Check out all the blog posts in this series:
- Identifying the Ingredients of a Winning Essay
- Finding a Theme for Your Statement of Purpose
- Writing Your Career Goals Essay
- How to Start Your First Draft of an Application Essay
- Revise and Polish Your Application Essays
All effective essays have a distinctive theme, and it can take time and careful thought to identify what yours should be. If you go back to the essays we examined in the previous post in this series, you will see that the public health program applicant opened her essay with her theme, which she cleverly presented as a question: “What if people lived healthier lives, practiced preventive medicine, and took precautions against illness and disease?” This theme was her passion for finding answers to significant public health issues.
In contrast, our law school applicant’s theme was his yearning for greater intellectual challenges while remaining in the healthcare field. While he persuasively built his case in his initial paragraphs, he saved the clincher for the final one: “I feel that my successful work experience and rigorous scientific training will allow me to debate with the best attorneys. Since medical technology and the law in this area are developing rapidly, I am also confident that this field will be constantly challenging.”
If you are beginning to think about what the themes should be for your own essays, the following questions will help you identify and define your essay’s main message. Your answers will also guide you toward expressing your goals, values as they relate to your career choice, motivations for pursuing a graduate degree, and professional dreams. Today, introspection isn’t as popular an activity as, say, yoga or streaming TV and movies, but it’s an invaluable part of this process. Give it the time it deserves. Your essay will be much better for it.
- Why are you passionate about – or at least committed to – your career choice?
- Exploring this question more deeply, what experiences in your life (personal, educational, professional) have influenced your career goals most powerfully?
- Has any individual played a major role in helping you discover these goals or values?
- What do you hope to achieve in your career?
- Can you visualize what career success will look like in five years? Ten years?
- What personal strengths, such as communication skills, empathy, and persistence, do you bring to this career?
- What professional skills, such as organizational abilities, clinical knowledge, teaching, and mentoring, do you bring to this career?
- What experiences do you have that will showcase these strengths?
- After the admissions committee reads your essays, what three words do you hope they would use to describe you? How about “driven,” “intelligent,” and “creative”? Or “dedicated,” “leader,” and “focused”? Whatever the image is that you want to create, identify experiences from your life that will illustrate those qualities.
As you think through these questions, some of the answers will come to you quickly, while others will need time to percolate. Write down your ideas, memories, and insights as they come. Eventually, they will build into a satisfying little inventory, and you will be able to identify the ones that are colorful or dramatic enough to become your essay introduction.
If you are writing multiple essays, such as for different MBA programs, each one must have its own theme. The admissions committees want to see you as a multifaceted individual and have therefore crafted their essay prompts accordingly. These questions provide you the opportunity to display various aspects of yourself, your values, and your personality.
Summary Tips
- Carve out some time for introspection about your career goals, values, and motivation. (That means your phone is in another room or at least in “do not disturb” mode.)
- Develop a distinct theme for each essay required by any program that demands more than one. Use each essay as an opportunity to show yourself as a multifaceted individual.
In the next post in this series, we’ll share insights into how to write an exemplary MBA career goals essay.
Work one-on-one with an expert who will walk you through the process of creating a slam-dunk application. Our admissions consultants have read thousands of essays and know the exact ingredients of an outstanding essay.
By Judy Gruen, former Accepted admissions consultant. Judy holds a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University. She is also the co-author of Accepted’s first full-length book, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Acceptance at Top Business Schools. Want an admissions expert help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch!
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