The Hidden Payoff of Your B-School Essays
One of the negative trends I've noticed in management
education in recent years is the growing unhappiness among MBA employers with b-school grads writing skills.
MBA employers regularly say that the inadequate communication skills
(meaning both speaking and writing) of b-school graduates are their top complaint about new hires. One recruiter for the financial services industry told
a reporter for the Wall Street Journal that the majority of MBAs he
tested simply were not capable of writing about an investment opportunity at the
level needed to communicate with sophisticated investors. His company would have to invest
a significant amount of time and training before they could trust
any of the applicants he spoke with to interact directly with clients.
These complaints are a timely reminder that, even in todays highly wired world, written communication is a
vital skill for business professionals.
Your business school admissions essays represent an opportunity to
improve your written communication skills and make sure that
your writing rises to the level demanded of business
executives.
Why Competent Writing Matters
Businesses lose money when
information is obscured or distorted by poor internal communication.
Problems can go without recognition or repair if managers
are not able to explain a situation and its consequences to
other staff members.
Opportunities can be lost if staff do not communicate news
to each other accurately and effectively. The best financial
analysis in the world is useless unless the person who came
up with it can also convey it to other people.
Poor external communication can be costly, too. Managers' communication
skills affect the company's ability to maintain the confidence of partners and investors. As the financial services recruiter noted, written communication plays a big part in maintaining those relationships. Writing that is sloppy, unclear, or overly casual reflects poorly on the organization it comes from and undermines partners and investors confidence.
Your future employers will demand that you show, at the very
minimum, a professional level of competence in your written
communication.
Writing Skills and Admission Decisions
The importance of written communication to business success is one reason why b-schools ask applicants to write all those
admissions essays. Theyre not screening for Shakespeare.
They are, however, looking for candidates who seem capable of presenting information and ideas in an effective way.
Ironically, although b-schools value applicants who write well, most MBA programs do not offer much instruction or support to students who need to work on a soft skill like writing. That fact has two implications.
One is that if you do not go into business school with already-developed writing skills, you will have to take it upon yourself to improve your writing on your own and, given the place of competent writing in business success, that effort is well worth making.
The other implication is that poor writing may sink an
otherwise strong application. Bad writing is not a
shortcoming that admissions committees can count on an
applicant having fixed by the time he or she graduates from
an MBA program. If an applicants writing is so bad that it
gives an admissions committee reason to worry about the impression
that the person might make on recruiters, the committee would be well justified in denying that applicant admission.
Winning the Confidence of
Admissions Committees
As I noted earlier, the quality of writing in your business
correspondence will be crucial to winning the confidence of
partners and investors. Similarly, the quality of writing in your admission essays is crucial to winning the confidence of business school admissions committees.
Good content, though vital, is not enough. You also need to present that content effectively. The strongest applicant in the pool can sabotage his or her admissions chances by conveying their achievements in writing that is clumsy, off-putting, or hard to understand.
Moreover, as is often noted, your essays are your chance to show the admissions committee the person behind your GMAT score and resume. You reveal your character through aspects of writing like voice, word choice, and rhetoric.
B-school applicants who resort to using mass-produced essay templates (or, worse, ghostwritten essays) are cheating themselves along with everybody else. They are missing out on their best chance to tell the admissions committee who they are. They are also missing out on a chance to develop the writing skills that benefit a business career.
I often hear applicants complain about the amount of tim Ą they must spend on drafting and revising business school essays. Thats a legitimate complaint.
Writing admissions essays does take a lot of time. However,
applicants often fail to appreciate an important benefit
they can gain from the process of preparing essays: the
chance to analyze and improve OQ{[ 6ting skills.
Most of us have little reason to focus on our writing skills
after we graduate from college. We may write memos and
reports as part of our work, but we tend not to get much
feedback on how effective that written work is. Its easy to fall into bad habits,
especially when thXpzRe and context of our normal
writing tasks is already widely understood by our readers.
There's a real danger of settling for a quality of writing that is good enough to get by with in routine work but not good enough to meet the challenges of a management position.
Conclusion
Business school essays are a rare opportunity to analyze the quality of your writing and to improve your writing skills. Writing a good essay is hard work. Its not just a question of the time you have to put into organizing your ideas and expressing them on paper. Its also a question of the considerable effort needed to read your essay the way a complete stranger would, and to recognize and fix what is missing, confusing, or unclear. Its a truly humbling experience. However, it will leave you with a much better sense of how you can persuasively communicate complex ideas to another person. Thats a skill that can pay off not only in helping you win acceptance to your targeted b-school, but in improved job performance and career prospects as well.
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