an insatiable appetite for finding patterns even in Kismat and assigning motivation to random events. If you want evidence, look at how the news headlines work for assigning motivation for random stock market fluctuations. The multiple variables and movement of funds could be from a salary cycle, unwarranted worries, or random movement of funds among the most active traders. There could be no motivation. Still, we cling on to a motivation.
We want to understand how it all began. We assign a timeline to a day’s trade - morning at x points, by afternoon down by y points, by 3, stabilized at z points. This is not from a lack of awareness but our mental map to make sense of any event.
Timeline is what drives all narratives.
Next time you have a conversation with a friend – see how often the person brings a timeline of a day, a career, a project, or their life’s ups and downs.
There is always a timeline – a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The three-act story structure is not an invention of modern plays or movies. It is how we structure our lives.
Don’t break such ingrained expectations in your essay. Meet the expectations with chronology.
MBA Essays with More than 300 words
When the word limit increases, so does your opportunity to build stories around your motivation. Depending on the school’s expectations, you can add story elements or directly express your motivation with ‘just enough’ storytelling. The judgment on where a story works and where it doesn’t is where most experienced editors come into play. If you want to collaborate with me and apply my editorial skills, sign up for F1GMAT’s Essay Editing Service. I enjoy working with driven applicants who see an MBA application essay as a challenge worth overcoming. Don’t disconnect from the branding, writing, and editing process. Win in an M7 or T10 MBA application doesn’t work without your full engagement, no matter how much PR you see around great consultants who could turn around an applicant’s fortune. Engage, and you will bring many interesting details that your competitors can’t bring to the application.
Make the admissions think about you beyond nationality, gender, GMAT/GRE, and GPA, and see you as a real person with a universal appeal.
