Writing Everyone's Essays But My Own

Before I get started, in honor of Mondays...




One of my colleagues in the Management Leadership Tomorrow program remarked that I am probably having an easy time right now because writing is one of my strengths. He's right, but then he's wrong. He's right in that I have an easy time with grammar, word use, etc, and that I can see for myself where an essay needs work. He's wrong in that I'm going to have to write just as many drafts as everyone else will. I'm not so cavalier as to think that I've got the essays in the bag. That type of hubris in this process is what results in rejections. In fact, the bar will probably be higher for me as an English major who works at a publishing company.

I do enjoy the essay writing process more than the studying for the GMAT process, though. I like to write and always have. You may be surprised to learn that I never wanted to be a fiction writer. The few times I've tried my hand at fiction, I have found myself bored and never felt compelled to see my work through to completion. I'd stop at the first draft and just lose interest. Non-fiction is where my heart was/is. At one point in my life I wanted to be a journalist so that makes sense. I love to recount true stories and find the symbolism, pathos, and humor in things that normal people do on a daily basis. Even still, my attention span has never allowed me to see any of my non fiction work through to the end (but I would love to write a biography of my grandmother -- she just refuses to be interviewed). Sure, I'm a decent writer, but my real talent (I think) is for bringing out the strengths of other writers. Kind of like a writing coach (or editor).

That same colleague sent out an SOS and asked me to look over some of his essays this weekend. He had received the same feedback multiple times and when he thought he was improving, his reviewer told him he hadn't made any progress. I looked them over and what had happened is that the treasure was buried deep, deep in the essay. Several paragraphs into a 750 word essay. He meandered through the essay making a few claims and never substantiating them or introducing ideas and never reconciling them. He had some cool ideas for metaphors but needed a coach to help him make the metaphors work and sing. I went through and helped him create a structure and develop a theme.

I also have a friend applying for medical rotations and she asked me to help her with essays for those programs. Unlike my colleague, She had so many treasures in one essay that readers were getting overwhelmed and she failed to connect the dots for why she wanted to go into radiology in a way that we could understand. So I helped her with creating an outline that kept her on track as she rewrote the essay. We have all of her treasures connected with a central theme that we laid out in the beginning of the essay.

While I was doing all this essay help, I avoided rewriting my own Kellogg essays. It did not help that I can now stream all four seasons of Mad Men on Netflix.


I spent Saturday watching Season 1 and pretending to write. To my credit, I did manage to finish a first draft of my Wharton essays at 2 AM last night and I'm glad that I got my ideas on to paper. As much as I preach about the benefits of outlining, I totally winged it on my career goals essay and wrote what I felt as it came to me.

Got my Kellogg Essays Back

I'm happy to report that my essays were in better shape than I thought they were. I am awesome at those Situation Task Action Results essays. Simply awesome. Where I am much less awesome is the Career Goals and Why This School essays. I've actually decided to alter my career goals. More on that later.

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

Recently, I got hooked on a series of blog posts wherein an admissions consultant was sizing up an applicants chances for a variety of schools. Though entertaining, I found myself a bit demoralized after reading these posts and started second guessing my accomplishments, chances, and choice in schools. I know that my GPA is low and am prepared to overcome that hurdle, but the emphasis on working for a big name firm is what got to me. Am I wasting application fees here? I know that it's unlikely that I'll be accepted everywhere I apply, but I do want to have a fighting chance at the school's I apply to. Now is not the time to lose faith in myself, so I decided to tune the self-doubt out and stop reading the series. I will instead channel that energy into fuel to produce stand out applications.

So my theme song for the day...

Onward, Ho! More Essay Outlining

I had a lovely evening last night. Simply lovely. Despite leaving work at 6 PM, I did not make it home until 8 due to protests on the subway.


I won't go into the details of the protest or even offer an opinion on them as my blog is not political in nature. All I will say is that my subway station was closed and I wound up having to take the expensive ferry home. Though inconvenient, it was a beautiful ride on the SF Bay.

The subway shut down took a chunk of my time last night that I was going to devote to writing Wharton essays, but last night I managed to get outlines for all down on paper. After having written a set of essays for Kellogg, my ideas flowed more freely. I'm going to be able to re-use an anecdote for Wharton that I've used in my Kellogg essay. I will not be copying and pasting, however, because the Wharton question is actually different from the Kellogg question. It's just that the theme is similar.

So why Wharton?




Wharton is a program that I got excited about in the last month after learning about the small business development center and their integrated marketing and operations major. I originally hesitated because it's a larger program and after speaking to some marketing students I got the impression that their support for those entering brand management wasn't that great. Upon a more thorough reflection of my career goals, I realized that Wharton's emphasis on finance and analytics is perfect for me in that I'll be forced to develop a knowledge base in areas that I'm currently lacking and through experiential opportunities, I'll be able to connect marketing and analytics in a way that I haven't been able to before.

Kellogg First Draft Finished

After a brutal seven-hour writing session, I have completed the first draft of my Kellogg essays. I need to give my boyfriend a special thank you for his understanding. We were supposed to go to the movies and out to eat this weekend but I just haven't had the bandwith. I managed to make breakfast and lunch today but have not changed from my pajamas. I had to send him to the store to get things for dinner, and at 9 oclock we will have our Sunday snuggle time. :) Right now, I'm unwinding with a cheap glass of Sauvignon Blac.

Reminders to myself about essay writing:

Be yourself. I'm sure you've heard admissions officers and consultants advise applicants to be themselves and not try to paint a portrait of what they think the adcom wants them to be. Truer words have never been spoken. I had trouble articulating the motivation behind my long term goals on paper and I hesitated to go for broke in talking about my career plans because I was afraid the adcom wouldn't believe I had the juice to make a career switch. For weeks, my career goals essays were boring and seemed too force. They actually pained me to write. Today, I restructured my career goals essay and talked about the deal with my father that led me to this career goal. My words flowed so naturally and so much easier than they had before.

Brainstorm and outline. It is essential to have a plan before you start attacking an essay. You need to know what you want to highlight in your essay, what anecdotes you want to tell and why they're relevant before you set pen to paper. This outline is your essay's skeleton. This outline allows you to think through your essay and establish a structure. I am a big structure freak. Structure in writing fascinates me. James Joyce is painful to read but I had to respect dude's structure. In fact in undergrad, I contemplated doing a PhD in Literature studying narrative structure (yes I'm that much of a geek). Structure gives the reader sign posts. The reader needs these sign posts so that your points are not lost. It also gives you a frame work to operate in so that you don't get lost in the writing sauce yourself.

A rough draft is just that. Rough. I am an experienced writer and spent my college education writing papers upon papers, but even with that experience I had to remind myself that the first rough draft is to really get your ideas on paper. There's no way in Hades that you're going to sound like Maya Angelou or Nabokov as soon as you put your fingers on the keys. It's just not happening. If the outline gives you a skeleton, the rough draft puts the meat on that skeleton. Power through those moments where you get stumped. One of my tricks is if I get stuck on how to describe something or on a word to use I'll write a stand-in phrase and put brackets around it so I know to go back and clean it up when I do my first repass. Some people work best when they do this rough draft through stream of consciousness (a literary style that I've always hated due to my love of structure), and this may be you. So you have to let the words flow through you and write your thoughts out. Follow the map you created in your outline until you get to the end and don't worry about how crappy or how good the essay is when you've finished.

Do not be afraid to abort the mission. This is another tip I picked up writing papers. I have thrown away pages of a paper and entire essays because after I got them on paper they sparked an idea for a paper that was much better than what I had. In the past few weeks, I wrote maybe two entire essays that I abandoned. I lifted maybe one or two sentences or ideas and used them to spark the essays that I have labeled my first draft. You have to give yourself ample time to write garbage. Nabokov's first iteration of Lolita was probably rubbish, so keep in mind that the greats got that way because they practiced, practiced, practiced. We're not writing novels here, but expect to go through some iterations before you get your polished jewel ready to submit to the adcom.




It is almost time for True Blood and Breaking Bad. My first draft has been sent off to my MBA application coach and I look forward to seeing what she has to say. I should include another self-reminder -- humble yourself. You need someone to keep it real with you and tell you where and why your essay sucks. I'm expecting lots of constructive criticism. I'd be kidding if I told you that I will squeal with glee when I see all of the comments about what I need to change and what sucked, but I need and want to hear this.