The bschool essay as torture device.

Admittedly, writing essays for a business school application is a big ol’ basket of no-fun. And unwittingly or not– Wait. Is there such a thing as “wittingly”???

“He wittingly put his foot in his mouth…”

Hmm. ‘parently not.

Sorry, where were we?

OH yeah. Essays and torture.

While you may harbor a secret suspicion in the back of your mind that the bschool adcoms have devised these essay questions — nay, this whole system of writing essays — as a means of punishing you for your very existence… A cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on those who aspire to get ahead… A gauntlet you must run in order to be given a chance of admission to their school on a hill… EssaySnark must remind you that you have volunteered for this. And, that writing skills are useful and practical and valuable to have in the world we live in today. And that as of now there isn’t really a better way that anyone’s figured out of how to get to know a faceless BSer to figure out if they’ve got anything interesting to contribute in a bschool classroom. (Video essays will undoubtedly become a bigger part of apps in the future — hey wait. Is “doubtedly” a word?? What is UP with the English language??)

And so you think the adcoms are out to get you with these essay-writing assignments. And then, given the opportunity, what you do — wittingly or not — is inflict your own revenge. You embed hidden weapons within your writing. You may not be conscious of how actually insidious your own actions are; many are not.

An unknowing third-party observer might just think that it’s an essay that you have submitted.

In fact, that’s the trap that we ourselves often fall into. “Dum de dum dum, just an essay, dum de dum.” Going about our little snarky day. Unbeknownst to us, dangers are lurking. There be dragons!!!

EssaySnark has a short memory, it seems.

We get an essay submitted for review and we forget the agony we just went through the last time we got one (like, yesterday). In comes the essay, and like Pavlov’s dog, we go to review it. It’s what we’re trained for. We innocently download the innocuous .doc or the more sophisticated and slightly sexy seeming .docx and unthinkingly we double-click on it — not managing to prepare ourselves, not bracing ourselves as we should. And lo, it opens on the screen. And we take a sip of our wine beer margarita shot of tequila COFFEE and settle in, just like the adcom will in some upcoming future time, with your beautiful and well-crafted and ever-so-wordsmithed essay there beaming at us.

And we read a sentence.

And we (try to) read another.

And we get halfway through the first paragraph, and suddenly we realize that our computer is leaning forward. The block of text on the screen is getting blockier. The weight is making our computer screen sag.

We shake our suddenly bleary head and try again.

Sentence 1.

Sentence 2.

Sentence 3… Oh wait. This sentence does not end.

We go into an endless loop: Read three sentences – system blanks out – back to the top.

Then we realize: No. No. No. It’s not us. This paragraph is inscrutable. We squint at the screen. It stares back, cold, calculating. Our computer is no longer our friend. We blink first, and swear to god it chuckles like Freddie Krueger.

We start hearing voices. What does this sentence MEAN?!? begins to echo — nay, shout — from the depths of our soul.

It seems that some BSers feel justified in making their essays into weapons of mass destruction — mass destruction of our brain cells, massive amounts of brain cells that just roll over and die when faced with the Herculean task of trying to decipher the meaning of this text. (Or maybe the brain cells are dying due to the increasing consumption of tequila. Either way, it’s still your fault.)

Little-known fact:  EssaySnark actually did not start out a snark. EssaySnark was CREATED. It is from you — or your countless predecessor BSers — that this creature arose. Reading bad essays did this to us.

Do you really want to inflict such a fate on anyone else?

Please, Brave Supplicant. Please. Do not launch torturous essay-bombs out into the world. Please figure out what you want to say in your essay FIRST. As in, BEFORE you start writing. (Maybe even plan out what you will say, with, like, OUTLINES and such.)

THEN you can start writing.

Because THEN you will have a point, and a purpose. You will know where you’re going.

As the inimitable Yogi Berra said (is there anyone who’s “imitable”?):

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”

And you might inflict real damage along the way.
 

Actually what will happen is the adcom person who you’re inflicting your torture upon will just put your essay aside. They will move on to the next BSer. Someone who is kind with her writing, who doesn’t cause hair to fall out in frustration. Because this is what many adcom people look like in real life. — Oh wait, no. That’s a picture of admissions consultants. Sorry, we got confused.