CA: Having essays that are memorable isn’t always good, is it?
BD: When you mention memorable, the first thing that jumps to mind are the essays that were a little cringe-y, and do not necessarily land the way that applicants wanted them to. I also think about some really beautifully touching essays, that were touching not because of how they were written, but what they imparted and what they told about the applicant; the fact that they were very sincere. That’s the key. Essays need to be grounded in your experience. It is not about how well you write. It is really how meaningful it is and how well it connects to the rest of your application.
CA: Could you drill down into that just a little bit more, in terms of advice to an applicant, how they can step back and perhaps view the application as a whole, as your team would. How they might identify areas that need a little more work or just a little more elaboration. Do you have advice on that?
BD: It is a challenge. Obviously you are not necessarily in control of all the pieces of the application. The recommendations, for example, and even your work experience and your transcripts are already set by the time you are applying. But I think knowing that we are looking at everything together, we are not looking at each piece in isolation, is important. Consider what information you are conveying in each piece and how it all fits together.
There are a couple of pieces of advice I would give.
One, the point of an application is to present your best self, put your best foot forward. We recognize that there is no such thing as a perfect applicant. We are not expecting there not to be any soft parts of your application, no warts. Successful applications are ones where candidates are self-aware about their weaknesses, their deficiencies, and they are able to incorporate that into the application. They might even address that as a motivation for wanting to get an MBA. If you can address and incorporate those weaknesses into your application, you can frame them in a productive way. That is better than ignoring them and letting us draw whatever conclusions we are going to draw.
A second piece of advice, getting back to the point of students and applicants thinking of schools as specializing, a finance school, or operations school or marketing school. We are all top schools, and are very diverse places. We are all looking for candidates with different backgrounds. I think you can trip up if you try to shade yourself or present yourself too much one way or the other in an application. For example, you think you are applying to a finance school so you have to be a finance applicant, or applying to a marketing school so you have to be a marketing applicant. You don’t want to get too far away from your own profile. Not all the information you are presenting is within your control. We are comparing everything together and if things don’t seem to line up it rings hollow. Not trying to shade things in any direction will present yourself much more favorably. You will be much stronger, regarding how your candidacy is viewed, than if you try to present yourself to be a little bit different than who you actually are.
If you take it from a game theory perspective, if you are applying to a finance school and you want to say, “I’m the finance candidate so I’ll be attractive”. If other applicants are doing that too, you all start to look the same. If the point is to differentiate yourself, it is counterproductive. So it is actually not a good strategy on a number of fronts.
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