To continue the subject we started yesterday about disclosing personal stuff in MBA essays, but today on a different aspect: The difficult life event.
If you’re coming from the military and have been deployed to combat, then it’s likely you have seen some awful things.
Many people are currently dealing with the absolute tragedy of losing a loved one due to coronavirus.
Sometimes people experienced life-changing events, such as an accident that resulted in a fatality, or a serious injury skiing. Or cancer.
Maybe there was violence in the home growing up. Maybe a brother or sister OD’ed on heroin.
Do these experiences belong in an essay?
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As we said when we began this two-part series: Whether or not you choose to include such a topic in your essays depends on many things. It depends on your comfort level in disclosing it to a complete stranger. It depends on whether it’s appropriate to the essay question that you’re considering it for. It depends on why you want to include it. Everyone has had difficult things happen to them in their life — not always horrific events of violence, but there’s been something bad that’s happened to all of us. The fact that it happened doesn’t automatically mean you should talk about it in your app. However, if it became a pivot-point for you, where everything changed after that and you grew into a new person because of it, and you feel that it’s important for the adcom to know about this because it’s so fundamentally a part of you… Then yes. It may make sense to include it. With proper detail, and connecting it into the topic that you’re being asked to write about.
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