CHAPTER 1
Getting Started

The most critical aspect of the application is the essay. We read them closely. They tell us a lot about you.

—RANDALL SAWYER, CORNELL (JOHNSON)

At first blush, it makes no sense. Why should essays—mere words—determine whether you’re among the fortunate few who earn MBAs from the world’s very best business schools? After all, CEOs aren’t paid millions to turn colorful phrases; their job is to solve intractable problems, motivate organizations, and enhance shareholder value. Isn’t your potential to do that better gauged by hard metrics like career progress, academic performance, and standardized test scores than by a batch of well-spun essays?

However counterintuitive it might seem, the preeminence of the application essay in the MBA admissions process is no longer open for debate. As the quality of applicants competing for top-tier schools spirals ever higher, the humble essay has become a decisive factor in helping B-schools choose the anointed few from the ranks of equally qualified also-rans.

And well it should. When applicants’ work experience, recommendation letters, academic record, intellectual skills, and extracurriculars are all uniformly superlative (at the best schools they often are), business schools could make admissions decisions with a coin flip. How much fairer it is that adcoms take the time to let applicants’ thoughts about their lives, dreams, values, and accomplishments guide their decisions. As subjective as words can be, business schools are actually doing you a favor by giving your essays so much weight. How so? Because of all the components of your application, the application essay is the one that gives you the greatest freedom and control and the one that most personally expresses the individual you behind the data. Your grades and work experience are by now all history; your recommenders may, or may not, say what you want them to; and even the success of your admissions interview depends on who your interviewer is, what you are asked, and whether the interviewer is having a bad-hair day. Your GMAT score can certainly open the admissions door for you, but only you can walk through it. Your essays can help you walk that walk like no other application component. From the themes you choose to capture your profile and the stories you pick to illustrate them to the lessons you draw and the tone you adopt, business schools give you the reins to shape their perception of your candidacy. Take them.

KNOW THY AUDIENCE

Why such generosity? Because, strange to say, admissions officers want to let you in. If you doubt that, consider the background of the typical admissions committee member. If you find any pattern, it may be that of the admissions careerist—that is, higher education–sector professionals with human-resource–oriented degrees who’ve worked their way up the admissions food chain, often at several schools. Rather than statisticians, demographic analysts, or business theorists, you’ll find career development and educational administrators as well as eclectic multicareerists, from romance-language Ph.D.s, ex-opera singers, and attorneys to former ambassadorial assistants, marketing directors, and management consultants (some with MBAs). You’ll find, in other words, “people persons” with polyglot interests who’ve made careers out of personal development and who value the same focus in applicants.

What the Schools Say

Please be authentic. If you enjoy writing your essays, we will enjoy reading them!

WHITNEY KESTNER, VIRGINIA (DARDEN)

Writing is really just a means of striking up a certain kind of personal relationship with the reader, and who you think that reader is will obviously affect what you say to him. Too many applicants doom their essays from the start by assuming that they’re addressing the educational equivalent of a parole board—humorless, ranking-obsessed statisticians sternly sifting your past for hints that you’ve departed in thought or deed from the true MBA way. The essays of unsuccessful applicants often read like they were written for an audience of rubber-stamping, degree-issuing automatons or surly Dickensian gatekeepers waiting to pounce on signs of individuality. Though admissions officers must deny eight or nine of every ten applicants, you must assume that they approach each one with an open mind and the readiness to believe that your application is the one that will draw them a step closer to a rounded, diverse, interesting class. That’s why the essays of successful applicants are usually open, relaxed, confident, and optimistic. That fact alone should tell you what kind of people your audience really consists of.

The Admissions Party

Imagine you’re at a tony cocktail party where you find yourself competing with the best and brightest of your peers to make a lasting impression on your welcoming but overworked hosts. You’re all splendidly accomplished, well-rounded types, but you know your influential hosts are only likely to remember a handful of you when the evening’s done. When your moment comes, would you collar them and begin reciting your promotions and academic feats? Let’s hope not.

You’d probably turn on the charm, complimenting them on their home, probing for areas of shared interest, telling a few of your choice stories, and generally captivating them with your engaging personality. On one level, your B-school essays represent this same interpersonal challenge: how to put your best foot forward when your personal distinctiveness, not your résumé, is what will separate you from the other super achievers vying for your B-school spot. If there are three applicant categories—the dings, the “doables,” and the dazzling—it’s in your essays that you can elevate yourself from the doable to the dazzling.

What the Schools Say
Effective business leaders are almost without exception also good communicators, and we make no bones about wanting to recruit good business leaders, rather than narrow analysts.

—ANDREW MCALISTER, FORMER WHARTON ADMISSIONS OFFICER

FINDING YOUR SELF-MARKETING HANDLE

The essay-writing process begins with introspection; there’s no shortcut around it. Before you begin writing, even before you know the questions your target schools ask, begin developing a short personal “marketing” message or “handle” that integrates the key themes (strengths, values, experiences, interests) you want your application to communicate. Picture our admissions cocktail party again. Your hosts’ time is limited. They must make the rounds with all their guests before the night’s over. Since you can’t give them your whole life story, everything you say must communicate a compact multidimensional message that’s distinctive enough for your hosts to remember you by long after other partygoers have made their pitch. Take your time, cast your net widely, and ask friends and family for their input so the handle you devise reflects the key uniqueness factors from your professional, personal, community, and academic lives.

You Are Not a Brand

“Marketing yourself” to business schools simply means understanding that your application is an act of personal advocacy, not a workplace self-evaluation, class paper, or confessional. But don’t get carried away with the marketing metaphors. Brands are often faddishly shortlived, skin-deep, and exhaustively focus-grouped. You should not be. All Apple iPads and Nike Air Jordans are essentially the same. No two humans are.

Thinking of yourself as a brand is the first self-falsifying step away from the self-reflection schools want and toward the pointless preoccupation with other applicants that they abhor. Before you know it you’ll be wasting time trying to figure out what schools “want to hear” or which post-MBA goals are hot this year. Rather than projecting flashy, airbrushed images of yourself as the Maseroti or Budweiser of B-school applicants, conceive of yourself instead as a unique person who desperately needs to communicate something to the adcom. That something is not just your need for an MBA—it’s deeper: what makes your life and experiences compelling to you. So, yes, market yourself, but your self, not some phony personal brand.

As a rule of thumb, construct your self-marketing handle out of four or five themes, each one rich enough to build an essay around. If you come up with, “I’m a natural leader with strong analytical skills and a social conscience,” you’re thinking way too broadly. (As an exercise in concision, try reducing your self-marketing handle to one tweet—140 characters). If your handle runs past a sentence or two, unless it’s truly scintillating, business schools may garble it or lose it in the crowd. Your set of themes should emphasize your multidimensionality—who you are professionally, personally, and in the community. In other words, you’re not only a testing team lead at Qualcomm; you’re also a Norwegian-American raised in Ecuador who also loves taxidermy and tutoring immigrant kids for The Knowledge Trust Alliance.

Remember that your admissions “hosts” will be bringing a long memory of past conversations to your brief encounter. Simply telling them that you’re a banker or a marketing manager will trigger all sorts of mostly valid assumptions about your skills and professional exposures. If you’re applying from a traditional MBA feeder profession like consulting or investment banking, for example, your handle will come equipped with analytical and quantitative strengths. So round it out distinctively by including themes that B-schools don’t automatically associate with your profession, such as creativity (e.g., your lifelong devotion to basket-weaving), social-impact causes (e.g., that stint training subsistence farmers in Malawi), or out-of-the-box professional experiences (e.g., your first career as a geography teacher). Or look for unusual childhood or family experiences, distinctive hobbies, or international experiences that offset the predictability of your professional profile, and incorporate these in your handle.

Conversely, if your profession is unusual (e.g., nonprofit or creative) B-schools will already be giving you points for distinctiveness, so balance your handle with themes that show them that you also have the quantitative, analytical, or business skills they automatically associate with consultants and finance types. Instead of “The award-winning African-American photographer who grew up in Portugal and organized her church’s choir,” pitch yourself as “The Lisbon-raised African-American photographer who runs her own five-person media studio and handles her church’s finances.” Like the consultant or finance professional, your goal is a handle that communicates multidimensional balance, but one that also reassures schools that you’re MBA caliber (in addition to being unlike anyone they’ve encountered before).

What the Schools Say
After reading each application, I try to sum up in one sentence who each applicant is and what she or he will contribute to this class. The easier that is, the better your shot at getting in.

—KAREN SIEGFRIED, CAMBRIDGE (JUDGE)

Don’t try to do this alone. Relying only on your own sense of your distinctive strengths may not be enough to separate you from your peers, especially if you’re a member of a crowded applicant demographic. For example, a male technology applicant from India (a large applicant pool) could be forgiven for deciding that the strongest aspects of his profile are his degree from an ultra-selective Indian Institute of Technology, his leadership of his school’s cricket team and cultural festival, and his fast-track career at Intel. Unfortunately, at the very top schools this stellar background will be only par for the course among Indian information technology candidates. To find a self-marketing handle that really sets him apart, our Indian friend will have to dig deeper—perhaps by focusing on unusual aspects of his upbringing (nonacademic obstacles overcome or cultural, geographic, or religious uniqueness factors) or hobbies or involvements that few of his peers will share. Experienced admissions consultants (moi, for example) can help you isolate the potential themes that can make your handle stand out.

Although a distinctive multidimensional handle is ideal, it must truly capture who you are. Don’t try to force a theme—“internationalism,” for example, or “creativity”—onto your profile if you don’t have the experiences to back it up. Again, each of your handle’s themes must be deep enough that you could write a full essay around it.

You don’t have to figure out your self-marketing handle first. If it’s easier for you, you can start the process with your best stories—the experiences from your professional, personal, and community lives that you’re proudest of or that you identify most closely with. What do these stories say about you? What values or talents do they communicate? The answers to these questions can become the foundation of your self-marketing handle. The bottom line is that you be able to approach the essay-writing process with (1) an idea of the general themes that distinguish your application and (2) the specific stories that will illustrate them. Which you arrive at first is entirely up to you.

DATA MINING YOUR LIFE

Once you have your self-marketing handle, you have the multipart message that should inform all your essays for every school (albeit with some tweaking here and there to match particular schools’ emphases). Now you need to find the best specific stories that illustrate that message. Unlike medical and law schools, which often give you carte blanche in formulating your subject matter, business schools help you by posing highly specific “thesis-bearing” essay topics—topics, that is, whose theme (or themes) is contained in the wording of the question itself. Moreover, within each essay question, schools also usually pose several specific subquestions (What are your goals? Why do you need an MBA? Why now? Etc.). This may feel like cruel and unusual punishment when you’re writing your essays, but by limiting the scope of the essays for you, schools at least spare you the agony of brainstorming your own essay topics.

Study the wording of each school’s essay prompt carefully. You will hear a lot (in this book too) about “positioning” themes and thinking “strategically” about your essays, but none of that will make a whit of difference if you don’t reflect in a sincere way on the question the essay poses. After all your savvy positioning, some of that sincerity must shine through, or your essays will read as blandly as a committee-written Hollywood script. Business schools put a great deal of thought (even ingenuity) into their questions because they’re looking for the most effective and varied ways to get you to open up and let them peer inside at the unique you.

Since capturing your key uniqueness factors was exactly why I advised you to craft a self-marketing handle, schools’ multiple essay topics should not intimidate you. Unfortunately, you won’t usually be able to simply match each of your themes to your schools’ individual essay questions. Some schools may force you to discuss several (or all) of your themes in a single essay. Other schools may pose questions that none of your self-marketing themes seem appropriate for. Many essay prompts ask you to address several things, so pay special attention both to the question’s subject words (for example, career progress, nonprofessional accomplishment, or leadership experience) and the direction words (describe, discuss, assess). The essay prompt “Please tell us about yourself and your personal interests. The goal of this essay is to get a sense of who you are, rather than what you have achieved professionally” might seem straightforward, but you can bet some applicants will discuss professional interests, assume “who you are” means “what you’ve done at work or school,” or ignore the crucial “tell us about yourself” question and focus exclusively on their hobbies. And many programs pose much more maddeningly complex questions. So read carefully, break out all the subquestions, even shoot an e-mail to the school if you’re unsure, but know what you’re being asked.

Review your schools’ essay questions to get a sense of the range of topics you’ll face. As we discuss in Chapters 2 through 4, there are at least seven basic topic groups: goals (including, Why an MBA? and Why Our School?), accomplishments, leadership and teamwork, “self-revelation” topics, diversity, failure, and “creative” questions. Assuming that you’ll be applying to six to eight schools, you may well encounter all these categories in some form. Don’t get too strategic here. Stay focused on the range of themes and stories within each school’s essay set. Don’t assume similar-seeming topics from two or more different schools can be answered with the same story. If you try to look for apparent topic “clusters” across a range of schools, you’ll risk losing the focus that you need to find the right mix for each particular school.

Review the essay questions once a day for a week or so to get your mind working on them in background mode. Now you’re ready to identify the individual stories you will build each essay around.

Mind-Plumbing Methods

The data mining or “life inventory” step is nonoptional. You should no more exclude it from the essay-writing process than you would omit gathering business requirements before developing a software application, rehearsing a piece of music before performing it publicly, or conducting research before writing a dissertation. It’s that essential. Inventorying your own life is by definition a subjective process. Your memory can deceive you, stories you consider unexceptional may actually make outstanding essays, and stories that you’re convinced are distinctive and impressive may actually be fairly commonplace. So at this early stage you want to suspend judgment and simply “brain-dump” as much as you can as quickly as you can. The goal here is to find different ways to bypass your inhibitions and trick your mind into disgorging details you overlooked, significant events you’ve taken for granted, passions you forgot you once had.

The following techniques may help you:

Using your résumé as autobiographical timeline. Your résumé can be a memory aid for generating essay material. Let your mind linger over each section of the résumé, recalling the challenges, breakthroughs, and changes each stage of your career offered you. Recall and write down the full details of the accomplishments listed in the résumé’s bullets as well as the achievements you might have excluded from the résumé that could make good essay fodder. Since many of your essays will involve a chronologically ordered narrative (e.g., your career progress, your greatest accomplishment), this exercise can generate useful material and a timeframe for understanding your development.

Recording thoughts or conversations. If you are one of those people who find any kind of writing exercise inhibiting, a voice recorder may enable you to get your thoughts out painlessly. Either record yourself as you extemporize about your life or goals or record a conversation with a friend (over a beer if it helps) as he or she probes you with some of the basic questions listed in the Put Yourself on the Couch exercise elsewhere in this chapter. Transcribe this recording (minus the “um”s and “dude”s), and you may find that you have a rough but potentially useful data bank of essay content.

Random listing. Instead of shackling your thought to the rules of sentences and paragraphs, first warm up your writing skills by generating simple lists—favorite music; worst jobs; greatest accomplishments; best vacations; traits that define you, characteristics your friends admire in you; or most unusual things about your childhood, education, homeland, international travels, hobbies, and so on. Then take these lists a step further by looking for any connections between them. Perhaps your list of defining traits is illustrated by your list of achievements. Maybe certain experiences keep appearing in different lists—an indication they are important or defining for you.

Journaling. Nothing will get you into the discipline of writing better than a daily regimen. The operative word here is daily; anything less frequent will prevent you from writing naturally and un-self-consciously. The goal here is to get comfortable with the idea of expressing yourself in words (it’s not an unnatural act). Pick a time of day when you can write uninterruptedly for 15 to 30 minutes. Record your experiences, victories, complaints from the past day—whatever you want—but do it without fail and without distractions. Avoid the trap of simply recording your comings and goings, however. Make it a practice to close each paragraph by drawing some conclusion or stating its significance. Writing thoughtfully is a habit you can learn. If you’d like a little help, try a Web tool called 750words.com, a private online journaling tool that gets you in the habit of writing three pages (about 750 words) daily by, for example, awarding “points” for every day you reach your 750 words.

Social media. If it will help you commit to the writing process to post your exercises where anyone and everyone can see them—on the Internet—by all means go for it (but maybe keep the really embarrassing stuff to yourself). Facebook friends may respond in helpful ways to an anecdote you post (or at least tell you that it sucks when it does). Likewise, tweeting your memory of a defining moment or an idea you have for an essay theme may earn you some interesting feedback. But even if Web posting just gets you in the groove of thinking about your essay’s themes and stories, it will serve a useful purpose. Twitter and other social media may get you into the habit of writing (albeit 140 characters at a time) and earn you feedback on your writing all at the same time.

Visual mapping or clustering. Write the four or five themes that constitute your self-marketing handle on separate sheets of paper (or use a mind mapping application such as XMind or iMindMap try Googling “mind mapping” for other visual mapping apps). Around each of your theme words, begin jotting down whatever events, skills, values, or interests these words suggest to you. Each new term you jot down will suggest other words. Follow them where they lead, and connect each new term with a line back to the related term that prompted it. If you go with the flow here, you may gain insights into what you value most and the interconnections between your themes. All these may prove useful when you begin writing your essays.

Stream-of-consciousness writing. Perhaps the least structured of techniques, stream-of-consciousness or “free” writing simply involves scribbling down whatever comes into your head without stopping, even if it’s nonsense. As odd as this may sound, you’ll find that, for all the useless verbiage you generate, you may also unwittingly produce ideas, phrases, and insights that may actually wind up in your essays. Try to group these ideas, phrases, and insights into related categories. At a minimum, this technique can help you overcome the angst of the empty screen.

What do all these exercises have in common? They get you writing before you begin writing your essays, when anxiety and your “internal editor” can cut you off from the creativity and personality that will make your essays live. The mere act of translating your thoughts into words—in whatever form—forces those thoughts to the next level of concreteness and leads you in new directions, while also giving you a “paper” trail to refer back to as raw material for your essays. Writing, in other words, is a way of thinking, a kind of introspection. The sooner you get into the habit of thinking on paper (or laptop, iPad, iPhone—whatever works), the sooner you’ll be ready to shape that thinking into the rigorous, ordered thought that is the essay. Crossing the great divide between your thoughts and their verbal expression in concrete language is what separates would-be writers from nonwriters. It’s not easy, but these exercises can help you do it with a minimum of pain.

Everything Signifies

Your data-mining or “life inventory” process should involve more then merely fleshing out the stories that best capture your self-marketing themes. You also want to be continually evaluating their significance—their value to you. How valuable was that Singapore internship to me? What did it teach me? How did it change me? To manage your data-mining effort, create a spreadsheet or log divided into sections, say, Career, Academics, Extracurriculars, Community/Volunteer, and Personal/Family. Within each section create three columns: one for describing the event, one for noting its “external” significance or impact, and a third for logging its “internal” significance for you. External significance will include the experience’s impact on your career progress (earned promotion, raise, etc.), on your organization (won new client contract), or on others (helped tutoring student raise math grade to B). Internal significance will include how the experience changed you, enhanced your skills, deepened your perspective, strengthened your sense of your potential, and so on.

By getting into the habit of identifying and noting down the underlying significance of your stories as they come to you, you’ll sharpen your ability to evaluate your essay material in the same way that admissions officers will, reducing your burden in the essay-writing stage. Don’t perform the critical data-mining stage all by yourself. Your perception of your own life is likely to be highly subjective, so ask friends, family, and mentors for any key traits, memories, accomplishments you may have missed.

FROM RAW MATERIAL TO ESSAY CONTENT

If you’ve done it right, your data-mining process should leave you with a mass of raw material that could fill multiple admissions essays. As much as you may want to throw it all into the pot, essay length limits will force you to jettison the bulk of it. So get used to thinking early on in terms of focused stories or experiences that capture in microcosm what’s essential about you rather than “overview” essays that superficially skim dozens of key moments. These latter essays usually come off as glorified lists that lack the detail and context that enable readers to remember your stories and, hence, you.

Look for discrete stories that can “stand in for” or serve as metaphors for your life’s themes. By understanding these stories, in other words, someone could know nearly as much about who you really are as by hearing your full autobiography. Given the limited space schools give you, the only way you can convey the breadth of your life experiences is by exploring a key handful in depth.

Because you approached the data-mining stage with your self-marketing handle already defined, you were able to group your raw stories or data points into buckets that corresponded to the handle’s three, four, or five themes. Your data-mining process may have shown you that your handle was overemphasizing one aspect of your profile or ignoring one that you now think is stronger. Be flexible; make whatever adjustments you need to. Get used to evaluating your specific stories (the ones you’ll use in your essays) against your self-marketing handle, and vice versa. This way you’ll be sure you’re keeping both the forest (self-marketing handle) and the trees (stories/essays illustrating themes) in sight—and in alignment.

Now begin to evaluate your raw stories critically. Look for the ones that are most distinctive and that combine the greatest external impact and personal transformation. If a story is scoring high in unusualness, objective results or impact, and personal significance, you’ve probably got a winner. How well does this story illustrate your theme? You may have three stories for your “internationalism” theme: a college internship in Thailand; an implementation where you worked side by side with Belgians, Russians, and Brazilians; and last year’s two-month ERP engagement in Cairo. Because the internship happened four years ago in college and you were based in the United States throughout the ERP implementation, you tentatively decide to use the Cairo experience as your core story for any essays that focus on globalism or cross-culturalism. (Of course, it may also work for any teamwork or diversity essays, and some schools may give you the space to discuss all three of your international stories.) Subject all the raw stories generated by your data-mining process to this same weighing or ranking process until you’ve arrived at a core set of stories that covers all the topics for the application you plan to tackle first.

Now—at last—you’re ready to start the essays themselves.

WRITING YOUR ESSAYS

You performed the content-gathering steps in the last section. Now that you are beginning your first essay, you should not only know which stories best address each question but also have done enough raw writing to avoid blank page syndrome and other writers’ ailments. Still, writing tends to bring out the procrastinator in all of us, so set tight deadlines of a few days or less for completing each stage of your essay. As in the data-mining process, your focus when writing the first draft of your essay is to get something down on paper. Many applicants believe that they have to complete a polished, finished draft in one sitting. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Good writing is a base-at-a-time game; it’s not about home runs. So forget about style, grammar, and word count when you’re writing your first draft.

To keep the pressure off, you might start with the first application that comes out in early summer or with a school that’s not your number-one choice. After you finish it, move on to the next school, but don’t submit the first application. Finish the second school’s application (and perhaps others) and then go back to the first school and polish it off in light of the tweaks you’ve made while working on later applications. In this way you can capitalize on the improvements that inevitably occur as you refine your essays, without jeopardizing the advantage of a first-round submission.

The Outline Is Your Friend

The outline may summon unpleasant memories of seventh-grade English, but it’s one more useful method for reducing the anxiety and time drain of the writing process. If outlines make you nervous or stifle your creative juices, you can develop your essays in unstructured fashion by simply expanding the raw content you generated in the data-mining process into larger chunks or paragraphs, and then juggling their order until you find one that fits. The (substantial) downside of this approach is its haphazardness and inefficiency. By failing to map out your essay’s organization from the start, you risk chasing tangents down blind alleys and wasting valuable time.

By bringing structure to your essay before you start writing it, outlines maximize your efficiency and enable you to perform a crucial early test of your essay ideas before you’ve invested too much in them. Do you have enough material to support your assertions or illustrate your experiences? Does the lesson you’re trying to draw from your material have enough substance? Does it really grow organically from the story itself, or does it seem imposed and unearned? Outlines can help you answer these questions.

Each outline you create will have the following basic organization:

1. Introduction. One paragraph introducing the essay’s themes and setting its tone.

2. Body paragraphs. Multiple sentences that provide evidence to support the themes asserted in the introduction. Each paragraph in the body should consist of:

a. Theme sentence. The first sentence of the paragraph often states the topic or theme that this paragraph will “prove.” “Though my formal roles are technical, all my growth opportunities have involved leadership roles.”

b. Evidence sentences. These consist of specific examples, anecdotes, or details that support the paragraph’s theme sentence. “In my very first project, for example, I became the de facto team focal point when my implementation proposal was accepted as our project solution.”

3. Conclusion. This paragraph pulls together the underlying lessons or themes of the preceding paragraphs. It generally includes lessons learned or insights (from the third column of your data-mining spreadsheet).

Good outlines are the safety rope that keeps you focused on finding that next secure foothold toward your essay’s summit rather than staring dizzily into the abyss of the next empty paragraph. Don’t cling to your outline cravenly, however. It may need to be revised as your thinking about the topic evolves. For examples of effective outlining refer to the two samples at the end of this chapter.

The First Draft

According to writing coach Elizabeth Danziger, you should devote no more than 15 percent of the total time you spend on an essay writing the first draft (with the remaining time divided between the brainstorming and revising steps). Whether that number’s accurate or not, the moral is that writing your first draft should not paralyze you with anxiety or perfectionism. You’ve already done a major portion of your work (finding, selecting, and structuring your material), and the bulk of your remaining work (revision and editing) comes later. So lighten up! Run with your outline, and don’t analyze what you’re writing too closely—just get it down.

Some writers start with the sections of the outline that look the easiest or that they know the most about. And for many writers, the introduction is often the last piece of the puzzle. In the next three sections, however, we look at the three main components of every essay—the introduction, body, and conclusion—in that order.

Introduction

In your introduction, you must tell the reader what you will be trying to accomplish in the essay. This does not mean that your first sentence should be a monotonous statement of your theme (“In this essay, I will be …”). But somewhere in your first paragraph—the last sentence is often good—you must directly signal that you will be answering the school’s question and what the thrust of your response will be.

More than stating your theme, however, your introduction must catch and hold the reader’s interest, which is battered daily by dozens of same-sounding essays. It’s critical that the admissions reader finish your introduction thinking something like, “I wonder how this turns out,” or, “Hmmm, intriguing,” rather than, “Geez, here we go again.” (See Chapter 2 for examples of the variety of ways you can open a goals essay.) Finally, your introduction must also provide some of the essay’s key context (answering where, when, who, and what questions) and establish, primarily through word choice, the essay’s tone (for example, dramatic and serious or wry and subtle).

Body

The body of your essay is also its heart—the human story and the corroborating “evidence” that justifies the claims or promises you make in your introduction. Every paragraph in the body should be built loosely on a basic pattern of general assertion → supporting example.

Whether you’re writing a narrative-driven chronological essay, an example-driven “argument” essay, or a vivid detail-driven descriptive essay, each paragraph in the body should advance your case or further unfold your story. Usually, the specific sequence of your paragraphs will be dictated by the chronology of the story you’re telling (from the past forward toward the present), but sometimes each paragraph will function as a separate example in a larger argument. In either case, your paragraphs will live or die by the degree of personal, vivid detail and insight you provide. You want to achieve a balance between data—the personal facts and stories that substantiate your themes—and analysis—regularly stepping back from an example or anecdote to tell the reader what it means. Too much data will make for a dull, impersonal essay. Too much analysis will cause your essay to float off into a sea of generalities unsupported by anchoring facts.

Perhaps the greatest disadvantage you face as an applicant is that you cannot read what the vast majority of other applicants write. If you could, you would immediately see how many essays sound identical. The reason for this sameness is almost always a lack of specific detail and personal anecdotes (that and many applicants have the same clichéd ideas about what business schools “want to hear”). So throughout the body of your essay, always be as personal and specific as you can be.

You know your essay’s body is structured well when the opening theme sentences connecting each new paragraph to the preceding (often called transition sentences) seem to write themselves. For example, the transition sentence, “The eFunds engagement was not the last time I took on leadership roles outside my job description,” smoothly links the preceding paragraph (about the eFunds engagement) to another leadership example the writer is about to narrate in the new paragraph. Try to avoid graceless numerical transitions (“Third, success for me means never having to say you’re sorry”).

Conclusion

Your conclusion needs to do several key things—and briefly. It needs to draw a synthesized (but not vague or banal) lesson or theme out of the body paragraphs that have preceded it. And it must do this without simply repeating the theme statement in the introduction or merely restating the key point of each body paragraph. The conclusion, that is, must create a true sense of “summing up,” of loose ends being bow-tied, but in a way that injects deeper or larger insight than you previously provided in the essay. Moreover, to give the reader that peculiar feeling of coherence or unity that good writing often has, your conclusion should refer indirectly back to the language or details of the introduction—but as an echo rather than a mirror. Finally, the conclusion’s tone should be positive and forward-looking. If you can smoothly refer to your goals or MBA plans, do so. Avoid “In conclusion” or any of its stuffy siblings.

As you work on your first draft, keep your outline in front of you so you don’t wander off into tedious digressions. If you start to feel lost or bogged down, pull back and ask yourself, “What am I really trying to say here?” “What do I want the reader to feel, believe, or conclude after reading this?” These kinds of reorienting exercises can keep you on track and plowing speedily toward your objective: a reasonably coherent document within which lurks a finalized essay.

Try to think of your essay not as an argument (“Why I should be admitted”) or a proposal (“Consider admitting me for the following reasons”), but as a story about an interesting and sympathetic hero (you) in pursuit of a distant but most holy grail (the MBA). Humans are hardwired to respond to human-interest stories. Tales of sympathetic protagonists overcoming conflict or obstacles by modifying their world to remove those obstacles appeal to our basic hopes in a way that impersonal proposals do not. This is not to suggest that you submit a ripe piece of fiction or melodramatic screenplay. But if viewing your essay more as creative act than as cold exposition infuses it with personality and reader-friendliness then go for it. You might, for example, use some object (your Brooklyn Element skateboard) or activity (belly dancing) that reflects one of your passions as a metaphor for talking about your whole life, connecting specific aspects of that possession or activity to examples from your life that illustrate them. The possibilities for creativity are unlimited.

REVISING AND EDITING

Now that your first draft is done, you must schizophrenically repress the uninhibited Mr. Hyde who created it and summon your editorial Dr. Jekyll to make it presentable. You must cease expressing yourself, that is, and begin reading yourself as the admissions officers will. Writing and revising are distinctly different, even opposing, acts. Intermingling them, like trying simultaneously to be a stage actor and theater critic, is to risk misadventure.

Once you’ve banished your writerly self, your first act as editor is to completely ignore your draft, at least for a day. When you come back to it, you will immediately see things your creative self missed. Before leaping to fix them, step back and consider only macro and organizational changes first, such as contradictory themes or assertions, needlessly repeated points, yawning gaps in context or logic, or weakly developed or poorly placed paragraphs. If you find these, you may need to switch around paragraphs, expunge digressions, or add to, delete, or bolster your examples. By attending to these big-ticket problems first, you’ll avoid spit-polishing prose that you later decide to cut.

Depending on how thorough your outline is and how effectively you elaborated on it in your first draft, your essay may go through one, two, or more macrolevel revisions before it’s ready for editing proper. It’s no fun, but you must revise your essays as many times as they require. Continually ask yourself whether your main thesis and secondary points will be clear to the admissions officers, whether your evidence will persuade them, whether you are telling this story as efficiently and clearly as you can—oh, and do all of these without editing the life and energy out of your original draft. Always choose the simplest, shortest, and most direct expression over the more complex or “sophisticated.” Read your essays aloud. Do they flow? Did you notice miscues you missed earlier? Is the tone conversational, and does it sound like you?

Don’t try to go through the revision and editing process alone. Whether you ask friends and family; colleagues, MBAs, mentors; or experienced admissions consultants like me, seek some reasonably objective and knowledgeable outside opinion. But be careful how many chefs you invite into the kitchen. Too much positioning and “helpful” tweaking will drain all the personality from your work (and some folks will just use your request as an opportunity to show off). They’re ultimately your essays; keep it that way.

Revising is really the writing you do after your first draft is done. Editing, on the other hand, is not really composition at all. It is cleaning up the essay’s mechanics and grammar at the sentence and word level after the writing is complete. Though the changes you make in this stage will affect your essay less fundamentally, they will be much more numerous and, if uncorrected, enough in themselves to torpedo an otherwise tightly organized piece of writing. The potential glitches that editing catches can involve everything from pronoun and subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, run-on sentences, and parallelism to punctuation and capitalization errors, word choice and misspelling, and active- versus passive-voice issues. If you’re uncertain about any of these potential problem areas, review the redoubtable (and brief) Elements of Style by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr. Finally, have a trained editor vet your essays.

Letting Go

Too many applicants decide that their essays are “finished” only because the school’s deadline says they must be, not because the essays are truly polished. Applicants who give themselves enough time risk the opposite danger: obsessively tweaking their essays until they have the bland plasticity of a corporate press release. Your essay is truly finished when you can’t imagine how to make it say what you mean more candidly, vividly, or directly. When you’ve achieved that level of honesty, color, and tautness, let go.

ADMISSIONS ESSAYS: WHAT NOT TO DO

1. Fail to answer the question. The answer to their particular question is what the schools want, not the answer to another school’s question. Remember that schools purposely customize the wording of their essay questions to differentiate themselves (and test your ability to follow orders). They don’t want cut-and-paste responses. Often their particular spin or twist is subtle and can be addressed by modifying some key words or sentences in your introduction or conclusion. Thus you rarely need to start from scratch. Just be sure you’re being sensitive to the particular nuance contained in the question.

2. Write essays that lack a point or underlying thesis. This mistake is often a result of omitting the data-mining or outlining stages of the prewriting process. Applicants appear to address the individual parts of the essay question, but when you look beneath the surface detail, you can’t be sure where the essay is going, why the applicant is relating this experience, or what she thinks about it.

3. Sound negative, whining, complaining. Successful leaders are positive, forward-looking types who even describe their failures in terms of the constructive lessons they teach. They inspire respect, not pity. The ideal tone is conversational and confident; energized, fair-minded, and optimistic; and self-aware but world-directed.

4. Use clichés or hackneyed ideas. These reflect superficial or tired thinking whether they’re committed on the micro or sentence level (“I broadened my horizons and learned that hard work and persistence are invaluable”) or on the macro or essay level.

5. Write a résumé in prose. This blunder usually stems from the misguided notion that it’s better to cram as much strong material as you can into an essay than to focus on one (or two) experiences in extensive detail. Believing that admissions officers evaluate human experience on some gross-volume basis, the applicant breezes through a long chronicle of mini-achievements, none detailed with enough specificity to distinguish him from any other applicant.

6. Write what you think admissions officers want to hear. Aside from the fact that this approach is insincere and won’t help you stand out (because so many others do it), it assumes that admissions officers know what they want to hear. In reality, admissions officers live to be pleasantly surprised by a story or profile that answers their question and that they couldn’t have anticipated because they’ve never encountered it before. Make their day.

7. Fail to catch grammatical and spelling errors. Don’t rely on your own eagle eye or computer’s spell-checker alone. Show your essays to other people, ideally someone with training in the rules and conventions of good writing and the English language. Read Strunk and White’s deeply helpful guide to incisive writing, The Elements of Style.

8. Leave out the passion. Choosing boring material or writing about interesting material in a boring way sends the wrong signal to admissions officers, who are looking high and low for engaged, enthusiastic people with multiple interests and a zest for life. All your essays are ultimately about you, a subject schools naturally expect you to be somewhat excited about.

9. Fail to be strategic about your essays. This means knowing how to strike a balance between standing out from other applicants and having the minimal skills and values to be accepted by future classmates. It also includes the error of forgetting to view each school’s essay set in its totality to ensure that you’ve included all your key stories and that your essays are a multidimensional mix of personal, professional, and community material.

10. Omit the lessons learned or takeaways. A B-school admissions essay (regardless of topic) that lacks a closing lessons-learned section should be a contradiction in terms. Whether the school asks for takeaways or not, give the committee reflection, thoughtfulness, and your analysis of the significance of the essay’s subject matter in a single paragraph.

Put Yourself on the Couch

The following questions can help you dig deep enough to uncover the kind of thoughtful, searching answers business schools seek in admissions essays:

1. What makes you happiest? (Or, In what moment of your life have you felt the most joy?)

2. What do you fear more than anything else? (Or, What experience has frightened you the most?)

3. Have you ever been surprised when someone thanked you? What had you done for that person?

4. What one person influenced you more than anyone else in your life? What one experience or event best captures that person’s shaping role?

5. What would your friends be most surprised to learn about you?

6. Aside from salary, what motivates you to do your best at work?

7. If you could choose your epitaph, what would it say?

8. What single event changed your life or your values the most, positively or negatively?

9. What was your greatest nonprofessional failure and what did you learn from it?

10. If you could be any person living or dead aside from yourself, who would it be? Why?

SAMPLE OUTLINES

The following outlines are actual examples (with some disguising changes) of essay outlines I developed with successful applicants to Harvard Business School and Kellogg.

Sample Outline 1: Vicky B. (Admitted to Harvard Business School)

What is your career vision and why is this choice meaningful to you?

I. My Facebook mental health pages have shown me that my passion is blending social media with social entrepreneurship. [The opening sentence of the actual final essay was more vivid, but this placeholderenabled Vicky to start her essay with a clear theme in mind]

A. Helped hundreds of people affected by depression, worked directly with psychiatrists and social agencies to find social media-based methods for reaching out to, treating depression victims.

1. Much more I can do.

II. Long-term goal: establish online mental health community that employs social media like Facebook and Twitter and technologies like iPhone to help isolated, depressed individuals find answers, compassion, professional treatment through Internet.

A. Opportunities abound. FastCompany survey: 17 of America’s 100 fastest-growing tech companies focused on $2 trillion social media market.

B. To understand how my startup can survive new-venture process, my short-term goal: associate in top social media VC firm such as Andreessen / Horowitz, Accel Partners, or Greylock Partners. [Vicky-clearly has already researched her goals; her final goals paragraph was not much more detailed than this]

C. Evaluating, investing in, guiding social media-based startups will prepare me to become entrepreneur myself.

III. Why MBA

A. Experiences in mental health community work and social media taught me how to create online communities, lead teams, and gave me expertise in social media’s technologies, trends, practices.

1. But not gained tools to break into VC industry and launch own venture.

B. MBA from rigorous, relevant business school will teach entrepreneurial fundamentals in accelerated fashion, give me VC-critical skills: evaluating business proposals, analyzing prospective investments, diligencing new deals, analyzing sectors, preparing sensitivity models.

IV. Why HBS

A. Social Media [Vicky has helped herself by having already done her Why HBS research before approaching her essays]

1. Case Studies like “Molson Canada: Social Media Marketing” and “Social Media: The New Hybrid Element of the Promotion Mix”

2. Courses like “Digital Marketing Strategy”

3. Professors like Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, “Understanding Users of Online Social Networks”

B. Entrepreneurship

1. “Entrepreneurial Manager” Required 1^st year course

2. 20 electives in entrepreneurship every year

3. Business plan contest

C. The HBS Difference

1. Case method

a. Class participation counts for 50% of grade

2. General management orientation

3. People:

a. My visit to Cambridge and conversations with HBS students X and Y have convinced me that …

b. Faculty: rich research tradition, truly thought leaders

c. Alumni: conversations with alumni X and Y …

V. When reached out to first depression victim online worried only about helping out

A. Never dreamed could one day think of building career out of battling mental illness

B. With HBS MBA that dream can become reality

[Given HBS’s length limits, Vicky’s first draft will run long, but better too much content than too little (or, what’s an editor for?)]

Sample Outline 2: Charlie K. (Admitted to Kellogg)

Each of our applicants is unique. Describe how your background, values, academics, activities and/or leadership skills will enhance the experience of other Kellogg students.

I. I still remember when I decided to find out where my father lived, to find out what kind of person he was.

A. Parents divorced when I was 4.

1. Only seen photos, heard stories

a. Dad: Korean immigrant; mother: American

b. When marriage failed, returned to Korea

c. Mom didn’t talk about him, were out of touch

2. She married briefly couple of times

a. Without father my whole life

B. Not something I felt sorry for myself about

1. Friends told me about playing catch or camping with their fathers

a. Accepted family situation as reality, though wished I could know what they experienced

C. Dad’s absence not only challenge

1. Mom is diabetic, depressive personality, didn’t interact with me a lot.

a. As child I spent time alone (no siblings)

2. Mom is teacher: without second income, not a lot of luxuries

a. Even new sneakers tough: “maybe for your birthday”

3. Mid-teens: began to be curious about ethnic heritage, father

a. With mom’s help, eventually found where he was, contacted him

b. Friendly call, “nice to hear from you,” but clear had moved on, didn’t seek relationship

[Charlie has lightened his essay-writing load considerably by already knowing his theme and many of his specific examples]

II. Despite these circumstances I always felt like “normal” kid

A. Never felt sorry for myself

1. Not sure why never got into serious trouble or struggled in school

2. Only “rebellion” was decision at 13 not to be confirmed

a. A shock for my very religious family

b. Didn’t feel right for me, stuck to my guns

3. Lack of parental presence made me self-reliant

a. Learned how to take care of things myself, make friends

b. As soon as got license at 16, took car out on my own

B. Self-reliance, inner drive key to how I dealt with childhood

1. Early teens: remember thinking I would succeed

2. No mentors, “uncles,” teachers pushing me: came from within me

a. Always good at school, math

b. Threw myself into schoolwork, always top of class

3. Turned into full scholarship at U. of Utah

III. Values of self-reliance and strength or drive began to blossom in college

A. Expressing themselves as leadership

1. Asian American Student Alliance

a. What I did as president: created, organized A-A week

2. In class

a. Always leading discussion and groups

3. In internship

a. Though didn’t have to, worked not only summers full-time, school year 30 hours a week in addition to school

b. Because of my initiative, when acquisitions head at Idex offered me chance to move from accounting to investing side, I jumped at it

c. Thrived: assigned to fly alone to Virginia to tour site, negotiate with seller on $X acquisition.

i. Sellers took me at face value

ii. Deal closed successfully

[Don’t worry if your outline doesn’t go to five levels like Charlie’s—three levels is plenty]

d. Experience so exciting quickly changed major to real estate/finance

IV. Growing up in Salt Lake City, can’t ignore nature

A. Always interested in outdoors, hiking, healthy living

B. Four years ago: passion for hiking went in new direction

1. Becoming “fourteener”

2. Climbed ten of Rockies’ 14,000-foot peaks

3. Result: growing interest in environment

4. Today: committed to integrating this concern into professional life too

5. U.S. Green Building Council, helping lead Idex toward green emphasis

C. Hiking also reflects my lifelong focus on health

1. Believer in taking health supplements

2. Last year decided to start business that would enable me to help people find the best supplements out of the myriad of good/not-so-good options available

3. Hallyu Nutrition is result

V. Want to bring values of self-reliance/initiative, of leadership, of commitment to environment/health to Kellogg classmates

A. Venues or clubs at Kellogg where I can express these values?

1. Environment or green clubs at Kellogg? Health-related activities?

2. How will my leadership manifest itself specifically?

3. How will my self-reliance/initiative help classmates?

B. Concluding sentence