Blogs About "essays"

If you are applying to business school, or any professional graduate school, you need to tell the admissions committee about your leadership skills.  But even for skilled writers, it's tremendously difficult to put it on paper.  MBA Podcaster has put together a video in which I feature, along with 85 Broads member Kate Casolaro, and admissions officers from Wharton and Columbia Business School.  Here's a preview, courtesy of MBA Podcaster:

The admissions...

Imagine this: an admissions interviewer has read hundreds of essays, maybe thousands, by eager students trying to gain admission to their school. Many of those essays are written by those who are fully qualified, but just put down a laundry list of their accomplishments, like a resume in prose.  And they will be dinged.

Admissions committee members spend a long time writing questions that they believe will bring out the...

It’s been a few weeks since I have posted, and for that I apologize; the mad rush of applications for the first round of business school deadlines got the best of me. I’ve tried to encourage my applicants to start early (as I have recommended time and time again, for example, in this blog post , but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the applicant will end early. There’s...

There are only a few real rules in writing. In fact, there are so few rules to good composition that the best-ever book on the subject, The Elements of Style, is only 105 pages and tucks tidily into a Kate Spade handbag.

In business writing, and especially in writing essays for business school applications, there’s one big rule above all else: Answer the Question.

Most of you reading this blog have...

This is “acceptance” week – by now most people who applied to school by Round 2 have a pretty good idea where they are going to go. It’s been a long haul for some folks, longer and more complicated than most people realize. So if you are thinking of applying in the coming year, now is the time to start planning.

There’s really no downside to starting your research now. This...

About a week ago, I gave an MBA essay workshop to about 25 aspiring students and each one was remarkable. I don’t think they all would have agreed with my statement until they saw it with their own eyes.

To start the evening off, we went around the room, and each person gave one true and one false statement about themselves. You can guess how it turned out—everyone’s...