The Perils of Canned Essays
Did you ever have one of those moments growing up when
your mother or father gave you a cold, hard look and asked,
"Well, if everybody else was jumping off a bridge, does
that mean you would do it too?"
I often think of that advice when I hear some of the
conventional wisdom making the rounds these days about
MBA admission essays.
You need to recognize that business school essays are
important, but you also need to recognize why they're
important. They are your chance to connect with every single
person on the admissions committee. An effective essay will
make you stand out in committee members' minds as a three
dimensional human being, and – more importantly – convince
them that you're someone they want as a student.
Unfortunately, people who rely on
'canned' admission essays risk doing the exact opposite. They make themselves
sound like a clone of a hundred other applicants in the
admissions pool.
There is one essay template that admissions officers
have seen so often that it has become quite a popular joke among them. It always begins with the writer sitting at
home and thinking about college days. 'And then,' it goes on, 'as I looked around the room, my gaze fell on my old
lacrosse stick propped in the corner. It reminded me of how
much the team had meant to me, and why teams are still so
important to me.'
Of course every single essay didn't use exactly those
words. But they did use the same sequence of images, the
same reasoning, and the same sentiment. And they really did
all mention lacrosse sticks.
I suppose it's possible that a bunch of nostalgic
ex-lacrosse players all just happen to apply to the same top
b-schools each year. (No, they aren't all teammates. They
come
from different schools.) But what I assume happens is that
various people had come across the same version of a model
business school essay and adopted it as their own. Even if
they had substituted a baseball bat or mountain climbing
gear or anything else for the lacrosse stick, they still
sound so much alike, and so uninteresting, that very few of
them make it far in the admissions process.
One of our admissions consultants has told me he's grown
to hate essays that talk about the writer having overcome
some hardship. It's one thing when the writer really did
come through some kind of adversity to get to where they are
in life. But most of the time the hardship the essay
describes doesn't amount to much. The impression the reader
gets is that the applicant is only writing about hardship
because it's supposed to be a sure-fire way to get into
business school. It winds up making them sound both
unexceptional and whiny.
The career goals applicants cite are also often clichéd. At
AdmissionsConsultants, we have noticed a trend towards too
many applicants giving 'to run my own business' as their goal in
life in b-school essays, without showing the ideas to back
it up. If you really want to have your own business, say something about the kind of business you want to
run and why you want to run it. If you can't explain your
reasons for aspiring to run a particular kind of business,
you'll sound exactly like hundreds of other applicants. (I
estimate that we successfully dissuaded over 80% of our
clients last year who started off with this well-worn stated
career goal.)
Recently, we've noticed a lot of people giving
their post-MBA goal as entry to a management rotation
program. That's fine if the program really suits your
interests. However, we suspect that in many cases it's just
that management rotation programs are something that people
are talking about, and applicants think it's an acceptable
goal to put on a business school application. (Hint: It's
not feasible for many applicants and, therefore, it won't
make a good story theme for those same applicants either.)
The bottom line is that MBA admissions committees are
looking for leaders, not followers. The essays are your best
chance to convince them that you have the leadership
qualities they're seeking. That means looking like you,
not like one of the herd. Please be aware that by reading
model essays, or even model outlines, you are probably doing
more to stifle your creativity than unleash it. Key imagery
from those sample essays is likely to remain in your
subconscious when it comes time to bring your brainstormed
essay topics to the keyboard.
Go ahead and read other people's
essays if you are truly convinced that these essays will
indeed help inspire you to organize your thoughts and
to write them up. (You're definitely in the minority if
these essays inspire rather than stifle your creativity
though. Each year hundreds of our clients confess they read
model essays after our consultants point out various cliché
items in the first drafts.) But, regardless of how you
choose to start the essay topic selection process, when you start to write your essay,
make sure that the outline, the words, the facts, the images, the
reasoning, and the style come from no one but you.
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