The mbaMission Podcast

Ep 77 | MBA Application Essays: The Dos and Don'ts of Final Revisions

• mbaMission • Season 2 • Episode 77

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As MBA application deadlines approach, many applicants feel the pressure to make their application essays "perfect." But how should you actually go about revising and polishing your essays? How much rewriting is TOO much, and how does a final read-through differ from a standard round of revisions? In this week's episode of the mbaMission podcast, Harold Simansky is joined by mbaMission Managing Director Rachel Beck and Executive Director Jessica Shklar. Harold, Rachel, and Jessica discuss the best strategies for fine-tuning your essays, common last-minute mistakes MBA applicants make as deadlines approach, and when it's time to stop tweaking and hit submit. If you are applying to business school and putting the final touches on your applications, you won't want to miss this conversation!

00:00 Welcome to the mbaMission podcast
01:47 When and how to fine-tune your essays
04:18 How to explain your work (without jargon)
06:36 Polishing versus a full teardown 
09:26 When to STOP revising 
10:01 Should you use ChatGPT to revise your essay?
14:00 Final read-throughs and checking for mistakes
19:48 Dealing with writer's block 
23:48 Communicating fit with examples
24:19 Make sure you answer (all of) the question!
26:11 Common mistakes in essay revisions 
29:42 Final thoughts on essay polishing and final reads

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Rachel Beck:

You want the admissions committee to understand what you do.

Jessica Shklar:

They want to know why was this project important? Who did you work with on it? What was the strategy behind it? What were the results? I actually have my clients put the question at the top of the page and then highlight the key sections. Are you answering the question for that school? Remember, the schools spend a lot of time figuring out what they want to ask.

Rachel Beck:

A good essay answers the question and does it in a way that anybody could pick it up and read it and say, wow, I learned something about you. If your stories are true to yourself, then have the confidence to stand by them.

Harold Simansky:

Today we are joined by my colleague Rachel Beck, who has been helping MBA applicants for well over a decade and was previously a journalist for the Associated Press. Between us, we have probably read and edited tens of thousands of application essays. So our topic today is certainly one we are experts in. How to polish your essays? Yes, starting an essay may feel like the toughest part, but how you edit and call your story maybe the most important. In this episode, we'll review tricky word and character counts, how to succinctly answer some of the most common essay questions, who should review your essays, and when and how to ensure your true self comes through. Hi Rachel. Hi Jessica.

unknown:

Hi.

Harold Simansky:

I'm talking to you now right on a very auspicious day. It is right in the middle of deadline season. So of course, people are going to be thinking about what do I do to really polish up my essays? And as I tell folks, with hours to go, you better have polished them already. So with that in mind, when should you start polishing your essays? And what does polishing an essay actually look like?

Rachel Beck:

Well, first of all, you shouldn't be polishing your essays in the final countdown because then you're rushing your polish and you definitely will not be happy with the results. So I say three weeks out plus, you should begin the steps towards polishing your essays. And the number one thing I say to my clients in polishing their essays is does this sound like you? Um so I always say to my clients in that final stage, read it out loud, hear it. And is it in your voice that's so important? Make sure the sentences sound like you and you're you're hearing your punchy things that you want to get through. Um that's the way I prepare my clients for the final read.

Jessica Shklar:

I would say the reading out loud is one of the most important things because if you're reading something and you find yourself stumbling over it, then it's probably not in your voice. And if you look at a word and you aren't quite sure how to pronounce it, or you just it just feels awkward, it's probably not a word you would use naturally. And that's especially important if English is not your native language. Obviously, if you're applying to business school, you have great English skills, but that doesn't mean you're going to sound like a native speaker. And I think what's really important is what Rachel said about sound like you. Um you're not expected to sound like a Pulitzer Prize winner or a reporter. You're expected to sound like the best version of yourself.

Harold Simansky:

Right. We frequently hear this notion of accountants should sound like accountants, engineers should sound like engineers.

Jessica Shklar:

I'm not sure I would agree with that. Um engineers and consultants um often use an awful lot of jargon. And it has to be sound like you, but also you're writing for an audience of someone who may not know your jargon.

Harold Simansky:

Aaron Powell Did I mention that the engineers I was that I was talking about actually were had minors in creative writing? Oh, okay. Well, no.

Jessica Shklar:

No, I'm just I'm just and I think that that actually creative writing brings up something else. I remember I've been here 17 years. My first year, I was almost done with a client, and she was she had really solid, good essays. And then I got what she called was her final drafts, and they didn't sound anything like her. I said, What is this? She's like, Oh, well, I thought they needed to be more creative, so I gave them to a friend who's a creative writing major and she revamped them. And I'm like, But do you use these words? She was not a native English speaker. And she's like, No, I don't actually know what some of them mean. It was a disaster. It did not sound anything like her, and we had a lot of rework.

Rachel Beck:

Yes. Well, I come from a journalism background where I would write stories that would reach a general news audience. And I always, in the kickoff call of my clients, use this pitch. You want the admissions committee to understand what you do. So when it's complicated, think about that average reader, which I typically say, think about your parents, your mom or your dad. Will they understand that? Which my parents found very offensive over time because they're a lawyer and a PhD, and they said, we understand complicated things. But I said, you wouldn't understand the complicated things in jargon in an industry. So when I talk to my clients about that final read, that polishing the essays, make sure it's not so inside baseball that the person reading it, the admissions officer, who is an average reader, they're not versed in basically anybody's field, can really understand it. And I think that is so crucial, especially as you get to these final weeks of the season.

Jeremy Shinewald:

If you want to be one of our success stories, sign up for a free consultation with a member of our full-time MBA admissions team. Since we've worked with tens of thousands of applicants over the past two decades, we can give you our honest opinion on your chances and help you put together your very best application. That is not a sales call, but rather your first session with one of us for free. We can give you a profile evaluation, answer specific questions about the process, review your resume, talk about your school choices, and so much more. Sign up at nbamission.com slash consult. We look forward to working with you.

Jessica Shklar:

And I think it also is when you come to polishing resumes, it's the same advice. A resume for a job might be very different from your resume for business school. Because for a job, you're pitching to someone who already knows, who plays that inside baseball. So if you're an engineer or you're a computer scientist, you can use those languages. You can talk about what you did. That's not what business schools care about. They want to know why was this project important? Who did you work with on it? What was the strategy behind it? What were the results? They don't care what technical language you use to write that program. They want to know why it mattered and what difference it made.

Harold Simansky:

That's right. And I say to many of my clients, think about a 10-year-old reading it. And then if they say, oh, of a 10-year-old who can absolutely understand that, then they say to them, think about my 10-year-old reading it, and you would have a definitely different reaction. When people also talking about polishing, are we talking about words? Are we to are we just talking about words? Are we talking about paragraphs? I think all of us have can as consultants have faced the issue of teardowns. So I'm gonna really ask a couple of questions here. And one of them, I'm gonna lead the witness. Is a teardown ever valuable?

Jessica Shklar:

A teardown by which I'm assuming you mean a complete overhaul of the essay? It can be. It's not because if you are tearing down because you sent it to someone who doesn't know anything about admissions, maybe they went to business school themselves, and they say, Oh, you should really do XYZ. Those teardowns never work because they haven't seen what we've done, which is the entire strategy of the application, how all the essays and the resume and the short answer and the recommendations fit together. And they may have very outdated knowledge. Tear downs because it's the last minute and you're panicking and you suddenly realize that you also undoes all the stuff that we've done before. A teardown that is a few weeks before, and you've really thought about it, and you realize that's not the message you want to send, or there's a different story, or something new happens in your in your career that you want to change, those are appropriate. So I would say thoughtful, well planned out teardowns are better than a wrecking ball.

Rachel Beck:

I agree. I would say that happens very, very occasionally when someone's like, I don't like this at all, and I want to restart, at least in the final stage of the application process. Like that would be that would be a big ask to suddenly be like, oh my God, let's redo the whole package. But part of reading it out loud is to make sure you're telling your story. That's what we want to convey. As consultants, it's very important to us that you're you're in this. You're we're helping you shape your story. So if it doesn't sound like you, then you should speak up. You should rethink what your approach is. And it's okay to do that. But again, you risk that rush to the finish line, which the rush often leads to mistakes or it doesn't sound great. Well, I think what's something that's really interesting because I'm old.

Jessica Shklar:

So is that No, you're not. I'm gonna insist you're not old.

Harold Simansky:

Jason and I went to high school together.

Jessica Shklar:

But I think it's the typewriter to computer switch that really this generation, the last few generations we've been working with, that really changes the mindset. When you know our parents went to school, they hand wrote a paper, and when it was done, they typed it on a typewriter and sent it in. And it was finished. With computers, it's never done. And there's this compulsion to keep tinkering until the last possible minute. And that's one reason that we do final read throughs when we work with clients where we really say, This is like the stage we're going to take a final, and we can talk more about what a final read-through is like. But we say, This is your final. Let's look through and then put it to bed. It's done. Move on to something else.

Harold Simansky:

Yeah. I actually hate the word polish, and I'll tell you why. It reminds me of over polishing in Apple, because we've all had this experience. Once you get to edit number 1516, the life has truly been squeezed out of the essay. And at that point, you sort of read it and it truly becomes ho-hom in this and that for me is the biggest concern as we get closer to the deadline. At some point, you just have to stop. And at this point, this does represent who you are. This is not a creative writing assignment. At this point, you're not looking to win the Pulitzer Prize. So, so what do you really want to say? And who do you want to be?

Rachel Beck:

I think at the end, and we're really seeing this more this year than we've seen ever before, not to bring up the dreaded AI, but as people are polishing their essays, there's a temptation that they feel like they should put it into Chat GPT just to see what it sounds like. And then it changes their voice, it changes the feel of the essay. They forget that they have to be all in here, their own voice, their own stories. They're not supposed to be these perfectly engineered narratives, right? It sounds like AI when you do that. So my warning is resist that temptation. You know, people say I'm just putting it into check the grammar, but it doesn't really work like that. Um, and so we really feel strongly at MBA Mission to avoid that step. And and it's rampant right now.

Jessica Shklar:

You're working with us for a reason.

Rachel Beck:

Use us for that.

Jessica Shklar:

Rachel, do you ever leave leave mistakes in your clients' essays?

Rachel Beck:

I don't because I can't do it. I can't. I can't leave a mistake um on purpose, right? Because if it it snuck through, then they would come back and say, but you read it, right? But part of the reason I like my clients to read things out loud is by reading it out loud, you hear mistakes that both of us might not have caught along the way.

Jessica Shklar:

See, I will sometimes, I will never leave a mistake that changes the meaning or that's offensive, or that it's blatantly wrong, and I cannot leave spelling mistakes ever. But if someone is a non-native speaker and there's a language quirk, maybe they say of instead of in because that's how they put it, or sometimes they pluralize something that shouldn't be, I will leave that because it's their voice. So there is a line, a fine line.

Rachel Beck:

I don't consider those things mistakes. I just think that they're writing in in their native voice.

Harold Simansky:

Yeah, I always split infinitives. I don't know if you're supposed to split infinitives anymore. You're not supposed to, but in many ways, I always think it just reads better. I just enjoy it better.

Jessica Shklar:

Yeah, I'll sometimes put notes to my clients. I'm like, okay, this is grammatically wrong. And here's the reason and here's the rule. However, nobody is going to know that but me. I just told you this because it makes me feel better. You do whatever you want.

Harold Simansky:

Yeah. Yeah. I think one say one thing when we talk about actually it being in your voice, also there's a level of really personal detail that can be is certainly lost if you use ChatGPT. It that is certainly the case. So, yes, read it out loud, but also think to yourself, not only does it sound like me, but am I conveying something that may be not so obvious in other places of my application?

Rachel Beck:

Something that I also tell my clients to do is as you're reading it out loud, just check that not every single sentence begins with I, because the reader starts hearing, I did this, I did that, I did this, I did that, versus listening to your stories. And I think once people start reading, by the way, I read things out loud from day one of edit to the last edit. Um, and I encourage my clients to do that, but they want to avoid that constant I, I, I, I, I, because when you change up sentence construction, your essays sound a lot more powerful.

Jessica Shklar:

And it's not just I, I, but you see, essays that start with the first sentence starts with but, and then the next sentence starts with however, and then the next sentence starts with although. And then those feel very repetitive as well, even though it's not I. So reading it out loud, looking for those nuances. Now, is someone gonna get rejected because they had three sentences in a row that started with I? Probably not. But you do want to put your best foot forward and you want to stand out, and you don't want any doubt that you did your best job. No one wants to feel like the admissions committee is gonna say they were sloppy. So I don't think it's a deal breaker to do that, but you really don't want to.

Harold Simansky:

Yeah. Yeah, listen, it's always about optimizing that one piece, that one extra piece. And I frequently tell folks to get into business school, you have to stack the right number of pennies. So at the end of the day, making sure that the grammar is right, that the language is right, you're just stacking pennies. You're not stacking nickels, you're not stacking quarters, but you are stacking.

Jessica Shklar:

But there are some um big mistakes, so you make sure that you run a search on your essays for the name of the school you're applying to. That's true. Because we all copy and paste. And I saw one the other day where buried in the middle of the essay was the wrong name, the name of the wrong school. And that's why we do read throughs and we catch it. But you can run, I mean, every I would say that every single applicant should do this. Just your final, final check. Take your essay, run the name of the school, the acronym for the school, and just see, because that would be a pretty devastating mistake.

Rachel Beck:

I mean, I even advise everybody to print it out and read the hard copy out loud with a pen and paper in hand. I know that is radically 2002. Um, but I think it's really important because when you're holding it in your hand, you see things differently than when it's on the computer screen. We're so trained to read on the computer screen that we gloss over things. Um, but when you're looking at it like you're reading a magazine or a newspaper, I am old school, you read things differently.

Jessica Shklar:

Actually, I absolutely mandate that. So when we work with clients, I have a whole process that I go through with them for final read through. So when we first start out working with someone, we look at the entire set of essays for that school and we figure out how they're all going to fit together. And it's not just, you know, oh, this is a career essay for one school, I'm gonna copy it to the other, because maybe a story in there doesn't work there. It works better in another essay. So we look at everything at once. But then everyone goes off and works on their own, and maybe they do five drafts of one essay and then only two drafts of another. And and we look at everything piecemeal at that point, and maybe working on multiple schools. So at some point, you have to bring it all back together. It's almost like I don't know what the shape is, a parabola or something where that's not a parabola, cut that out. Oh, you start up here and then it expands and then it comes back together. So when I work on essays, and I'm sure you do this too, when I think an essay is done, I say to them, stop working on it, set it aside for final read through. Not going to worry about it yet, just set it aside. Once we get to the point where everything for a school has been set aside for final read through, that's resume, all of the essays, and the application itself, then I say it's time for your final read-through process, which is put everything together and just like Rachel said, print it out. Take it somewhere else. Go to a coffee shop, go to your living room, print it and read it somewhere where you're not used to reading it with no electronics around and with a pen and paper, and you will see it completely differently. I just did this and I had a client who wrote back to me, he's like, I haven't printed something in years, but oh my God, I caught all these things that we just wouldn't have seen, and it was such a great process. And that way you see everything. One of my early years here, um, I did a final read-through for someone, and we realized that we had one paragraph that was completely duplicated in two essays for one school. But we had been doing so many essays and so many different versions, and this paragraph was a really key paragraph, and it was in lots of his essays that neither of us realized when we were doing everything piecemeal that it was a complete duplication. And so that isn't a teardown. We said, okay, this entire paragraph, this 200-word paragraph is gone, we need to pull something else into it. That's a good reason for a teardown to come back to that. But without the final read-through process, we wouldn't have caught that.

Harold Simansky:

So we're talking now, the sequence really is polish. In my mind, it's polish, put down, put together, final read-through. When should the final read-through happen, do you think?

Jessica Shklar:

Well, not at the last minute.

Rachel Beck:

Absolutely not.

Jessica Shklar:

Because you know, you run you run the late with the risk of it of it being just too late to really do a good job or to go into panic. Um I would say ideally it's a couple of weeks before the deadline because you might catch things and you want time to make those changes. So final read through, set uh set it aside. I tell people like put everything aside and then go away for a day. Work on something else. Come back to it with a fresh eye. Even if it's just a few hours, but ideally a couple of a day or two, and then do the final read through and then I talk about fresh eyes a lot in the whole application process.

Rachel Beck:

Um, as a journalist, I used to suffer from real writer's block. And I would sometimes have to go walk around the block in New York City and come back, and then I could write the story on deadline in in a half hour, but I was stuck. And I feel like a lot of my clients feel like they're stuck through the whole process. But the most important fresh eyes is the last step, is where you read it, you walk away for a day or two, and then you come back to it and you will see it differently. And I would say 99% of the time, nothing has changed, right? You you like the work that you've done. Sometimes there's little things like, oh, I noticed this phrasing I didn't like. Okay, we can fix that. Now I'm a really big stickler about finishing at least a week before the application is due. And I had a client last season who refused to live by this. And he applied to six schools with me and had a tech glitch at every single school. And we were like literally working up to the like the deadline, like the hour that was the deadline, and things would happen. So you can't live like that. You need to work ahead of time because you then look at things with these fresh eyes and clear eyes. Um, and you feel very good when you submit. So you don't want to feel like I submitted rushed. That doesn't feel good.

Harold Simansky:

Yeah, I do a lot of ding reviews, as we all do. And one of my first questions is always, when did you actually submit? And if it's closer than three days before the deadline, I sort of know the story at that point. I'm like, okay, I'm not even saying there were mistakes in there. Yeah, I'm just saying that there must have been some element of momentum here. You probably didn't do possibly the best job that you could have. And then I go off and read the essays, and invariably that turns out to be true.

Jessica Shklar:

Can we talk about writer's block? You brought that up. And I know that's not polishing, that's the beginning, but what tips do you give your clients when they face writer's block?

Rachel Beck:

I give them a lot of tips. First of all, I suggest um get up 20 minutes earlier in the morning and just jot down your thoughts. I know it's hard to get up earlier in the morning, but it makes a big difference. So when you come at home at night, it's not this dread all day long, like I have to work on this essay. You've actually already jotted down some thoughts and then work on those thoughts in the evening and then do the same exercise the next morning. And by the end of the week, you should have your essay coming together. Um, and I think that that really, really helps. I also really um put a high premium on outlining. Like, don't feel like you have to sit down and just write this cold. Take some time to do outlining. And you can do outlining multiple times for one essay. Like maybe you do it the first time and it's very loose, right? It just bullet points. The second time you start filling in more to the paragraphs. The third time, it's wow, this is starting to take shape. So I would say almost everyone has some level of writer's block. You can get over it by fresh eyes, taking on different strategies. Don't leave it, don't say, oh, Sunday I'm gonna write all these essays. It's not going to get done on Sunday. You're gonna actually be very, very frustrated.

Jessica Shklar:

And I think that um what I do is when I brainstorm with people, I try to give them an opening line because that's the hardest part. So I'll say, like, here we may throw it away at the end, but here's your opening line. When you get off the phone, write this opening line down, and that's gonna be the structure for your essay. And we're gonna line up the paragraphs. And I try to do that outline on the phone with them when we brainstorm. Because honestly, the opening line is the hardest part. And but then the other thing, if we don't have a great opening line, or if not, I say, just write. You know what? It's the worst thing you send me is not gonna be the worst thing I see. And I'm not gonna judge you for sending me something that's not good. I might get rid of it. I might, you know, if you need to write an opening line that just sort of repeats the question, you're not gonna end up with that, but just get something on the page.

Rachel Beck:

You actually gave me great advice years ago. Jessica trained me in this job 14 years ago. And you said, after we do a brainstorming call, you tell your clients to block out an extra half hour. So when we're done, you go and you spend time just writing down the thoughts from the conversation. And then you should have a lot of things to turn to when you're starting to write your outlines. Um, and I think that helps a lot.

Harold Simansky:

Okay, I'm gonna give a very different opinion about writer's block. It is not my own. Anyone can email me and I'll tell you who actually said it. Okay. And it's gonna be very different. There's not writer's block, there's a laziness. At the end of the day, look at that page and start putting words down. That's the answer. You get through writer's block by writing, and that's what you have to do. That's your job.

Rachel Beck:

It's a it's fair, but sometimes it just doesn't. People get stuck and they get stuck in the stuck. So sometimes by walking away, and I always tell my clients, they send me a long brainstorming document, and then I'll invariably people say, Hey, I sent it to you this morning. Can we meet this afternoon? And I'm like, Meet this afternoon? I like to read this over a few days, and then I'll I explain. I live with it. I live with your stories in my head. I live with it when I'm working out, I live with it at the supermarket, when I'm walking the dogs in the middle of the night fits of insomnia. I'm living with your stories. You need to live with your stories too.

Jessica Shklar:

We read those brainstorming documents several times, take notes, try to come up with outline ideas, and then we meet and talk. So if our clients have spent six, seven, eight hours working on a brainstorming document, we spend three or four before we even have that first conversation. Yeah. So that's absolutely that's that's really important. The other thing is they can just, you know, write the question down and in, but not in question form and sentence form if they're really stuck, right? So why do you want to go to business school? I want to go to business school because we're not going to stick with an essay like that.

Rachel Beck:

Which actually brings me to the final read-throughs. An very important thing to think about in your final read through is am I really, if it's a question about fit, you know, why do you want to go to this school? Why this school? Make sure you're really giving strong examples. Um, I think what happens through the process is you include some things and then you forget about it. But now that you've done all this hard work in preparing your applications, am I really conveying what I want to the school of why this school? And I think that's an important thing to think about at the end.

Harold Simansky:

Right. And I think that's a piece of the polishing as well. Because by the time you get to writing essay number five, four, you know, five, six, seven, then suddenly the question just seems to evaporate. And you're writing about really what you want to write about. You sort of created frequently this Frankenstein monster, but I like this from this essay, I like this from that essay. So at the end of the day, polishing really starts with what's the question? What's my answer?

Jessica Shklar:

And so many of the schools, catalog is a perfect example, have three or four sections to every question. Harvard does this year too. So I actually have my clients put the question at the top of the page and then highlight the key sections. MIT does this. And then as I read, I'm going back and saying, Oh, does this meet that highlighted section? Did you did you forget why now? Did you because that's not in every school? And so we're constantly looking to say, are these, are you answering the question for that school? Remember, the schools spend a lot of time figuring out what they want to ask, and they know their questions. And if you don't answer their question, they know it's a copy and paste from that school.

Harold Simansky:

That's it exactly.

Rachel Beck:

Exactly. Actually, last night I was editing two sets of final read-throughs for Kellogg, and both clients had stripped out for word count the why now, which is a direct question in uh the Kellogg um essay. And so I went back and said, you've got to put it back, and we have to take out other words. Right, right.

Jessica Shklar:

One of the other things I find, getting back to the whole idea of um tone and your voice, is I often will set have clients, they send me an essay, and then they put in the margins in the comments. What I'm really trying to say is, and then they give me this beautiful, articulated, lovely layout that has not is much better written than what's in the text when they feel like they have to write an essay. 90% of the time I take that paragraph and I put it into their essay, cut what they had before, and it sounds terrific because it's their voice. That's when they're talking to us. And when they're trying to write in essay form, it's become stuffy.

Harold Simansky:

Aaron Powell So when it comes to polishing, what are some of those things that you see that always surprise you? Or what does the polishing reveal that you really may not have anticipated?

Jessica Shklar:

Aaron Powell I think that people often doubt themselves and they throw away all the work that's gone into the essays up until that point. They have this moment of panic. Um, and they I I was working with someone the other day, fantastic essay. It was beautiful. It was Harvard one, the business-minded, and they do not ask. Harvard specifically does not ask, why do you want to go to Harvard? And when I had got it back, he had about 40 words out of a 300-word essay, that's a lot, where he was writing, I really like the case method. And I said, Why are you becoming generic? He's like, Well, I think I have to put it in. I said, but they didn't ask that. I said, You can. But you took out something that was unique to you, specific, so much part of your identity, to put something in that's generic and that the school didn't ask for. And he said, Okay, it was my anxiety getting in the way, and we were able to change it. It's not ultimately his decision, but that was my advice. And I think that that's what we see a lot is my father read it, my boss read it, um, and or I just suddenly had a moment of doubt and not trusting the process, which is we've spent months on this. Let's just trust that we did it the right way.

Rachel Beck:

This is where we become part therapist, part consultant, where we're like, if you put the work in, it reads really well. Tune out the noise. Like your cousin's girlfriend's sister went to this school and she got in and we're happy that she got in. But that doesn't mean her perspective carries any weight with your story or how you present yourself. Like what worked for her on a totally different set of essays doesn't work for you on your set of essays. And if your stories are true to yourself, then have the confidence to stand by them. Right.

Jessica Shklar:

And I when people want to read, have someone else read their essays, I say to them, like, your friends, your bosses, people care about you. They're going to want to make comments because they're trying to help. And it's not ill-intentioned in any way. But they don't necessarily know what they're talking about.

Harold Simansky:

In the history of mankind, no one has ever not returned comments when they've been asked to comment on something.

Jessica Shklar:

Exactly. And even if they're asked limited to grammar, limited to tone, it doesn't sound like me, they're going to say, Oh, you really should put in Y HBS. Even because when I went to HBS, I was asked that question. But HBS doesn't ask that today. Or, well, you haven't talked about this story. Okay, but we have another essay about that for the same school, and they didn't see that one. So there's just, it's there's so well-meaning, and I am not intending to imply anything else, but they're so well-meaning.

Harold Simansky:

They're so well-meaning. And when some someone says to me, Hey, I just had my father read in he has some feedback, the only thing I can respond is ug.

Jessica Shklar:

In my head, I say, Oh, so where did he get his admissions coaching training? Exactly.

Rachel Beck:

But I don't say that out loud. Exactly. I actually, when I do the final read through, and if I don't make any changes, which is pretty often, I send an email back saying, I'm sending you back the full document, but please note I didn't make any changes. And that doesn't that you shouldn't take that as a concern. It looks great. It's time to upload it. Like I kind of prompt to the next step in this process. Like, this looks great. I didn't make any changes.

Harold Simansky:

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Listen, you can always change something, making it better, that's fundamentally different. And I'll say that to my clients a lot. Yep, we're in the world of changing.

Jessica Shklar:

Change for change's sake.

Harold Simansky:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jessica Shklar:

Change because it's anxiety, not change because it's progress.

Harold Simansky:

So, Jessica, Rachel, what does polishing mean to you? What does it look like? And how is that different from the final read?

Jessica Shklar:

Polishing is the step before the final read, but it's reading it out loud and making sure that it really sounds like you and you say what you want to. And then the final read is maybe having your consultant read it. It, you reading it a while as well, printing it out, and just confirming the polish. I wouldn't say there's a massive difference between the two. It's just a very much of a process.

Rachel Beck:

I would say it's like they flow into each other. Like you can't get to the final read if you haven't done the polishing. So you need to do that step of I'm confident in everything I've gotten here. And then the final read is kind of the rubber stamp, I'm ready to upload this to the application and I'm going to make this happen. And if you haven't done the polishing, you're not ready for that final step. So you need to take the time to get that done. And I think people who do the polishing, then the final step is just read reading it over and feeling good about it. And those people then are able to upload their applic applications with no hesitation.

Harold Simansky:

Great then. Okay, as far as polishing up and final word here on our podcast. Rachel, thank you very much. Jessica, thank you very much. Let's really blow it open though. What makes for a good essay, Rachel?

Rachel Beck:

A good essay answers the question and does it in a way that anybody could pick it up and read it and say, Well, I learned something about you.

Jessica Shklar:

A good essay, in addition to what Rachel said, uh, or as we said in business school, building on Rachel's comment, a good essay sounds like you. It's your story. It's not what you think the school wants to hear. It's not what you someone else tells you should say. It's true to who you are. You read that and you learn about yourself and you feel good about what you've put on paper.

Harold Simansky:

That's great then. Well, Jessica and Rachel, thank you very much. Thanks for joining us today.

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