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MBA Admissions Tip: The Optional Essay

Knewton — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:30:37 +0000

This MBA admissions tip is provided by our friends at Clear Admit. Check out their blog for more advice about the b-school application process.

We realize that the questions of whether to answer an optional essay and, if so, what to say are ones that loom large for many b-school applicants at this time of year. While we’ve been offering a great deal of school-specific essay advice over the past few months, we wanted to take some time to suggest a few considerations that applicants might want to take into account when making this call.

Is it relevant?
Perhaps this goes without saying, but the only information worth sharing in an optional essay is that which will make a material difference in your candidacy. Whether you wish to comment on an exciting leadership role you’ve just taken on or explain that you were overextended extracurricularly during that one bad semester in college, make sure to think carefully about whether this information will affect and enhance the reader’s perception of your business school candidacy.

Was it requested?
Most schools do request that applicants use an optional essay to address certain issues, such as a failing grade in a degree program or the absence of a letter of recommendation from one’s current direct supervisor. In spite of the technically optional nature of the question, it’s very important to follow directions and provide this information if a school requests it.

Also along the lines of what information is requested, it’s wise to think carefully about a school’s other essay questions before deciding to use an optional essay or provide additional information, as each of these topics affords applicants a chance to introduce the information about their background and interests that they consider to be most important. Your objective should be to provide as complete a picture of your candidacy as possible within the framework of a school’s required essays (as these are a good indication of what a given program is most interested in hearing about) and to only introduce information in an optional essay that you could not have covered elsewhere without sacrificing something more essential.

Is it constructive?
Once you’ve decided that a detail is relevant to your candidacy and merits mentioning in an optional essay, the next step is to think carefully about the way this information might be perceived and make sure that the impact it makes on your chances of admission is a positive one. For instance, an essay that simply alerts the adcom to a serious medical condition might help its author stand out from other applicants, but could also leave the reader wondering whether this person could handle the demands of a rigorous academic program. On the other hand, a few details about this applicant’s strategies for achieving success in spite of some kind of disability and commitment to supporting others with a chronic illness or impairment might make him or her seem like a very valuable addition to the business school community.

Is it concise?
It’s always a good idea to keep in mind that by answering an optional essay, you are creating extra work for the person reading your file. While this should not dissuade you from addressing a topic that you have deemed important based on the considerations above, it’s very important that you demonstrate good judgment by limiting your comments to the most relevant information and keeping your response as direct and concise as possible.

We hope that these general guidelines have helped to clear up some confusion and shed some light on the optional essay issue. For more tailored feedback on your personal situation, feel free to send your resume or CV to info@clearadmit.com for a free initial consultation.

A core concept is central to MBA essay success

Knewton — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:00:26 +0000

This post is from Linda Abraham, founder and president of Accepted.com. Also check out the Accepted team’s first post on our blog for tips on law school personal statements.

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I have just finished reading Made to Stick by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath. I recommend it highly to those of you in sales, communications, or teaching. Quant jocks? You probably don’t need it.

The authors researched and identified the factors that cause communications to succeed or fail. They boiled their research down to “six principles of stickiness.”

Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness
Credibility
Emotions
Stories

This post will focus on the first principle you should apply to your application essays: Simplicity.

Your B-school application essay needs a core idea. That essence or central point becomes the driver of all content for that essay. When responding to specific questions, your core must directly and elegantly answer the question. When writing a less-directed essay, you still need a driving concept; you just have more choice as to what your concept should be. Everything else in the essay should support that concept.

If writing multiple essays for one application, each essay has to have a core. Those themes should mesh and complement each other, but not duplicate.

The remaining principles of Making It Stick are means of effectively relating your core idea, but first you need to have a core. Unfortunately, many B-school applicants treat their essays like many teenagers treat their bedroom closets—as a place to put all kinds of “stuff” that may be useful or perhaps once was useful. There is no logic or organizing principle, no driving force. These messy closet essays then read like the mishmash they are.

Essays that are resumes in prose or that attempt to tell your entire life story descend into the mishmash category. MBA essays replete with irrelevant detail stray from their central mission. They are not engaging or persuasive. In fact, they bore.

When you write your essay, start with a central idea and then make sure that everything else supports it. That elegant simplicity is not simplistic and is not easy, but it is highly effective.

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Accepted.com’s staff has been checking clients’ work for the essentials of great B-school application essays since 1994. Visit accepted.com/mba for professional advising and editing services as well as sample essays, tips, free ecourses, webinars, and more.

The college essay: getting started

Knewton — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:16:30 +0000

This piece is from Andrew at CollegeEssayOrganizer.com. He’s been in the SAT game for years, and he’ll post here from time to time with college essay tips.

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A lot of the time, the hardest part of a college essay is just getting started. Too many schools, too many questions, not enough time. Not to mention, the way the essay prompts are written, they make it seem like you need to know what your life’s work is before you even graduate high school.

The name of the game for starting your college essay isn’t so much knowing exactly what you’re going to write, but which prompts you’re going to have to deal with in the first place. Once you have those assignments figured out, whittling down the amount of work you actually have to do can be a pretty easy job.

First, do yourself (and your parents) a favor and make a list of the schools you’re most interested in applying to, and try to identify your top choice. If you can’t pick a number one school just yet, that’s fine, you can worry about that later.

Then, once you’ve identified the schools you’re interested in, see how many of your essays ask similar questions. With a little organization, you can actually minimize the amount of work you have to do: think three essays instead of seven, five essays instead of twelve, that sort of thing.

We developed College Essay Organizer to help you see all your essay requirements in one place and show you how you can write as few essays as possible to answer all your required questions.

Doing this kind of work takes just a few minutes all together, and it helps you get your head off your desk and makes the whole essay process seem a lot more manageable than it used to be. Plus, when your parents come knocking on your door to find out if you’ve done anything with those gosh darned essays you’ll be able to say yes, thank you, please get me a beverage.

Law school admissions tip: Banish common, boring openings

Knewton — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:53:07 +0000

This is the first in a series of posts from our friends at Accepted.com. Stay tuned for inside tips on the law school and B-school admissions process.

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What are the most boring, non-starters for your personal statement? Openings that use wording from the question, or in the case of general questions, are so common that they will have a narcotic effect on any admissions reader wading through mounds of files.

Recently, Accepted editors discussed a client’s response to the question, “How have you experienced culture shock?” The applicant began her response with “I experienced culture shock when…” How many applicants responding to this question start similarly? Too many. However, if the applicant from the first word contrasted the culture she comes from with the one that engendered the shock, she would be immediately painting a picture of the situation, differentiating herself from her competition, and making maximal use of each word in an essay with a tight word count.

Another common opening: “I want to be a lawyer because…” or “I was born in…” or “I come from…” Start with an opening that portrays your vision for the future, reveals your preparation for your chosen path, or depicts an illustrative and impressive experience from your background. Then swing back and tie this opening to your desire for a legal education or the theme of your personal statement.

Your opening needs to immediately grab your reader’s attention, introduce your topic, and make effective use of the space. You all have word or page limits. Your readers have limited attention spans and a pile of other applications staring at them. Don’t bore them from the get-go. Begin with an opening that engages and grabs attention. Start your essays with an anecdote, a description of a scene, a startling statistic, or an appropriate quote.

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Accepted.com’s staff has been checking clients’ work for the essentials of great law school personal statements since 1994. Visit accepted.com/law for professional advising and editing services as well as sample law school personal statements, tips, free ecourses, webinars, and more.

Great GMAT Essay from Knewton student

Josh — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:46:56 +0000

Josh Anish is Senior Editor at Knewton.

I read A LOT of GMAT essays. Alex Sarlin and I read every single essay sent in by every single Knewton student. More and more are coming in every day. We usually offer words of encouragement followed by a points of constructive critique — don’t use first-person pronouns in the intro, don’t pay too much deference to the other side of the argument, and so forth.

But last week we received an essay that was so good, we asked asked its author to let us share it with the world. So here it is, followed by a breakdown of why we like it so much.

Reprinted with Robbie M’s permission (thanks Robbie!).

Prompt
The following appeared in a memorandum from a regional supervisor of post office operations:

During a two-week study of postal operations, the Presto City post office handled about twice as many items as the Lento City post office, even though the cities are about the same size. Moreover, customer satisfaction appears to be higher in Presto City, since the study found fewer complaints regarding the Presto City post office. Therefore, the postmasters at these two offices should exchange assignments: the Presto City postmaster will solve the problems of inefficiency and customer dissatisfaction at the Lento City office while the Lento City postmaster learns firsthand the superior methods of Presto City.

Question
Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.

While a potential solution for the gap between the performance of the Lento City and the Presto City post office could be addressed by switching postmasters, the author fails to provide sufficient evidence or sound logic to validate his or her conclusion. First, there are explanations other than postmaster aptitude for the gap between post office performance. Similarly, the assumption that similar size cities have the exact same post office configuration is not logically sound. Finally, additional evidence about the current postmasters would strengthen the author’s proposed solution.

One possible explanation for the difference in volume between the two post offices and customer satisfaction is a difference in supporting staffs. The Presto City post office may have a significantly larger staff, or Presto postal workers may be substantially more skilled or have more experience than their Lento City counterparts. Should this be the case, more significant changes, such as hiring additional workers or training existing employees in Lento City, would be necessary to reduce the gap in performance.

The author also fails to validate the assumption that the two post offices are comparable. Lento City could be demographically different, hosting a population of technologically advanced citizens who rarely send postal mail. These citizens could instead use other means of communication, such as email. In this scenario, the volume of mail would be significantly lower, which in turn could lead to less-experienced or fewer postal workers. Furthermore, using number of complaints as the measurement of customer satisfaction ignores the potential for differences in how customers communicate their satisfaction. It may be that Presto City has no formal means for collecting customer feedback, while Lento City has a very robust process.

Finally, the author could strengthen this claim by citing specific examples of the strengths and weaknesses of the two postmasters. For example, if we were told that the Presto City post office once experienced issues similar to those in Lento City, and that the situation were improved upon the incumbent postmaster’s arrival, it would strengthen proposed postmaster-exchange. Similarly, if there were pieces of evidence that the significant decline in Lento City corresponded to the current postmaster’s tenure, it would more directly relate the present state in Lento City to the postmaster. Without this evidence, the author fails to validly support his or her proposal as there are too many alternative reasons for the variance between post offices.

In summary, the author must better support the link between postmaster and post office performance to support his or her conclusion. A reader of the argument has no means to conclude that there are not other explanations for the variance in performance.
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The essay would easily earn a perfect 6 on the AWA. The intro clearly advances a single perspective. Robbie even sets up the 3 body paragraphs in the first paragraph. The body paragraphs themselves are succinct, advancing the author’s argument without sounding dogmatic. Almost no deference is paid to the other side of the argument, a strategy I cannot endorse enough.

In the conclusion, Robbie again brings attention to the flaws in the author’s argument, and then goes on to show its ramifications.

Five Steps to Getting a 6 on Your GMAT Essays

Knewton — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:01:15 +0000

While many argue that your GMAT essays are meaningless, don’t forget that the essays can be a determining factor in the increasingly competitive admissions process. An extremely low score could set off flags, and raise doubts about your ability to complete graduate work. Additionally, admissions officers will use your GMAT essay as a check on your personal statements, to make sure they were authored by the same person.

1. Have an opinion. In both Analysis of an Issue and Analysis of an Argument essays, it is important to pick a side in the intro/thesis and argue it persuasively throughout.

2. Organize. And then don’t deviate. Shoot for the time-honored five paragraph model of Intro-Body-Body-Body-Conclusion. This template should help you organize your thoughts. Again, this is not the only way to do it, but it is perhaps the method that essay readers find most appealing.

3. Pick relevant and eclectic examples to back up your thesis. Each body paragraph should be about one (and only one) of the talking points.

4. Don’t relax come conclusion time. Many students will bail out of their essays at the end—and dash off only a sentence or two as the last paragraph. Hang in there and write a substantial conclusion. Restate the thesis in the conclusion, but introduce the thoughts in a new way—and make it at least three sentences. Remember, your conclusion is the last thing the reader will see before giving you a score.

5. Proofread. Scorers (both human and computer) will focus a trained eye on your grammar and syntax.

Visit the Knewton blog again in a few days for a sample essay scored a perfect “6″!