Two Essays, 300 words each. Carnegie Mellon Tepper doesn’t give you a lot of room for error, but they still expect you to make an impression. Let’s get into it.<\/p>\n
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Essay 1 (Maximum 300 words):Describe a defining moment in your life, and explain how it shaped you as a person. Folks, this question is 100% about Before & After, which is proving to be a fairly consistent theme this year. B-Schools are all interested \u201cpersonal inflection points.\u201d Please do not pick a resume moment and hope that\u2019s gonna rock their world on its own. Gotta dig deeper than that. <\/p>\n Two possible approaches here\u2013feel it out and see which ones ignites for you. <\/p>\n Approach #1 \u2013 Work backwards. We\u2019ve seen people veer a bit off course here by leaping to the most obvious \u201cdefining moment\u201d in their lives, write up a potentially compelling narrative, but end up with an essay that doesn\u2019t create a spark in the reader that allows him to get excited about this person as a BUSINESS SCHOOL CANDIDATE. <\/p>\n Think about where you\u2019re headed. Your ambitions. What you wanna achieve. The difference you wanna make. The people you wanna inspire. The opportunity you wanna seize. Good, now imagine that ten other people SHARE EVERYTHING on that list, and there\u2019s only room for ONE GUY to be given the opportunity to pursue that chance. Why should it be you? What trait distinguishes you from Joe Applicant, that will make you the most promising person to \u201cwin\u201d? Once you\u2019ve isolated it, now think back on your life and career and identify, say, three BIG moments that would show up on a timeline on your life. Big failures, big changes in the way you act\/behave, big influences that affected your outlook on something, big external events that profoundly altered something for you personally, etc. Pick (up to) three of the biggest ones. Now take another look at that \u201cdistinguishing\u201d characteristic from the previous exercise. Do you see a line emerging between any \u201cbig\u201d event and this distinguishing characteristic? You should be able to find a relationship there that connects one of the pivotal moments in your past, to your personal development that is directly or even indirectly related to your promise to succeed in life. This could work. First you\u2019ll wanna walk us through the pivotal moment, and end your essay with an extrapolation of how this will manifest in your future, helping us to connect the dots.<\/p>\n Approach #2 \u2013 You may have some obvious pivotal moments in your past that you would be foolish to ignore. If that\u2019s the case, don\u2019t waste much time, explore incidents or moments that almost automatically spring to mind as \u201cdefining moments.\u201d Could be a military operation, could be the time you betrayed someone, could be the time you told a shameful lie, could be the time your world view changed on a dime, etc. The way to mine gold here is to figure out how this incident\/moment\/node ALTERED your trajectory. Where were you headed? Who were you before this moment? What would life have looked like had this \u201cthing\u201d not happened? And more importantly, how DIFFERENT would that version of your life looked? Why is \u201ctoday\u2019s\u201d version so much more preferable? This story just writes itself, because you\u2019re essentially explaining why you were heading toward unknown (or even known) destination A. But now you\u2019re heading toward new destination B (because of \u201cdefining moment X\u201d). Explain the destination (which will almost certainly include some allusion to future goals as well as personal ones) and why this is the better path.<\/p>\n
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