The ten essay question archetypes above will allow you to recognize most of the essays you are likely to be presented with. You should also be ready for three other common essay question types: community service, self-review and the optional essay. Community service doesn’t often come up directly but is heavily implied under the surface in many questions. Self-review and the optional essay are easily recognizable, and always come up in more or less the same way.
COMMUNITY SERVICE ESSAY
It is debatable whether a community service profile will make you better at business school or better in your career, but it is nevertheless very common for schools to want to know about your contribution to social causes or involvement with public issues. There is an undisguised moralistic framework being applied: you are a better person if you contribute to society in some altruistic way.
The committee’s approach is that, if they are going to boost you to the top tier of business influence at the expense of the next eight or nine applicants, 118 ESSAY MANAGEMENT
they like to think that somehow, somewhere, you’ll be the one who helps others along too. Their best guess about this is based on your history of social contribution in the past. This principle is so important that if you are not directly asked about community service, you should still find a way to put a paragraph about it into every application.
You have some latitude here, in that schools usually interpret community service very broadly. You do not have to have worked in a soup kitchen or taught inner-city kids. Anything that is not your job – and not a family, friends or an obvious leisure activity – and involves social issues and is done for free, is presentable as community service. You can go for a less orthodox interpret- ation, such as being a web-radio DJ, or doing equipment set-up at your local summer salsa festival.
Community service is a golden key
Community involvement can incorporate almost any of the elements that come up in the other essay archetypes, or any of the attributes Adcom seeks.
Your service can be a teamwork activity, it can be a success story, it can support your diversity claim, it can demonstrate your values in action, it can be the basis of a mentorship relationship, or it can say something about how you use your personal time. Therefore, the community essay will let you develop one or more of these topics if there is no question that lets you do it directly.
Reciprocally, you can talk about community service in any of these essays if there is nowhere else to put community service. This is a great help in plugging holes as you map your message to the questions, as explained below.
The multifaceted nature of community involvement tasks also means that you can usually find a way for your volunteering to reinforce at least one of the central themes of your application. It should also reinforce the leadership theme if you pick a community involvement where you launched a project, developed an organization or organized a program.
For choice, talk about a community activity that differentiates you: if you developed a line in free-range eggs on behalf of the local co-op, or you were an assistant on a cycle team for the Tour de France, that’s intrinsically more inter- esting and valuable (to your application) than if you went on a river clean-up.
Also, try to keep to recent activities. If you go back to high school to find a volunteer engagement, you flag the fact that you’ve done nothing since. (But if your high school community service was the beginning of an ongoing and future involvement in a cause you still support, then it signals long-term community involvement.)
As community service has become something of a checklist item for MBA applicants, it pays to be subtle in promoting this part of yourself. Do it as if it were a natural part of who you are and what you do with your time. If you visit an elderly persons home once a week, don’t start an essay with, ‘My THE MBA ESSAY QUESTION ARCHETYPES 119
community service involvement is visiting an elderly persons home,’ as if the fact that it is community service is more important that what it actually involves. Just say what you do and let Adcom check community service off their list. As usual in your analysis, be sure to say why you chose the activity you did, and how it sheds light on you and dovetails with the other parts of your candidacy.
What do you do about the community service experience requirement if you don’t have any? Certainly, avoid making lame excuses such as you are too busy, or you travel a lot for work, and so on. First, excuses of any kind on any topic look bad in your application. It is always better to acknowledge a fault, say how you fixed or are fixing it, and move on (see advice on dealing with weak points in the optional essay section, below). Second, chances are there will be many in the applicant pool who volunteer despite heavy workloads, and that only makes you look doubly bad. Face the inevitable: the only way to satisfy the community service requirement is to do some community service.
More is better, but even a day’s worth will allow you to present a ‘recent’
example of the kind of things you do.
SELF-REVIEW ESSAY
This essay asks you to evaluate yourself as an outsider might. You may be
‘appointed’ as a member of the school’s admissions committee and have to write the evaluative assessment for your file, or you may be asked to write your own review for a promotion at work, and so on. Depending how the question is phrased, the essay may just ask for strengths and weaknesses, or it may ask for a full and comprehensive evaluation of your candidacy. The broader the scope of the question, the stiffer the test. On the one hand, the committee is saying, ‘Tell us what you want to, in the way you want to,’ which is a great opportunity to get your message across without having to pay lip service to the question. You have a blank slate: you can and should put down the clean- est possible version of your application message to the committee. On the other hand, you have nowhere to hide: if you cannot get your argument for admission clearly and definitively made here, your reader will be most unsympathetic.
Your approach to this question should be driven directly by your profiling results and prepared message (see Section Two). Put down your profile, themes and message, flavour it with some self-criticism, dress it up in terms of pros and cons, and you should be close to done.
There are two main dangers associated with this essay:
• As with the failure essay (see above), you must show enough maturity to own up to faults and weaknesses and take responsibility for them.
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As with the failure essay, this also gives you the opportunity to show how diligently you work on your weaknesses.
• This question invites lists of attributes, and it is fine to use listing techniques. But don’t forget to select, group and focus your attributes so that the main points of your candidacy are easy to grasp.
THE OPTIONAL ESSAY QUESTION
Often the final question in the set is one that gives you the chance to say anything you feel is important, that you think the admissions committee should know, that you have not been asked about. There are mixed opinions as to whether to do this essay or not, and there is no right or wrong answer. The advantage of doing it is you get more space to make your claim; the disadvan- tage is that the criterion of relevance and interest is far higher. If you waste the reader’s time a bit in the other essays, well, that’s time they have committed to you anyway. If you ask them for more time, and you waste that, you’re in trouble.
In deciding whether to do the essay or not, don’t worry about drawing attention to your bad points. Unless the admissions officer has had too many martinis (not likely), all your bad points will already be unmistakably blinking on a spreadsheet. Ask yourself, is this extra essay definitely going to add a new dimension to a potential problem, and more generally to Adcom’s understand- ing of my claim to a place? If the answer is ‘no’, don’t do the essay. If it is ‘yes’, then go ahead, particularly if you have genuinely not been able to find a place for a critical piece of your profile, and that piece changes the picture. Make it crystal clear what the relevance of the extra information is and how it relates to the rest of your candidacy. Remember that there is normally a word limit for the optional essay, but there is no call to use all the space you have. Make your additional points and sign off.
Dealing with weak points
Many people use the optional essay to excuse negatives in their profile – bad college grades or Gmat score, or work gaps and unemployment – so much so that there is a default assumption that the extra essay will be about this. The excuses can get pretty lame, so disassociating yourself from this tradition is an excellent reason not to use the optional essay at all if you can do your necessary explaining in one of the other essays.
If you have to use the optional essay to renegotiate your weaknesses, be sure to explain the situation without excusing yourself – let Adcom excuse you or not. Be brisk and forthright. If there is some circumstantial information the committee should know, tell them straight. If you made a mistake, acknowledge THE MBA ESSAY QUESTION ARCHETYPES 121
the mistake, say how you have worked on yourself not to make it again and move on. If you dwell on it, so will they.
Here’s how to think about whether to excuse yourself in this essay (or any other):
• Is your problem a finite thing that is definitely in the past? If you can show that the problem was a one-off, related to a specific mix of cir- cumstances, inexperience, timing and bad luck, or any factors that are definitely over or you have unequivocally fixed, then you are okay.
Say what happened and, if learning is appropriate to the event, what you’ve learned. Stay optimistic and upbeat and assume future success, given better circumstances.
• Is your problem a factor that continues into the present? If your prob- lem is not clearly over – if, say, you got a bad Gmat because you have test-taking stage fright, or you have a stormy relationship with your spouse – obviously the committee will be thinking this problem could recur at any time. Better that you don’t say anything.
Don’t ever whine, moan or curse your luck. Don’t blame the Gmat system or any other system or committee, or person. Don’t tell a sob story. There’s no sympathy vote to get you into business school. As in business, you are either on top of things or you are not.