With late-round MBA essay deadlines still to come, I’d like to run through a few tips that will help MBA applicants ensure their essays are as strong as they can be, even if they’re working under tight time constraints. Reviewing these points and applying them to your own work won’t take a ton of time, but they can help you make a substantial positive difference in your writing.
1. Make sure you’ve addressed the entire prompt. Many MBA essay prompts have multiple parts – they’ll ask you to talk about an experience and then ask you to draw meaning from that experience, for example – and it’s important that you write essays that address the entire prompt. Go back over your prompts and essays to ensure that you’ve answered all questions and provided all requested information.
2. Watch out for buzzwords. Today’s professional landscape is littered with overused buzzwords: synergy, facilitating communication, analytics, core competency, benchmarking, proactive, smart-sizing…. I could go on forever. While you might think that these words perfectly capture an intended meaning or make your essay sound professional, in reality, they will make your essay unoriginal and in many cases, clichéd. Avoid buzzwords in favor of using simple, descriptive, and original language.
3. Check your length. Each of your MBA essays will have a length limit of some kind. Make sure that you haven’t forgotten about those. Even though you’re sharing detailed stories, you still need to do so within the set length limit. Submitting a batch of essays that are all too long will reflect poorly on you.
4. Proofread, proofread, proofread. There’s nothing more important than MBA essay review multiple times. That’s because an otherwise outstanding essay can be severely compromised by even a single missed grammatical error.
Applying those four tips to your MBA essays won’t take much time, but can make a big difference in how effective your finished essays will be.
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