Confident, but not Overconfident: Striking the Perfect Tone (Part I)
By Jeremy Dann
It’s all about “attitude.” Your attitude will permeate your essays and set the tone for the way the admissions committee views you when you apply to a top-flight business school. When b-school aspirants sit down to actually craft their essays, they realize what a fine line they walk as they seek to develop their literary persona throughout the handful of required essays.
One of the key questions they have is: how confident should I try to appear? It’s fun telling a story full of your achievements and peppered with remarks that show your confidence, pride and skills. When you do this verbally to someone across a table from you, you able to pick up on verbal and visual cues that let you know if you need to ratchet the confidence back one or two levels. With b-school essays, we have one shot to craft our message, and those passages will be read by people with diverse personality types and differing levels of acceptance and patience for bravado.
How do we highlight our business and leadership achievements without sounding like we are God’s gift to Commerce? A couple of pointers now (and a few more next week):
• Acknowledge the team: NASCAR drivers use the “we” technique to a fault. “We were running great today. When we took that first turn, our car was running perfectly.” You don’t want to sound like a cliché, but positioning your achievements as team achievements works wonders. Plus, ultimately your abilities as a business leader will be more dependent on your abilities to achieve in a team format than in an individual setting.
• Balance your portfolio of essays: You probably have more license to highlight your truly impressive achievements when you gain credibility in other essays by being honest and open about failures, weaknesses and doubts you have had. If you just highlighted how the incredible amounts of work you plowed into an entrepreneurial venture led it to be such a success, then you shouldn’t in another essay half-heartedly chime in with “sometimes I work too hard” as a personal or professional weakness.
• Highlight mentors: If you are shining the spotlight on your leadership capabilities, make sure you also acknowledge people in your academic, extracurricular or work settings from whom you learned some of these skills. This works equally well for hard skills (finance, negotiation, etc.) and “soft” skills (leadership, communications, ability to mentor, etc.). It shows you are good at acknowledging the strengths in others and know how to learn from them.
More on this soon. Take care.
