The MBA question archetypes
ARCHETYPE 9: DIRECT PERSONAL INQUIRY (WHO ARE YOU?) 1. Examples
someone ahead of you in life or in your field, that’s all. Try to keep it factual and objective, and incorporate balanced criticisms. If you come across as dizzy and star-struck, you might get into cheerleading school but you won’t get into business school.
5. How to flunk this essay
You will mess up this essay if:
• You don’t show mentorship experience or an understanding of the dynamics of such a relationship.
• You choose your influence badly: someone you don’t know well, or who doesn’t fit with the thrust of your application message.
• You don’t have an insightful anecdote about your mentor, or yourself in relationship with your mentor. You don’t give examples and details.
• You develop the analysis of your mentor but not of yourself. You fail to show how your mentor relationship has changed you and facilitated your development.
• You don’t show why what you have learned is relevant to your application or the class you want to be a part of.
• You appear star-struck and lack critical judgement of your influence or mentor.
ARCHETYPE 9: DIRECT PERSONAL INQUIRY (WHO ARE YOU?)
that is, its blunt intrusion into your personal space – often under the guise of asking you to say what other people would say about you. It sometimes asks for a creative format, such as writing the first page of your autobiography, or a letter to the incoming class, and so on.
3. The underlying issue
All essays are made better by making them more personal, but in this one the admissions committee is telling you that personal revelation is compulsory.
This essay archetype exists due to the frustration of admissions committees that, no matter how much they ask, in so many ways, for the real person behind the application mask to come forward, they often don’t get it. They get guarded, impersonal, generic, diplomatic statements. So they resort to bald-faced personal inquisition.
The trick, of course, is to take the committee on a real journey of personal exploration and revelation, while staying within your themes and on message, and not losing a strategic focus on what will be inferred from what you choose to talk about and how you portray yourself. No matter how personal you get, the direction you go in should reinforce the thrust of your application message.
The essay often targets your hobbies and extracurricular activities, and also often comes close to your ‘contribution’ essay – allowing you to show additional forms of personal interest, diversity and potential contribution to the class. If you don’t get a ‘contribution’ essay in the set, you should use this essay as your primary statement of uniqueness and value-add diversity. Part of what is at stake in this question is your ability and commitment to your non- professional life. The school is not interested in workaholics. They want bal- anced people with plenty of attributes and interests that make them more interesting. The school won’t mind what your non-work absorption is, but they will care that you have at least one serious one. (Your non-professional project cannot be a love interest – that’s assumed – but it can be children.) 4. How to tackle it
Personal questions are intrinsically uncomfortable. You have a choice: either you can deal with the discomfort by hoping it will go away and no-one will notice if you offer safe statements with some window-dressing, or you can bite the bullet and provide a real window into you. Guess which strategy works best? Trust the fact that your application is confidential to all outside the admissions office and get on with it. Generally, if you think your answer to this essay is too revealing, it is probably about right.
Of course, personal does not necessarily mean ‘heavy’. Revealing who you are just means sharing something genuine. Drop the mask. Be real. Be engaging.
114 ESSAY MANAGEMENT
Share your feelings and don’t be stiff. Show your humour, and that you’re interesting and fun to be around. Your response to this essay must, above all, be unique to you and be filled with details and observations that are intrinsic- ally yours, showing special insight into you and the personal history that has made you ‘you’.
This essay is one where applicants often give the committee too much information and leave them to sift through it. It’s fine to start by laying out the spread of your non-professional life and interests, but the key task is to find an angle to your personal life that best represents you and focus on it. If you focus your personal statement around an extramural activity, you must take the reader to your passion for it. Even if the admissions officer would never, him- self, consider joining an amateur electronics club, for example, your presenta- tion should make it clear how obviously addictively great it is and why it is an outlet for you and what that implies about you.
The committee will not care which extramural passion you present. As with all your essays, the ‘why’ questions are the important ones: Why is it important to you? How has it influenced your perspective or your choices?
How has it changed you or grown you? How does it relate to your wish to go to business school? Why should Adcom consider it important to your application?
Integrating the personal and professional
The most effective essays in the personal category are the ones that show an integrated, cohesive whole across professional and personal life – how the one feeds the other. If your themes stretch from work into leisure, and integrate the two, then you really start to come across clearly and strongly. For example, if in other essays you are proposing a career in media management, you could use this essay to share your passion for 1940–1950s radio-theatre nostalgia, saying how you have a vast collection of tapes, how you formed (leadership) a West Coast radio theatre society and allied website, how and why all this is personally meaningful to you. You therefore deepen your media theme, show how it is a passion as well as a profession, and thereby show a multifaceted but integrated life.
5. How to flunk this essay
You will mess up this essay if:
• You don’t respond personally to a personal challenge. Your response is too generic and safe.
• You don’t say enough to differentiate yourself or raise interest about you.
THE MBA ESSAY QUESTION ARCHETYPES 115
• You don’t demonstrate a real passion for the non-professional interests you have.
• You don’t appear to understand yourself at a personal level. You fail to develop insights about yourself or share them with the reader.
• You don’t make the connection between your personal attributes and the attributes demanded by business school or business life.
• You present a jumble of personal facts and interests, without focus.
• There is little or no link between your personal interests and the rest of your application message.
ARCHETYPE 10: CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION