Many years ago I was hired by several Wall Street investment banks in New York City to assist their corporate analysts with their applications to b-school. During this time, I interacted with a wide variety of clients, each with his or her own unique set of strengths, weaknesses, and circumstances.
Below you will find eight tales of business school hopefuls, whose stories may serve both as inspiration and warning. As you read them, you may identify with the applicants’ challenges in completing a winning application. Their stories may also help you figure out how to best describe your experiences to showcase your most desirable qualities.
I met two brothers, just a year apart in age, who were both applying to Harvard. Each had exceptional credentials, although one brother had near-perfect grades and test scores and had gone to Harvard as an undergrad; the other went to Bowdoin.
At that time, one of the essay questions inquired about a favorite extracurricular activity. As both were expert skiers, skiing was an obvious choice. The two brothers were born and raised in affluence on Fifth Avenue in New York City and, unsurprisingly, they had learned to ski in glamorous locations. The Swiss Alps was the most frequented and memorable locale.
One brother made the Midwest the scene of his essay and mentioned the location only once. His story focused on the bumps on a “skull and crossbones” run he did over and over for days until he got it right. He spoke of the importance of earning performance, about always working harder than the guy next to you. This was the bedrock of everything he did—challenging himself again and again until he had mastered the task at hand. Skiing, as a metaphor for all of his pursuits, was about being the best he could be and, through sheer force of will, attaining his goals.
He also spoke of the beauty of the mountainous terrain, of his awe of nature, and the freedom he felt when speeding down vertigo-inducing runs. He made creative use of his passion and talent for skiing, and he made a compelling analogy between his core ethos of hard work and the commitment he would bring to b-school. The unique twist to his material was refreshing, and it was on message. Even though the only skiing I’ve ever done is down my driveway on a cafeteria tray, I could relate to his story.
The other brother chose to write about skiing in Switzerland and chronicled other ski trips abroad. His story was basically about the exhilaration of skiing. Unfortunately, this essay was predictable, and the setting in the Alps was a turn-off. In the absence of gripping insights, the venue came to be front and center. He came off as just another pampered candidate. This was the brother who had the superior grades, Harvard undergrad degree, and better test scores.
Have you guessed the ending to this story? The brother who wrote about conquering the “skull and crossbones” run won admission to Harvard Business School. The brother with the presumed edge in his academics did not.
It’s important to note, though, that it was not just this one essay that earned one brother an admission and the other a rejection. It was the consistency of their themes in the remaining essays. For the brother admitted, these themes painted an appealing picture of a hard worker with leadership and teamwork abilities.
In fact, knowing both brothers, I would say the essays ultimately did reflect their true personalities. One was indeed pompous. The other was thoughtful and self-aware.
As you can see, the “how” in your writing is powerful enough to elevate you or sink you.
Here’s another example. An applicant I worked with had to write about the person he admired most. This was a common essay question at the time, and it stumped a lot of applicants. Most applicants assumed the subject of the essay had to be famous or powerful, which made the task more daunting. Once they decided on an individual, they were often at a loss as to what to write about.
As we’ve said before, knowing the agenda in a question goes a long way. This question is really asking you about the character traits and strengths you value in others, as well as in yourself, which is revealed in your selection. Whom you select is not as important as what you say about him or her, so your choices can be humble.
This particular gentleman chose to write about his wife. The moment he picked her, I knew the essay was at risk of being compromised. Would you want to work alongside someone whose view of the world ends at his front door? This essay was too intimate for a b-school application, and it demonstrated that he was inward-focused and myopic.
How does this story end? This candidate was not aiming for schools like Harvard, but nonetheless, schools that were selective. He was accepted into one of them. In spite of this acceptance, though, it would be unwise to conclude that this essay didn’t impact his application negatively. The essay certainly reflected questionable judgment.
There is also tremendous variability in admissions factors to take into account. During the year in which this candidate applied, applying to b-school was not as popular as in previous years, so he was in a less competitive pool. Furthermore, many business schools have favorite hunting grounds for recruiting applicants. He worked at one of them—a prestigious Wall Street firm. He had a solid and impressive work history.
In all likelihood, the admissions board found this essay problematic but was able to overlook it in light of other redeeming factors. Nonetheless, times have changed. The demand for admittance to b-school remains high, and schools are more sensitive to issues of character. If the same person applied with the same essay now, I think an admissions board would give far more weight to this one essay, and it would be more damaging.
Many years ago, community service was not the popular and accepted activity it is now. But we have become a society of do-gooders—so much so that a majority of our nation’s high schools now integrate community service into their requirements. At b-schools, service through organizations like Habitat for Humanity is an equally acknowledged staple of student life. In this process, volunteerism is important because it reflects empathy and interest in others—both critical to effective leadership.
When I met this next applicant, schools were just getting jazzed about the concept of volunteerism. He was savvy enough to recognize that a volunteer activity would indeed communicate his positive attributes and put him ahead of the curve. Several of the b-school applications he was working on required an essay about the applicant’s greatest accomplishments. He wanted one of those accomplishments to be his commitment to community service. The problem? He didn’t have one.
Shortly thereafter he hit upon an idea. Late one night when he was burning the midnight oil, he was still at work when the cleaning crew came in. He noticed that the woman who cleaned his office spoke little English. He decided to help her learn English as a second language; he thought this might allow her to do something more than cleaning up after others. This became the subject of one of his essays on his greatest accomplishments.
If you’ve already learned a thing or two through these examples, you may know where I’m heading with this one.
This essay was a stretch. The concept of helping someone could have been moving, but this act of kindness seemed self-serving. Common sense says that someone who wants to go out and help others actually leaves his building to do so. Although helping this woman was noble, as a greatest accomplishment it came off like a bad Hollywood movie. The premise also seemed flimsy because of the timing; a genuine history of service to others dates back to some period of time before your application is due.
I can’t tell you exactly what happened with this candidate because I lost contact with him. I do know he was struggling to come up with material for not only this essay, but also many others. He was hampered by the fact that he was relatively young, that he had only two years of work experience, and that those experiences were very typical of an investment banker. With all work and no play, and nothing truly dramatic in his life, it was a challenge to create a compelling essay.
Hey, no one said this was going to be easy.
By contrast to the last tale, this next candidate had a genuinely unique background. He had worked in his family business since college, and he was a third-generation executive in a true mom-and-pop operation. As he was an only child, the legacy of this company would be in his hands.
This candidate seemed to have such rich material to work with. First, his family was in the business of wholesaling comic books, a nontraditional industry if ever there was one. (To build diversity, b-schools seek out candidates from diverse venues like this.) From the story of how his grandparents built their business from nothing to his future plans for the business, there was great opportunity for creativity in his essays. Surely there were many issues he could touch upon to describe what the MBA could offer him.
Naturally, I was surprised when I read his essay addressing why he wanted the MBA. Overall, the essay was passive. It lacked passion and focus. Nowhere was there anything about his vision for the comic book company, how the comic book industry was evolving, what the threats and opportunities in the marketplace were. He wrote nothing of the need for this company to integrate accounting principles, business strategy, or professional marketing into its practices.
Of all the candidates I had met at that point, he seemed to have the strongest, most genuine need for the MBA.
Or so it seemed. The truth was, like many family businesses, this one was embroiled in family power struggles. The “Mom” and “Pop” of this business, the applicant’s grandparents, did not want to relinquish control, and his father was wrestling for dominance. This candidate might have been the next generation, but the business was in his father’s hands for the time being.
As for his personal life, it was equally stalled. Friends from college had married or moved on with their professional lives. He felt out of sync and uninspired. His real reason for wanting to go to b-school was to figure out what he wanted to do with his life.
This unstated objective was unfortunately quite evident. As we said before, b-schools are not pit stops for figuring out what you want to do with yourself. If you’re not clear on your professional objectives in the short and medium term, how can you select the most appropriate program to help you achieve those objectives?
It was hard for this candidate to map out a potential career plan, but he did it. He articulated it well in the rewrite of his essay, and the plan did not include a career in the field of comic books.
He applied to six schools, many of which were state programs, reasonable choices given his academics—a B average and decent test scores. He was admitted to all but one and chose to attend a school in Texas, far from his family.
This story is about an applicant who was injured in a farming accident when he was a child, which left him with a devastating physical handicap. Despite this handicap, he had done exceptionally well and was in a senior position at a blue-chip investment bank.
When I met him, his application was almost complete. Each essay I read was better than the last—well crafted, passionate, interesting, and reflective. I had almost no feedback for him. He had excellent test scores but only average grades, and he had done his undergrad at a little-known college in the Midwest. His target list of b-schools consisted of the most prestigious, top-tier programs.
Even today, almost every application has a personal statement essay, or what I call a bonus question. Although it’s optional, I almost always encourage individuals to submit something here, as it is an invaluable opportunity to provide the admissions board with additional information. It can be used to communicate something remarkable, or it can be used to explain poor grades or test scores (this is where many applicants indeed do this, but we’ll get to the “how” of that later).
Obviously, I thought this candidate could make use of the personal statement opportunity. But he was quite resolute that with what he’d communicated in his other essays, there was nothing more to say.
End of story? Almost.
You won’t be surprised to learn that he was admitted to his first-choice schools. You may be surprised, however, to learn that not a single essay in any of his applications made mention of his childhood accident or of the resulting handicap. And yet an essay about this injury would go straight to the heart of character, as would a story about overcoming adversity. But this applicant did not want his essays to elicit sympathy. He had spent his whole life trying to make his handicap a nonissue, and he was admitted solely on the merits of his candidacy.
Analysts are generally hired straight out of college. They spend two years in an analyst training program, after which they are expected to matriculate at a business school or find other work. Post-MBA, they often return to the bank in a more senior capacity, but this is not a contractual agreement. These analysts are often a “safe” or “easy” admit; the banks are considered feeder programs to the schools because success in the job often correlates with success at b-school.
I worked with one applicant who was a second-year analyst at a prestigious Wall Street investment bank. She was the top-ranked analyst in her second-year program, an honor bestowed upon her for her outstanding work. She had good grades, but unfortunately just an average GMAT score. At less competitive schools, her score would not have been a problem, but she was fixated on getting into one of the nation’s best programs. I couldn’t blame her.
Her essays would have to promote her candidacy above the penalty of a low score. She began by addressing her GMAT score in the “personal statement” section. She explained that she had test anxiety and that despite taking the exam on two different occasions, she was unable to improve her score. Because she scored lower on the Math portion of the GMAT, she played up her success in calculating complex financial transactions for the bank. I thought she had proactively put her problematic scores into context.
Unfortunately, her other essays were predictable. They lacked introspection and passion. She was driven and ambitious—assets in her line of work, but hardly qualities that would make her an engaging dinner partner. Despite my feedback explaining that her essays were boring, her rewrites were no better. She wasn’t able to tell a compelling story.
Younger applicants would generally need more years of experience to accrue the professional and emotional maturity that older applicants have. For an applicant from a feeder program like this, there is probably a discount factor. That is, schools may not expect the most inspiring essays. But in her case, the bad essays gave them no reason to admit her over the highly qualified competition.
This candidate applied to five schools and was rejected by all of them. Because I had worked with other candidates with similar backgrounds and scores, I was able to determine that her essays were the death blow. I encouraged her to reapply after she had left the bank and gained some maturity.
She spoke a little French, so she chose to attend a graduate-level, one-year foreign language immersion program involving overseas study. She became fluent in French and lived abroad. When she applied to b-school again, she composed essays that sang with excitement; they spoke of her passion for France and her experiences while there. She reapplied to three of her original b-school targets and won admission to her first-choice school, a bastion of finance. At graduation, she returned to a life of investment banking, her greatest passion.
The moral of this story is not that you have to go to Paris or change your life completely to write a great essay; it’s that you have to write about something that inspires or excites you. For this woman, it took getting out of the box to find that inspiration.
A final note: Later on, it occurred to me that the b-school had truly lost out in not admitting this applicant the first time, proof again that essays are imperfect predictors. She quickly took on a leadership role at that school and became a genuine champion of the program. For the time she was there, she made a difference. Perhaps this school had underestimated how great a contribution she would have made the first time she applied.
Shortly thereafter, I worked with another second-year analyst at a different investment bank. She, too, was a bright star at her firm. Unfortunately, like the applicant above, her GMAT scores were mediocre.
Unsurprisingly, she had targeted top schools for admission. Her first choice was regarded as the “in” school and had just been chosen as number one by a widely read business magazine. It offered not only a great education, but also a dramatic departure from the cutthroat atmosphere of other programs, as its focus was on teamwork and other “soft skills.” It was going to be extremely difficult to get into this already popular number-one program.
This applicant worried about her GMAT score, and for good reason. Like the analyst applicant we mentioned earlier, she was able to make a compelling argument for why she could manage the academic rigor of b-school and that she should not be judged by her score. She focused on portraying herself as the type of student who fit with the culture of this school. She slaved over her essays.
Unlike the other analyst, this applicant had a unique advantage: She had founded, almost single-handedly, a volunteer program aimed at getting Wall Street executives and analysts out of their offices and into community service projects. The program set new standards in this industry. It not only succeeded where others had failed (Wall Streeters are not exactly known for their altruism), but it also became “in” to volunteer with this program. Again, this was about fifteen years ago, before we were becoming a nation of do-gooders. At the time, this was highly novel.
You’ve already jumped to the punch line with this applicant. Yes, she was accepted into that number-one school. But it wasn’t necassarily a slam dunk.
When the applicant first sat down to write her essays, she initially got hung up on a lot of details about her work (too much detail and techno-babble is always a mistake). In the essay that asked for a discussion of her accomplishments, she failed to articulate her volunteer program as a major achievement. I know that seems unbelievable, but this is exactly the kind of opportunity that gets missed without careful introspection and self-awareness.
Perhaps because of the intensely competitive culture in which she worked, she was overly focused on professional accomplishments. She didn’t recognize what would be most valued by a b-school. Her best story nearly got buried.
After I had several discussions with her, her community service program came to be front and center in her essays. Still, she was never fully confident that this one achievement would override her GMAT score or that it would have more significance than her work history. Fortunately, her essays did articulate her accomplishment, and she stood out among a sea of applicants. Her essays also made it clear that she was a genuine fit with this school. Her GMAT score became a nonissue.
The epilogue to this story is that she had what it takes. She just wasn’t going to showcase her best advantage until someone showed her the way.
Another individual I worked with was an ex-analyst at one of the investment banks for which I was a consultant. He had attended one of my information sessions when he was a first-year analyst. Shortly after we met, he left the bank’s training program because he found it rigid and limiting. He had kept my business card, and years later he phoned me.
After leaving the program, he had found a position at a smaller firm. He then went to work in finance at a service-oriented company. After that job, he was a project manager in a technology firm. By the time we spoke almost four years later, it seemed as though he had changed jobs every six months. Not only that, but the companies he had worked at were no-name firms.
Before we go on, I will give you some personal background: This applicant was born and raised in India. He had attended a selective college in America, had good grades and a solid, though not exceptional, GMAT score. He was feeling tremendous pressure from his parents, who were still in India. They did not consider business a worthy profession, so getting into a world-famous b-school was critical to earning their approval. It was equally critical to his life plan.
When he phoned me, I had been retired from my consulting work for several years, and I had just had a baby. He talked me into working with him and was very persistent, calling almost every day. To say the least, he was difficult to work with.
He was also convinced that b-schools had a bias against Indians and that it would therefore be more difficult for him to win admission. I didn’t think this was true. What is in fact true is that all applicants are vulnerable to the diversity b-schools are aiming to create. But they also benefit from it.
He decided that only one school would do. I cautioned him that his chances were better if he applied to a mix of schools, but he was fixated on just one. With all that was riding on his acceptance, I worried that he was setting himself up for a letdown. His patchwork of jobs was problematic. His essay on this subject would have to compensate for a lot.
He used many essays to write movingly about his family and life in India. A socioeconomic analysis he made of the Indian caste system was fascinating. He related it to behavioral expectations placed on him as a member of the elite. His mother and father, both medical doctors, were considered professional aristocrats. But because the tax rate in India at that time was around 95 percent, they were not rich. The rigidity of the caste system kept them at the upper rung of society, but ironically, they could not offer him financial support in college or thereafter. In the context of the American standard of living, he was poor. He spoke eloquently of the impact of those inconsistencies.
Now he had to answer the essay question on his professional experiences. Not all of the job switching was his doing, which gave me hope. At one organization, an entire department was eliminated; at another, the company was sold. As I’ve said in other sections of this book, the trick with a background like this is to focus on how you overcame adversity and what you learned about yourself.
He did speak of a personal ethos of determination and about how much he had learned, but some of this was a stretch. At many of his jobs he was overqualified—he was simply biding his time until he could figure out the next step. His work history came off less as a case of bad luck and more as a case of a young man unable to stay on a chosen path.
He was rejected from his choice school. Ever persistent, he insisted on speaking to an admissions officer to find out why he was a no-admit. The feedback was hardly surprising; the admissions board found his work background of serious concern. They found the remainder of his application and essays compelling, however, and they encouraged him to reapply.
My advice to him was to find a job he was passionate about and stay put for a year.
He did. Right on cue, many months later, he came knocking at my door. This time, his “problem” essay spoke of more stability and genuine passion. He reapplied early in his choice school’s first round and got in.
There are several points to this story. First, an essay can blow your emotional cover. Genuine passion or sincerity is hard to manufacture. In this case, the insights he took away from having worked so many jobs lacked fire. Second, even an application full of great essays, such as this applicant’s essays about his family, may not overcome an inherent problem.
As we’ve said before, there are many variables in the admissions process. At another school, perhaps one that was less selective, he would have been admitted in the first round. At this particular school, his application full of moving, well-crafted stories made an impression on the board, which probably had something to do with his being encouraged to reapply. When he did, they remembered him. Fondly.