Shocking truth about MBA Application Essays

During the orientation session in a leading Business School, when MBAs were asked “Who among you are clueless about your short-term goals?” -  87% of the participants raised their hands. So much for clear post-MBA goals. AdCom would rather admit candidates who can articulate their goals than an aimless wanderer who look at professors or classmates for inspiration. Not many will follow the professor’s academic path when they hear stories about the wretched academic papers and the boring tasks of evaluating test papers of the brilliant to the not-so brilliant to the plain awful students.


History Repeats Itself

Most applicants who plan for the MBA have reached the upper strata of their career path, and look at MBA as an escape from their routine jobs. The research about MBAs will lead them to the employment report that give split-up of jobs by functions and industries. “Consulting sounds fine” is the inner dialogue of most applicants. “I have good communication skills. I had even offered sound advice on investing in stocks. Maybe I should consider Finance.” Further research happens, and the realization that finance is second only to consulting for increase in post-MBA salary soon follows. Applicants now start to think about top MBA in Finance. “Wharton, Booth or Stern?”. Strategies are developed to create two sets of essays for each job function. What happens - year after year, is that the employment report is the cue that directs MBA applicants to one of the job functions; evaluation of their strengths and weakness is an exercise only for the essays.

Private vs. Personal

“Don’t fake it. Show your authentic self.” Even we have given such advice but writing personal essays is not writing about your private lives. The AdCom does not want to hear about your dog or the girlfriend that broke up with you when you revealed your MBA plans. “She was thinking too low.” The applicant felt that the sentence would offer context on the adversity that he had faced. A less ambitious girlfriend is not an adversity that the AdCom is expecting. ‘Shock and Awe’ works in brilliant essays and even for the unintentionally funny ones. I bet there is a collection of essays that the AdCom has kept safely, and read every other day for comic relief. Your essay does not deserve to be there. Applicants assume that they are creating the context with private details. No matter how colorfully you have written your essays, your upbringing, lifestyle, and aspirations cannot be completely put into words.

Great Writers = Guaranteed MBA? NO!!

What more can applicants do when an essay is one of the two mediums to convey your motivations? You can either write like thousands of other applicants or find that unique inner voice. You don’t have to write like Howard Jacobson, Salman Rushdie or William Faulkner. If you do, what are you doing getting an MBA? Start writing novels. What AdCom expects is an “emotional connect.” You have heard that several times. No one has cared to explain what it is. I will try. Any writing that invokes a strong emotional reaction: sadness, disappointment, humiliation, uncertainty, joy, and finally inspiration will put you in a different category – “the unique applicant.” There is little place for “laughter.” It’s a thriller/suspense/parable genre. If you had paid close attention to the list of emotional states, you would notice that there are just two positive emotional states – “Joy” & “Inspiration”.

Why do we love negative emotional states?

Don’t blame yourself or your brooding genes, blame Freud!

According to Freud’s Structural Apparatus of the Psyche, our personality is shaped by two conflicting elements – “Id” that dictates our impulses and “Super Ego” that advises you “not to put mud in your mouth.” Now picture that in your mother’s voice.

The parental advice that has shaped our beliefs about personal safety, religion, or lack of it, and ideal behavior in a cooperating society is the “Super Ego.” Our environment, friends, siblings, parents, and thinkers who have influenced us over the years reshape our “Super Ego.”

The residue of the conflict between “Id” and “Super Ego” is our “Personality.”

We are inherently managing conflict on a regular basis, either internally with our dialogues or externally through problem solving. AdComs are having the same  “Inner Conflict” – “Should I read the essay again”, “Am I missing on a great candidate”,  “This essay sucks..Oh wait a minute”, “Should I go for the coffee break?”, or “This is the 100th Boring Essay. I hate my life”. You can’t manage their inner conflict, but you sure can replicate this natural state of conflict with your essays.

The essays that lack conflicts are often rejected. Let’s face it, they are boring. No one wants to sit through a brag sheet even if you are an excellent candidate, and the bragging is with full earnestness. Learn the art of subtlety and strategically include bragging in recommendation letters. The essays are your opportunity to take the admission team through a journey that changed your life. You have to shortlist events in your life that had conflicts. Take the AdCom through the four negative emotional states: sadness, disappointment, humiliation, uncertainty and don’t forget to end with “Joy” or “Inspiration.”

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