When BSers get stuck on what they’re supposed to say in their essays, they frequently leave an exasperated comment asking for help. “Do you have a sample I can look at?” they ask plaintively, trying to keep the whine out of their words. If you read other people’s essays – even “successful” ones that got […]
Continue reading...($) 3 Innocent Mistakes MBA Applicants Make
(Besides not starting early enough. Which is the #1 mistake almost everyone makes, regardless of how much we warn about it. Pro Tip: It would be good to get started sometime soon!) While there are a near-infinite number of ways to muff up your MBA apps, there’s some common issues that we see crop up...
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What if you miss the deadline by only a few minutes or an hour?
It would really suck if you’re still getting your application done at 11:15pm when the deadline is at midnight and you only then discover that the school has a hard cut-off for the word limit on their field that you’re trying to paste your essay into, and your essay is too long, and suddenly you […]
Continue reading...Too much spin is a turnoff and becomes the opposite of an authentic presentation of yourself.
This is kind of general life advice which you already know, but we’ll issue this warning as you gear up for the months-long process of figuring out what to say in your essays to get into business school. Yes, you need to impress your reader. But there’s a fine line between writing about your achievements, […]
Continue reading...Bad MBA essay typos (2019 edition)
This topic is a never-ending source of amusement / mortification / horror depending on who you are and what stage of the essay-writing process the typo was discovered in. If it’s EssaySnark discovering it in an essay review, it may be kinda funny, or for common mistakes like messing up when “it’s” needs an apostrophe […]
Continue reading...($) Embroider it on a pillow.
But please don’t write it in an MBA essay. We originally started this blahg because we saw too many earnest MBA applicants (aka BSers) saying earnest MBA applicant things in their essays. That was nine years ago (and we’d already been reading MBA essays for many years before then). Alas, not much has changed. 🙁 […]
Continue reading...($) Being a “thought leader” is not a career goal.
BREAKING: Study Finds No One Quite Sure What The Hell “Thought Leader” Means — ADWEAK (@adweak) September 12, 2018 Sometimes people tell us that their long-term post-MBA career goal is to be a “thought leader.” (Apparently in Washington, DC, people say this on first dates , too.) This is not a career goal...
While much of the blahg is available completely for free, the content here is reserved for members with full blahg access only ($9.95/month for six months, cancel anytime). Please login to view this content or purchase a membership.
Your resume should be just one page. Period.
We have a whole Don’t Do This tag here on the blahg which seems to get a lot of use and might be worth exploring. Today’s topic is something that hasn’t been mentioned recently even if we’ve said it plenty times in the past, so we’ll hammer it home again: MBA resumes must be one […]
Continue reading...($) “I saw my [friend/mother/grandfather] go through this experience and now my ambition is to…”
Today is technically a holiday here in the U.S. – but we’re around reading essays just as fast as you are writing them! For those trying for schools like Stanford especially, we have a post today on a common practice used in MBA essays that doesn’t usually work. We see many essays that start […]
Continue reading...($) Do not overpromote!
Given our fraught public dialogue these days, the adcoms are becoming ever more sensitive to hype and propaganda in MBA apps. You don’t want to risk your candidacy by taking liberties with language! We don’t mean our standard exhortation about lying. Instead, we’re talking about hype. We have seen BSers inadvertently step in it when […]
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