You tell stories in your application essays for two reasons:
1. Proving attributes. Your claim to a personal attribute means almost nothing unless you can back it up with a factual set that illustrates and ‘proves’ it. The best way to provide a compelling value set is in the retelling of an event. For example, you may say you are ‘cool under pressure’, but what makes it more than mere hot air is when you tell the story of how you landed a Cessna on Route 505 when the pilot passed out. Claiming your ‘team spirit’ is one thing; telling the story of being stuck in the elevator in Taiwan with six fellow McKinsey associates at four in the morning, when you were taking a break and trying to find an all-night pizza parlour, is more compelling.
2. Raising reader interest. Narrative brings facts and attributes to life. Most people hate to read theory or conceptual copy but they love to read stories, particularly stories about people in difficult situations. They get sucked in and they want to find out what happened and how it turned out. Not only are stories engaging, but they are also memor- able. Most people remember narrative more vividly and for longer than they do interpretation or bald data.
Tips for thinking of good stories
Search for events, moments and insights that were turning points in your life.
Any time you can say ‘that changed me’, you are dealing with a situation where events led to a fundamental development of character, and this is likely to be a moment that speaks powerfully of you. For this reason, it will likely make for a story that can be milked for personal analysis and insight.
Other considerations in selecting a story are:
• Is it memorable, cute, dramatic, or somehow likely to stick in the mind of the reader?
• Does it have interesting and lasting imagery? Does it create scenes and pictures that stick?
• Does it have action and some imperative moving events forward, making the reader curious?
Be unfaithful to time and scale
To find and develop your story properly, it is helpful to break with the unconscious habit of representing events and experiences in your past in the THE PROFILING PROJECT 53
order in which they happened, or being bound by the relative time prominence they assumed. Length of time in an essay does not have to be faithful to length of time in life. Prominence of a story in life does not have to be faithful to prominence of a story in your essays. Liberate yourself to move freely through your past, looking for the things that have the most personal and emotional prominence, or which provide the basis for glimpses of self-insight. Develop stories around those moments and exclude everything else.
For example, say you spent ten years in hockey training, tournaments and hockey camp, and one day, through a series of accidents, you took part in a ballet class warm-up – and that totally changed your perspective. You are per- fectly within your rights to talk about that one day. Similarly, you can have spent six years at General Motors and you could choose to talk only about a single late-night conversation you had with the janitor.
Section Three of this book deals further with writing techniques that will help you zone in on what’s interesting and relevant, lengthen ‘interesting time’ and cut the rest that drags your essay down.
Small is beautiful too
In searching for stories, don’t confine yourself to fantastic and memorable events: the time you saved the lives of ten people stranded by a forest fire and won a bravery medal, for example. The best stories are sometimes about sim- ple, everyday, slice-of-life incidents: locking your keys in the car, say. Written in an engaging way, they can provide insight into your values, motivations, fears and personal philosophy.
Formative stories are valuable
Most stories are demonstrative: they show you demonstrating an attribute. But a story can also be a tale about the formation of an attribute. An example is how your grandfather peppered you with spelling bee questions every time he came to the house and would give you 5 cents for every one you got right.
Soon you were first in your class in English, and that’s where your passion for languages started.
Subjective reality is a safe space
In picking meaningful moments that are worthy of consideration, recognize the difference between subjective and objective reality: what happened versus what it meant to you. Something or someone can objectively be a tiny part of your life, but subjectively be enormous. It is ethically compromised to claim an experience was objectively more that it actually was – that is, to falsify information. You should not claim that you were on the team that won the national high school athletics 4 × 400 m, when in fact you won a local school derby. But you are absolutely entitled to say that your derby win was the most 54 PROFILE-BUILDING TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES
important event of your adolescence and the turning point of your life, or express any other subjective association you choose to. Adcom is interested in your personality and subjectivity. You are invited to blow a molehill of an event up into a big rock candy mountain of an experience, as long as you clearly represent it as your subjective experience.
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