The MBA question archetypes
ARCHETYPE 5: CONTRIBUTION 1. Examples
5. How to flunk this essay
You will mess up this essay if:
• Your leadership event is weak, suggesting you don’t have any significant leadership experience.
• You mix up leadership events with achievement events or ethical dilemmas.
• Your story is short on detail, interest and relevance.
• You hype the amount and extent of your leadership experience.
• Your analysis is vacuous and does not provide insight into you or your leadership attributes.
• You do not show understanding of your own leadership style.
• You fail to develop or share your insights into the nature of leadership.
ARCHETYPE 5: CONTRIBUTION
Schools seek diversity because much of MBA learning is peer to peer, and candidates with diverse and extraordinary experience have more to give to their peers.
Various other essays are designed to see if you fit the MBA mould. The test of this essay is whether you can separate yourself from the crowd and get away from being the typical candidate. This one is the talent show. You don’t have to be better than anyone else in the show, but you do have to enter with a special skill, talent or experience that is exclusive. You have to find something in your profile that sets you apart. Among the kinds of things that people talk about in the context of their diversity contribution are:
• International experience: growing up abroad, or significant travel or foreign work experience and languages.
• Unique work experience, or experience in unique industries, in- cluding benefiting from unusual training.
• Being a member of a minority group: being black, American Indian, or being disabled, gay, or otherwise non-mainstream.
• Special abilities and talents: being an occasional baritone with the Austrian National Opera, for example.
• Having benefited from a special or unique vantage point on the world – being on Kofi Annan’s staff, for example, or having worked in promotions for the Brazilian national soccer team.
These are just example categories. There are almost no rules for what you can bring to the talent contest – only you can know what you are that nobody else is. Often your extramural activities will point the way to your unique attributes.
Example
The following is one way of discovering your unique contribution. Imagine you are accepted to your dream school. On your first day there you bump into the head of the admissions who knows exactly who you are, and she says:
‘From the moment we realized that you would bring (back- ground, experience, talent, other addition) to the school this year, wow, you were in!’ Fill in the blank. If nothing jumps out at you, consider that your unique attribute may be in the combination of elements that are otherwise unremarkable. Perhaps you are a Palestinian partner in an Israeli-funded IT start-up. Maybe you are a currency trader who sings opera at the London Proms every summer. Is there some combination of factors that will make you unique and memorable?
It’s nice to underscore your uniqueness with a certain level of achieve- ment, but achievement is not the primary consideration here. If you merely trained to swim the English Channel, or were a teen counsellor in a THE MBA ESSAY QUESTION ARCHETYPES 101
Japanese orphanage, or grew up on Hollywood movie sets, or spent a month in an ashram in silent meditation, this could be enough. There are plenty of times in an MBA application where competitive achievement counts, but here the bias is towards the experience itself – as long as you can show why the experience adds to the tapestry of interdependent learning of business school life.
On standing out
Applicants are often so desperate to make the ‘right’ impression that they fear doing anything that would make themselves stand out, and scrub anything from their file that smacks of difference. Don’t be scared to be different and be yourself and to make the admissions officer think: ‘Huh!! I’ve got to meet this one.’ Unusual people with interesting pasts get in because they make the class more fun and enriching for all.
On the other hand, business school is a serious place and there are limits to how eccentrically you can play your hand. These limits largely depend on what the rest of your file looks like and where you are applying to. If you are a banking lifer at 28, you have to do something – anything – to make a colourful splash in your essays. But if you’re the guy on Venice Beach who made an unofficial fortune renting kite-boards and selling joints, you should run an altogether more conservative application.
4. How to tackle it
This essay is one where candidates are highly susceptible to the tendency to throw everything at the committee in the hope that something sticks. Try not to do this. It’s fine to sketch out the spread of your interests – then pick one or one cluster.
The standard template for this essay is:
a. Claiming an interesting and unique aspect, or combination of aspects.
b. Proving that you have it/them.
c. Showing why it is relevant and beneficial to the group and the school.
d. Showing what else it says about you and making links to your themes.
The burden of proof is generally quite light in an MBA essay, but it is there.
If you claim you danced in the Hong Kong Youth Ballet, for example, the committee would expect (and be interested in) some details. If you have been to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station, some first-hand experience account would be called for.
102 ESSAY MANAGEMENT
This essay doesn’t always call directly for a story, but you should write one if you can, to bring your unique element to life. In fact, one of the tests of whether your uniqueness is valuable and enriching to others is whether you can immediately think of some interesting or enlightening stories to tell about it. As you move from story to analysis, you must show why the unique attrib- ute you offer the school sheds light on you as a person and your potential to succeed at school and in life.
The relevance and benefit of your exclusive contribution to the class must be spelled out clearly. It may be evident to you that being physically disabled or French-speaking or the stepdaughter of Robert de Niro makes you different and valuable – but the test is whether you can convince the committee this is valuable to the learning experience of your classmates and/or to the faculty.
Also, be as specific as you can. You can limply say that your Communist Romanian childhood gives you insight into ‘economic, social and cultural differences’, or you can point out how your many summers at socialist teenage camps will allow you to offer some genuine insight into European labour politics in your human resources elective.
5. How to flunk this essay You will mess up this essay if:
• You fail to differentiate yourself – your exclusive offering is something others offer too.
• Your diversity attributes and experiences are trivial or not apparently relevant to the business school environment.
• You do not focus your contribution. You give Adcom too much disparate information and make them guess.
• You play it too safe. You profile doesn’t have a memorable angle.
• Your proposed contribution is not valuable to your peers or the school, or you fail to explain how it is valuable or to whom.
• You fail to connect your unique attribute(s) and the circumstances of their acquisition to the rest of your file. You don’t use them to enlighten the reader about you.
ARCHETYPE 6: ETHICS AND VALUES