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But what SPECIFICALLY is the answer?

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EssaySnark frequently finds ourselves saying in our critiques of BSers’ essays: But what specifically?

To illustrate the issue we’re trying to point out, we offer today support from the presidential campaign.

No, not that one. The other one that got America all wound up. From eight years ago.

 

When you’re answering the question that the adcom has asked you, you need to ANSWER THE QUESTION.

Specifically.

The full episode is available here, in case you’re in the mood for a little comedic remembrance.

($) essay critique! Kellogg “How have you grown?”

by EssaySnark - Discusses

Another Brave Supplicant ponyed up the big bucks threw a draft over the transom and asked for some freebie help, this time for Kellogg Essay 2. As a reminder, here’s the question: Pursuing an MBA is a catalyst for personal and professional growth. How have you grown in the past? How do you intend to…

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Good first drafts aren’t written. They’re assembled.

by EssaySnark - Discusses 5 Comments

Wanna know the longest route to a solid first draft?

Open MS Word and start typing.

That’s guaranteed to end up making this process rocky and difficult.

When you begin the task of answering the question that a particular school is asking, there is NO WAY you will know what you want to say.

Sure, you can start typing, and see what comes out. If you keep typing — and keep referring back to the question, as a reminder of what you’re supposed to be talking about — you may, eventually, come around to something worth saying.

But there will be a lot of useless words spit out onto your screen before you get there.

It’s just how things go.

Any good writer in the world will tell you, first drafts suck. That’s what they’re designed for. You don’t know what you’re saying or how you want to say it. The task of a first draft is to get the ideas captured on the page, and then you can start the real work of figuring out what it means and what actually belongs.

Most good writers don’t even harbor any fantasies that their first drafts will be usable. They KNOW that they’ll need to come back for revision. They EXPECT to do massive rewriting, and then are ready to throw writing away. Whole chunks of it. Sentences. Paragraphs. Sometimes the full draft.

You can do your MBA essays that way if you want.

Or, you can just write out a draft, and run spellcheck, and submit it.

Both methods are pretty much guaranteed to be doomed. If you submit a first draft, then we have a confidence level approaching the value of 0 that the essay will invite an adcom reviewer to look twice at you. That’ll put you on a fast path to rejection. If you start your first draft by just writing-writing-writing, then we also guarantee that that draft will be near-useless as a final document that appropriately answers the question and demonstrates who you are as an applicant. That first draft will need to be rewritten. Probably from scratch. As in, a start-over File->New clean-slate rewrite.

So what other options are there? How else would you do it, if you’re not writing a first draft of your essay?

The other method of building your MBA apps is to construct your essays.

You take the first question you’re answering.

You parse it out to its separate components.

You tackle each one of them individually — through a process of research and discovery and self-reflection.

Take Columbia’s Essay 1 on career goals:

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(end special nugget o’ Columbia essay 1 dissection)
 

Really what we’re saying here, Brave Supplicant, is break down the question, examine each piece individually, and then go off and think about it for awhile.

Taking each prompt apart and answering each element separately is super important. If you don’t do that, then you’re nearly guaranteed to be writing an essay that is half-baked and unfinished.

Each part that you answer needs significant attention, and brainstorming, and planning. It’s not a matter of dividing the page into sections and blah-blah-blahhing for each part of the question for a couple hundreds words, and you’re done.

Crafting out the nuggets from your background, and polishing up each individual item you will be presenting, will let you have these bite-sized chunks of material that you can then ASSEMBLE into a meaningful whole for your reader.

If you do the groundwork and lay the foundation in this manner, you will have significantly more ammunition at your disposal to apply to all the different essay questions that will be thrown at you this season.

(And oh yeah, shameless plug: The Complete Essay Package guides you through this whole process! Start to finish! We help you with the exercises for brainstorming and the techniques for examining your ideas in separate contexts, so that you have the building blocks you need to tackle all of the essays you’re trying to write assemble this season.)

When you have your first drafts assembled, then they will still need some revision. They are not going to be “done” just because you built them up from those nuggets. But they’re much more likely to be much closer to your target than if you’d just freewheeled it with randomness. Then, you’ll have a shot at making that multidimensional presentation to the adcom we’ve been advocating.

 
 
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($) Word choice matters.

by EssaySnark

We had a BSer send in an essay last season where they were trying to convey how they’re ready to pursue their stated future career goals based on current work experience. They had a statement that said: “My participation nearly from the start of the deployment was very helpful to become acquainted with the business…”…

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We do not recommend having your essays edited.

by EssaySnark Leave a Comment

International BSers especially often get frustrated by all the feedback they get from us in the Essay Decimator review process where we’re harping on writing problems.

Just a word of caution about getting help with English, as it could end up backfiring. The main reason that we provide critique and not editing services is because the essays need to be your own, and if other people do too much on them then it’s unethical and you’re going against the desires of the adcom in presenting your own work only. Many schools require in their applications that you attest that all the work is your own. That’s why we don’t do that type of editing ourselves in the reviews we offer (and obviously we never write essays either). So we just mention this as a warning about not crossing the line with what’s expected.

While it’s perfectly acceptable in other situations to get an important document edited by an English expert, that’s not OK with your MBA essays. We hate to use words like “unethical” when the implication is that YOU are being unethical by doing this, since it seems a little rude to be blatantly accusing you… but we have to call it what it is.

There’s a fine line between giving feedback on your approach with your essays, and writing the essays. Any review where your reviewer is changing the text of your writing is almost definitely crossing that line.

We realize that (most of) you would never intentionally be acting unethically — but that’s the thing with ethics. They can sneak up on you. Most people easily rationalize and justify their actions even when they veer into problematic territory. It’s unlikely that Bernie Madoff or the Enron guys or anyone involved in those operations were consciously seeking out to bad things that would so negatively affect other people. They were simply acting in their own self interest and the human mind has a way of making it seem OK to yourself.

And, sometimes, it’s simply a matter of not understanding the situation. Maybe you thought you were EXPECTED to submit perfect essays and that meant you should do all in your power to make them perfect, even if it means hiring an outside editor to fix them, since you know your English isn’t great. Or you thought it was OK to get a friend to do it.

The problems with this are:

  1. The English language bschools are evaluating all aspects of your application to see if you’ll do well in their program — including the English proficiency aspects. If you’re submitting work that someone else wrote — or even if they just “fixed” it for you — then you’re misrepresenting your abilities. You’re not going to have a paid editor go over everything you write during your MBA program. You shouldn’t be doing it now.
  2. The adcoms don’t EXPECT that a non-native speaker will have perfect English abilities. They just need to see what you’re capable of.
  3. The adcoms will have samples of your real-time, unedited writing through the standardized tests that you’ve taken. If the quality of those doesn’t match up with what you’re submitting in the essays, then that can be at least a minor red flag if not a major one in some cases.

The other problem is, if you get outside help on the essays like that, you can’t honestly answer the question when you submit your application and say that all of it is your own work. Wouldn’t it be nicer to be completely proud of what you submit and know that you’re putting your own best attempt forward based on your own personal effort?

And finally, the last problem is, what if your friend isn’t that good with English? And you don’t even know it? What if they make things WORSE? The biggest risk of all is that you get an “editor” helping you who has no clue about the best practices and proper techniques for writing essays for admission to business school. There is an art to this, specific methods of presentation that we coach you on. What if your well-meaning editor takes all of that stuff out? What if they muddy your message? What if your previous drafts were good and now they’re not? What if they edit out all of the good stuff?

Yeah, that can happen.

It’s why we say that friends don’t let friends read their essays.

It’s why we encourage you to talk to students – just not about your apps.

There’s so many ways things can go badly when you get too much “help” with the essays. Be conservative in how you approach this task, Brave Supplicant.

You are more than qualified and fully capable of doing this successfully on your own!

($) “Why do I have to say that in the essay when I’m already telling them that in the app?”

by EssaySnark

Doh! This post was supposed to go up BEFORE yesterday’s! When we give feedback to a BSer in the Essay Decimator process, sometimes they come back with questions of “Why?” Like, “Why do I need to do that, when I’m already doing this?” A common one is when they ask about our recommendation to lay…

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($) The hardest part of learning to write good essays

by EssaySnark

We introduced recently the model of The Four Stages of Learning. borrowed from illuminatedleadership.co — see EssaySnark’s discussion in our recent post   Today we will remind you that learning something new is hard. In the essay-writing process, Stage 2: Consciously Incompetent is very painful for many people. Why is that? It’s because you THOUGHT…

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