A couple weeks ago a brave Brave Supplicant sent in a Yale SOM draft for us to look at for review here on the blahg — and here it is! Thank you to this BSer for doing so, especially for doing it so early in the season when it’s going to be most helpful to others and hopefully to you too!
Since today is officially T-1 and counting we figured we’d launch into Essay Season with this!
Oh yeah, in case you’re not familiar: We invite anyone to submit their draft for consideration for a free review. Check that out if you’d like to nominate your draft for similar treatment!
Here’s what Yale is asking again this year:
Describe the biggest commitment you have ever made.
And here’s how this BSer’s Yale essay started.
Her eyes, afraid to blink, were fixated onto my laptop screen, as I finalized her tax return. She, a single mother who expected a tax owing, was in tears to learn that her refunds will help pay utilities. Witnessing her emotional outburst, I realized that leading the volunteer tax clinic and serving hundreds of similar families meant more than an extracurricular activity. The experience of helping her, like no other, bestowed upon me a sense of purpose and awakened my innate desire to help the less fortunate, translating to a commitment to delivering positive social change through volunteering and entrepreneurship.
Wait – what? What’s that you say?
Oh, you can’t read it?
Oh. Darn. This BSer must not’ve gotten the memo. 🙂
The file that was sent over was set to Calibri 9 single spaced*.
We’re guessing that this BSer is working on some kind of massive computer display on their desk at home, or maybe even two displays which is so common with you smart young hipster types that need to get even more video games gamed important work worked. And their default view setting in Word is like 150%, or they have some fancy setting on their monitor that blows up everything beyond life-sized. Those are not standard display settings that the adcom will have.
For mere mortals receiving this kind of file on a basic type of office setup, a 9-point font in any fontface is teensy tiny. In Calibri? It’s minuscule.
So!! First lesson of MBA essays (and resumes): Use a decent-sized font!! This is a bare-minimum requirement in the category of “be kind to your reader.”
Let’s try that again:
Her eyes, afraid to blink, were fixated onto my laptop screen, as I finalized her tax return. She, a single mother who expected a tax owing, was in tears to learn that her refunds will help pay utilities. Witnessing her emotional outburst, I realized that leading the volunteer tax clinic and serving hundreds of similar families meant more than an extracurricular activity. The experience of helping her, like no other, bestowed upon me a sense of purpose and awakened my innate desire to help the less fortunate, translating to a commitment to delivering positive social change through volunteering and entrepreneurship.
Ahhhhh. Isn’t that better?
Okay, so now what do we got?
Well, a whole lotta confusion, frankly. 🙁
1) It might work to open this essay talking about someone else — but usually we would say not. Why? Because this is asking for YOUR biggest commitment. The first rule of Fight Club is whoops, sorry. The first rule of good essays is you must answer the question. Do we get an answer to the question anywhere in this opening paragraph? Nope. We get a vague reference to a commitment to doing good in the world, but that’s not a “commitment” in the sense of the word that the adcom is asking (see below for more discussion on this important point).
Even worse though, the first two sentences don’t have the essay-writer in them. Those two sentences are about someone else entirely. So the essay is supposed to be talking about the applicant’s “biggest commitment” and yet we don’t have the applicant in the opening. Again, this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule but it’s very rare where we see someone have an essay that’s MORE effective by starting off talking about someone else. To rephrase that in simpler terms: It’s a personal essay, asking about YOU, so open the essay TALKING about YOU. Even juggling it around to something like, “I made my biggest commitment when….” would give a better focus — though admittedly, that’s a very clunky opening. But it at least would let the essay be oriented most effectively from the very first word.
2. It might work to talk about the woman’s reaction somewhere in your opening where you talk about the volunteer work you did, but gosh darn golly, maybe EssaySnark is a sloppy reader, but unfortunately we just couldn’t figure things out at first! When someone is crying, usually it’s because THEY ARE SAD. It was only after reading the opening 4x did we get a hint that maybe she was crying BECAUSE SHE WAS HAPPY. Either way, due to #1 above, it’s not an ideal way to begin, but if you do choose to keep it, you need to make it clear what the other person’s emotions are and why they matter.
3. The bigger issue though is that there’s nothing here that shows what THE APPLICANT did to make the woman cry (regardless of if they were happy or sad tears). The next paragraph in this essay is off and running about how the applicant volunteered for an NGO after they graduated. We never come back to this woman anywhere in the essay. It’s just a throwaway experience — with throwaway tears. It’s not core to any answer.
And that’s the primary issue with the whole draft, which we’re not going to post in its entirety but instead will summarize:
Intro: High-level reference to working as a volunteer tax preparer
Para 2: Team-based experience volunteering with social entrepreneurs (very confusingly written, unfortunately, and also muddy because it’s talking about a team instead of the applicant’s own contributions beyond such statements as “I encouraged the team” which is not nearly specific enough to be useful)
Para 3: Now we’re on our third example, this time a professional one (?) involving work on a biotech startup, again with no details and very confusing information about what the applicant specifically did or how
Para 4: “why Yale” content apparently focusing on weaknesses — none of which was requested in the essay question
Hate to say it, sender-inner-BSer, but this draft is really really far from the mark and probably needs to be tossed. 🙁
Nowhere are we getting a direct answer to the question. What was your biggest commitment?
It’s rare that an answer for this essay can cover such a vast time span, and it’s also rare that professional content works in it at all. There are always exceptions, but we don’t see this draft or this approach being workable.
This ends up like a rehash of the resume. We learn nothing new here about YOU as a person. It’s falling into almost all of the common traps that we lay out to watch for in our Yale SOM Essay Guide.
In most cases, this essay simply does not lend itself to talking about why you want an MBA. The adcom has not asked for that, and the MBA is not a topic related to “biggest commitment” in any obvious way. We also don’t see this BSer’s career goals to be at all related to this do-gooder theme of volunteering as a tax preparer or serving in an NGO or working in biotech (the latter of which also doesn’t even seem related to that theme either). This essay suffers from the classic “let me try to impress you!” issue that so many people fall into. You can’t help it; you think that the assignment is to make the reader say “Wow look at that!” You put on all your shiny gold stars and blue ribbons that you won through years of trying to achieve from early adulthood to today, and you want them to admire it. But that’s not what this essay is asking for at all.
It’s kind of missing the point completely.
But don’t feel bad! This is what lots and lots of people do at the beginning.
href=”https://essaysnark.com/2015/12/the-most-natural-thing-in-the-world/ rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>It’s a natural response to the problem of trying to write for someone in a position of authority.
It’s why it’s so absolutely awesome that this BSer has started so early. Because that means that there’s a chance to turn it around!!
What we suggest to this BSer, and everyone else who’s reading this, is to pick up our MBA essay strategy guide for the school that you’re targeting. To study it, and read up on the blahg, and read some more. To possibly consider enlisting some help of a professional, like with essay ideas, before starting to write.
These essay questions may seem slippery and tricky, but they’re not.
They’re usually quite simple.
Do some analysis on what you have written.
If you can take a red pen and underline the answer to the question, then you know you’re on the right track.
Nowhere in this BSer’s ~500-word essay do we see where they stated what their biggest commitment ever was.
At the end of that first paragraph we posted above, yes they used the word “commitment” but all they said was it “awakened a desire” and then they made a very broad reference to “positive social change” which is way too vague and undefined to be something to commit to.
It’s like World Peace. Everybody is committed to that, aren’t they?
So if the “commitment” you have identified is something that probably everyone you know would also say, “Oh yeah sure I’m committed to that, too” then you know you haven’t found the answer to the question.
The best “commitment” essays are tangible, and they show literally what you committed to.
This type of “commitment to justice” or “commitment to doing good” essay is a dime a dozen for Yale SOM. They get gazillions of others saying nearly the same thing.
What this BSer did well was they tried to use real examples to back up the answer.
But it does not meet the BIGGEST commitment test because if this “social change” thing were really their #1 mission in life — which “biggest commitment” implies — then they’d have focused their entire career on this, instead of working in a standard corporate environment as they do now and instead of the post-MBA goals that they shared with us which aren’t about social change at all.
So it falls short of that “biggest” criteria.
Now, “biggest” can be interpreted in many ways, so don’t get too hung up on that precisely. We’re using that mostly to help explain why the draft as submitted is not very strong. “Biggest” is another way of saying “most significant” — it does not mean “This is why I’m pursuing this particular professional career” etc. As we said above, this probably is best done not with professional content. But if you DO use professional content, then it all needs to tie together.
This BSer also needs to work on clarity in writing, and remember — as everyone needs to — that the reader is a complete stranger who knows nothing about your life or your work. For most people, one or two examples total is more than sufficient in this essay, and they don’t need to be achievement stories at all (those often take you further from the ideal content instead of closer). This post may help explain.
And now we’re at almost 2,000 words in discussing this so we’re going to end this here! Our Essay Decimator service is absolutely invaluable for anyone tackling their first drafts to their first school. There is a major learning curve in writing good essays and until you get one set of essays polished up and shiny, you’re only going to be repeating these same issues over and over in all of your apps, which will not help you maximize your chances. This BSer has a very very common profile and in this case the essays will need to be a-ma-zing (well, that’s true for all of you, but it’s especially true for applicants like this).
Again, congrats on starting early — which means you have plenty of room to allow you to start over again!! 🙂
If anyone else is brave enough to send in an essay for this type of treatment, please do!
Or if you want to minimize the pain and reduce the rework, and maximize the opportunities that your profile affords, the Complete Essay Package is highly advisable. There’s still plenty of time to get started and move all the way through!
* Not that double-spaced would’ve been any better! All 9-point fonts should be outlawed.
The 2018 Yale MBA Application Guide has beaucoup information not only the “commitment” essay but also the video essays, the recommendations and the interview, and plenty of guidance on what might make for a good answer — or probably not the most idealest one — for your “biggest commitment” essay.
Tell us what you think.