would the Gmats, the quantity and quality of work experience, the merit of references, and so on. Any other aptitude or psychometric test they could run would also not significantly separate the candidates. When they are faced with a Gmat 720/GPA 4.0 banker from Chicago, a Gmat 720/Oxbridge- graduated systems analyst from Glasgow and a Gmat 710/Chinese Fulbright scholar, and they can only take one, how are they going to choose? How can they choose correctly?
Schools set hard, open-ended, searching personal questions to allow them to choose between good applicants. Asking what really motivates her, why he needs an MBA, which of her achievements matters most and why, how he copes with failure, how she envisions her future, and reading the results over three or four pages, provides Adcom with subtle distinctions between those with an apparently equivalent good claim to admission. Through the essays, the truly compelling candidates make themselves known.
Therefore, it turns out that the essays are the only logistically viable, standardized testing instrument, which gives admissions officers the deep information about every candidate that they need in order to be able to fulfil their function of separating the great applicant from the good one. So, unless you have a stupendous 770 Gmat or you are the son of Alan Greenspan, you should assume that your essays will be the key difference between you and the other good applicants in the pool for admission. You are not going to get yourself noticed ahead of your serious competitors without a compelling personal statement. Essays count so heavily because they are the tie-breaker between excellent candidates.
Of course, face-to-face interviews perform a similar function of separation.
But interviews are even more hassle for all concerned: they absorb more person-hours and most schools can’t interview every candidate. Also, schools can’t control the questions or the questioner, making the results harder to trust and impossible to standardize.
Rewarding strengths outside the classroom
Another reason the essays are so important is that they balance the academic bias of other parts of the file. As already stated, the admissions committee and all the people they represent know that academic results are a spectacularly poor predictor of business success. MBA degrees are not there to choose or to produce intellectuals. The high status of the personal essay statement, therefore, is a way for schools to show that they care about non-classroom factors, and that they are ready to provide every possible way for candidates with valuable management potential to showcase their leadership record, personality, character, maturity, dynamism, motivation and effectiveness – and that these real-world credentials count big-time in admission decisions.
42 STRATEGY FOR THE ADMISSIONS PROCESS
Rewarding communication skills
The third key reason the essays are sought by the admissions committee is that they test the candidate’s ability to communicate ideas and, in particular, to communicate them in English if the candidate is a non-native speaker. No matter what kind of statistical and quantitative Excel-jock you are, or what kind of numerical paradise you may be expecting your business career to be about, make no mistake that the ability to communicate – get ideas across to colleagues, customers, investors and others – is fundamental to business and leadership success, and becomes more so the more senior you become in an organization. This is true all over the world.
The committee doesn’t need or want you to be Shakespeare, but they are looking for people who can succinctly organize information and eloquently brief a reader or a listener as they will have to do many thousands of times in their management careers. The essays test this skill and separate those who can do it from those who can’t.
Meeting the essay requirements
The essays are therefore a fundamental, deciding part of your application. If you plan to ‘just get them over with’, don’t even waste your time and money applying. Given this specific role the essays play, it follows that your task in writing them is to provide enough differentiating, high-quality material about yourself that Adcom is motivated to make those subtle distinctions in your favour. A non-communicative statement will not put sufficient distance between you and your competitors in the top half. The worst thing you can do in them is to be bland, non-communicative or to repeat information that is already in your file.
One of the tests of a good essay is the extent to which it adds value to your file, providing stories, insights and perspectives that turn you from a data set into a fully three-dimensional human being with values, passions and interesting qualities. Your personal statement should ‘open a window’ into your single and unique life, and through it Adcom should feel they have met you and come to know you and identify with you, so that they can distinguish you from the crowd. You achieve this by selecting and sharing personal events and stories, and analysing and reflecting on them in an honest way, so they get to understand what you stand for, are interested in or are motivated to do with your life, and why. Differentiating, high-quality material is not hard to recog- nize: it is anything that turns you from a set of numbers and achievements into a unique, memorable person on an interesting path.
If you are having trouble knowing what it means to add value to your file in this way, imagine yourself at a cocktail party with thirty other competing MBA applicants and one admissions officer. You all work for the same company AFTER YOU HAND IN YOUR APPLICATION 43
and you all have the identical Gmat score, but only three can be selected. You each get about five minutes to talk to her – what do you say about yourself that is interesting, insightful, provoking and memorable? That is your essay material. You’ve succeeded when she (or the reader) no longer thinks, ‘MIT undergrad, science major, 3.8/710, ex-PWC,’ but instead, ‘The guy who majored in botanical studies, left consulting to create a successful small business in exotic East Asian seedlings and now needs an MBA to develop a community- friendly agribusiness worldwide. By the way, he also has big–6 consulting experience and great numbers.’
Essays also give you a chance to provide the filter through which the rest of your file is read. The things you choose to highlight, and the way you connect the dots in your life story, will influence the way the reader makes sense of your data record and her understanding of your achievements and career choices, including the choice to do an MBA at this point in your life.
There is no single formula for good essays. There are, however, many tools, techniques and precedents that will improve your message and provide a reliably good recipe for winning personal statements. Sections Three and Four in this book are devoted to these topics.