I have to be honest, I’ve been putting today off. I have read blogs and my “How to Get Into..” etc book on marketing yourself and positioning, but I hadn’t yet sat down, outlined what I need to say, and started putting it into essays.
Today, I started. Despite the beautiful Southern California day, the offers of friends to go to the movies/beach/etc…I started.
It was kind of a hot and cold situation. I started by outlining my accomplishments, stats, and other details, then broke it down into the key stories that I feel I should make sure I tell the adcom. I have to say, seeing it all down on the page made me feel better about being able to make a good case for my admission. I decided that I would group my essay writing efforts by schools, not by essays of similar type for different schools, because I want to make sure each group is truly focused towards the particular school.
So, I took my lists of stories and stats and started to try to fit it into my first set of prompts – Wharton, in my case. This is where it gets a little less fun. Wharton happens to offer a tough set of questions for my particular list. Some of theirs aren’t as “comfortable” – or maybe they just make it harder to provide them with nothing but shameless self-promotion – but anyway, it was tough to fit in all of my points.
I honestly still haven’t figured out how I’m going to structure it. I’m going back and forth about an idea that I have to answer the question about adapting to people with different perspectives – I’m not entirely sure if the story I’m thinking of answers the question completely enough. I’m going to run the idea by a few people and see if I’m being creative or just crazy.
I will say that I feel better about having this problem than about the problem I was afraid I would have. I think part of why I had been putting this off is because I was terrified that I would sit down and not have the stories or accomplishments (because I haven’t done enough) to give convincing answers. I am a little stuck on fitting said answers into the requested prompts, but it’s a much more fixable problem!
Read the full article: First Real Day of Essays