Free Essay Evals by EssaySnark -Official GMAT Club Reviews

I used essaysnark for a profile review early in my process and they were pretty amazing. Great attitude, and super helpful! Althought I did not use them for an essay review, I have read some of the reviews they've done for free in the past, and they are truly valuable. I highly recommend giving this a try.

Aw shucks guys ... thanks for the kind words!!! You're making us feel all bashful now.

Yaye! Go ahead blow it up! :D Essaysnarks are here .

BUMP - we have ONE SPOT available this week!
Anyone who gets us an essay first will get it

Hey Guys,
Where we've been on this?? I mean are we still publishing the essays in the forum evaluated by EssaySnark?

Haven't seen any yet!

I imagine no one has submitted an essay as yet due to fear of snarky comments!

We're not that snarky in the essay reviews, we promise!!

@bagdbmba, haven't seen a draft from you come through, have you submitted yours yet??

EssaySnark

EssaySnark Essay Review! Duke Essay 2: Why you want to go to Duke

We have a playah! Thank you to the brave Brave Supplicant who submitted an essay for a free review by EssaySnark. We're pleased to inaugurate this new service on GMAT Club with a review of Fuqua's second required essay about what you tell your friends when you talk about Duke.

It's absolutely awesome that Duke is allowing you so much space in the essays to present yourself – this two-page essay is practically unheard-of in the modern age of slimmed-down requirements. Unfortunately we can't post the entire two-page essay here in a forum message or it would go into infinite-scroll mode and half of you would fall asleep before you made it to the second paragraph. If you're thinking about throwing your hat into the ring and submitting an essay for us to read, then it's fine to send in a longer one but like we're doing today, we'll isolate out a key few paragraphs and focus our comments in on them.

Without further ado, let's do exactly that with this Duke draft. Here's the first paragraph:

After graduating as a Mechanical engineer, getting into engineering design was a logical choice. My analytical and technical skills helped me to excel in niche domains such as shipbuilding and renewable energy. During my professional experience, I noticed some of the key challenges facing businesses today - integration of business units, identifying policy frameworks and an increasing “time to market” of products. In my current organization, a [industry niche] company, a lack of integration between Technology and Supply Chain teams and a lack of accountability is visible resulting in delayed decision making and thus increasing the time to market of products. Another important challenge facing the company is product portfolio management. There have been instances in the past when the work undertaken for development of new products was discontinued abruptly sighting no demand for the product. This led to wastage of both time and money and more importantly led to frustration among the employees. I believe that managing an optimal product mix according to the needs of the market and customers is extremely important in this emerging sector. While on one hand we need to keep pace with emerging technologies, we also must make sure that we are not losing out on the existing fast selling products. Given my current role as a design engineer and my purely technical experience, I cannot directly contribute in providing solutions to such problems. I want to learn the nitty-gritty of how businesses work and develop a skill-set which would help me tackle such complex business problems. I believe a formal training in business management will equip me with tools and skills to take up a leadership role in a company and fill the gap between my current skills and career aspirations.

So.... OK.... This definitely sounds like a bschool essay, doesn't it! It's written in that “this is important I better say it right!” style of a nervous Brave Supplicant. (Note: For those of you new to EssaySnark, we call all of you applicants “Brave Supplicants” - or sometimes just “BSers” for short ).

What's the problem in “sounding like a bschool essay”? You'd think maybe nothing, right?

Wrong.

This is Duke. Where in this paragraph is any sense that that's who it's written for?

Not only is there NO MENTION OF THE SCHOOL NAME anywhere in this very long chunk of breathlessness.... but it's also completely bereft of any hint that it was written for this exact prompt.

The tone of this is “I'm writing something important! I don't usually do this! Can you tell how important this is??”

Meaning, it's very formal, almost stilted – certainly not the worst we've ever seen, but also not at all giving us any sense of the person beneath it.

We're not suggesting that u shd b writing n txt mode 2 the adcom peeps.

But you definitely need to be writing in a way that shows them you are answering the question.

Right now, this draft feels like it was written for another school entirely.

Which school, we have no idea, since very few schools allow for such lengthy diatribe explanations of past work experience in their essays these days.

But you need to take a very big step back: What in this paragraph tells us anything about what Duke has asked about?

All of it is potentially relevant, in some way, to an application to business school. But none of it – at least, not how it's been presented here – is relevant to Duke essay 2.

That's the problem with Duke's long essay. If you're not careful, you can begin writing, and then wander off in the distance with it and get woefully lost.

What this essay needs is a FOCUS... and the question needs to be taken much more literally.

Ask yourself this, Brave Supplicant: If your best friend asked you why you want to go to bschool, would you tell him “Because I believe that managing an optimal product mix according to the needs of the market and customers is extremely important”????

Uh, wouldja? Gosh we hope not!

It's completely feasible that career goals could find their way into this essay. It might even make sense to have them restated somewhere at the top – even though you have three short-answer questions about goals, it still doesn't hurt to remind your adcom reader, when she gets to this essay, what you said way back over there before. Generally speaking, the goals are the reason that anyone wants to go to bschool – or they should be, otherwise you end up with a tail-wagging-the-dog situation. So touching on the goals again is fine.

But by the time you get to the point of writing out a full draft in response to an essay question – particularly when that full draft is 2 pages long – we hope that you would have completely researched the school and learned what they're about. And that would mean having a real understanding for the Duke culture. And it especially means, paying attention to the question they've asked you, both literally the words they've used, and the tone.

The “words they've used” means, they want to know what you tell your friends.

Would you really launch into this diatribe about emerging markets if the conversation turns to bschool when you're out having a beer?

And, would you really need to go back through all of your professional history to answer that question?

You can't dive in cold with your adcom reader – you do need to give them context, and background, and supporting details, and piece your information together in a way that a stranger can follow it without too much effort. But you really need to be conscious of where they're coming from with this question.

They want to know about YOU. What this essay gives is a very sanitized, “proper”, almost clinical answer to some career goals question that the adcom didn't even ask. It's reasonably well written, and as we already stated, all of this is potentially relevant to a bschool application.

But is this helping Fuqua get a sense of you as a person? The BSer behind the scenes?

We'd posit that the answer to that unfortunately is nope. Not at all.

And can we just make one more comment, oh yee very patient Brave Supplicant to whom we've just told that you must start over again?

That first paragraph is LOOOOOOONNNNNG. Like, ouch-worthy long. Like, one whole intimidating block long. Please be kind to your readers. Break things up. Chunk them out. Make it easy to read your beautiful essay-monster-creation.

Finally: If you feel compelled to write a lot about your goals for Duke Fuqua – which you might, we're not saying that that's necessarily a bad idea – then just like with every other school that cares about goals, you must be SPECIFIC about what those goals are.

Even if this were a more generic “short-term/long-term goals” question, we still don't have a clue what this BSer wants to do with the MBA. There's discussion of all this stuff in this first paragraph but none of it is focused enough that we really have a strong sense of what they want to do. So that needs improvement, if that's going to be the approach used.

So. That was a very long post for us to end up saying “Start over.” There's actually a whole bunch of comments we could offer on the content itself, but it would be much more important for this BSer to take a fresh approach to the question and do more with it. It needs an appreciation for what Duke is looking for and where they're coming from in how they've asked it. This is the type of essay that feels like it's saying what you're supposed to say in an MBA application – instead of literally responding to what was asked.

Thank you again, Brave Supplicant, for being brave enough to send this in. You're raising some good points here that, in a vacuum, could belong somewhere in an application to business school. But as you have by now gathered, we think you need to go back to the drawing board on this one.

Good job in starting the process so early! Plenty of time to rip this one in two and start fresh. Hope this is helpful to all of you GMATClubbers, and good luck with Duke!
--------------------------------------------------------

EssaySnark will be reviewing essays here on GMAT Club every week. If you want to see if yours is up to snuff, please read the instructions at the top of this thread to submit it. Personally identifiable information in your essay needs to be removed and won't be published – don't worry, you'll be able to stay anonymous if you prefer.

Thank you for the review.
Follow up question: I'd like to know how one should address 'friends and family' part in this question. I feel that writing a dialogue or even 'once I told about GATE to my family, they said wow' tone will sound very awkward.

Where does it ask you to talk about their reactions?

No dialog needed. Just explain your reasons. Mentioning GATE (or whatever) is important to back up your statements but it's secondary to them.

The tone thing is a balance, it usually only comes after many revisions. Get a draft down, let it sit for awhile, then go back and evaluate it again. That's where the goodness will be revealed.

EssaySnark Essay Review! Yale Essay 1: Career Goals

Yale has maintained a focus on career goals in their application this year and they have a remarkably short, yet surprisingly complex, way that they're asking about them: What motivates your decision to pursue an MBA? 300 words. Seems simple, right? Let's see how one Brave Supplicant handled it.


At the age of nine, at the local driving range with my dad, I was given my first golf club and hit my first golf ball. Five years later, I purchased my first set of new clubs and was preparing to try out for the high school team; I made it. Since then, my passion for the game of golf has only grown. With each new challenge I face I reflect and draw upon my past experiences in hopes to create a better future for those that are just now picking up their first club.

That intro is almost a third of the allowed length – 95 words. What works with this intro is that the writing is clear, the focus is anchored on the applicant, in terms of relaying a personal experience, which is often a good way to go with such an essay asking about “motivations” - but we finish reading this first paragraph with a massive question mark forming in our minds...

“This person wants to go to Yale to play golf??”

In fact, that question is so pronounced that we even were willing to overlook the incredibly fluffy last sentence about facing challenges and creating a better future for people … who play golf. (We'll come back to that in a minute.)

Let's keep reading to see if this is in fact what the BSer's goal is – because if it is, it surely will be differentiated! But it's also got us wondering how an MBA fits in.

My decision to pursue an MBA is motivated by my desire to be a leader in the golfing community. As a golf professional, I have worked closely with multiple charities and seen the positive impact their efforts have on entire communities and families. After graduation, my goal is to work as a Senior Vice President for a major golf management company, such as Troon or Marriott Golf. In this position, I would travel the globe to some of the finest golfing facilities in the world, evaluating and improving each operation with the opportunity to make a difference in each community.

Hmmm. Well, it definitely is distinctive – there aren't going to be many other people applying with THAT goal, that's for sure!

Which is a bit of a double-edged sword: Yes, it's good that it's unique, you're standing out from the crowd... but are you also so unique that you're atypical? In other words, is an MBA really necessary for this career path? Is this a position that recruiters are going to be hiring for at Yale? Do recruiters for these companies even look at MBA programs at all? For that matter, does a SVP at a company like this come from outside the industry? Or are they promoted from within? Besides all that, SVP of what?

The biggest issue with this goal is that we have no context within which to evaluate it.

While this is a super short essay and you don't have room for a lot of extraneous material – and, the adcom will have your resume, so you don't want to repeat a bunch of stuff that's already being communicated elsewhere – at the same time, this goal is being launched out into the void. This is a complete vacuum of information. There is no framework or platform here at all... except that we know the BSer plays golf. Apparently for a living – a “golfing professional.” OK, that's interesting. But that's not enough information. What's completely lacking here is any sense of background information that shows the reader that this person has a foundation that can be leveraged towards this future career.

So now we have two defects: We don't know if this career path is one that requires an MBA (to the extent that, we're even wondering if there are any jobs available in this area); and we don't know what this applicant brings to the table that would show he/she is qualified.

A Senior Vice President is a very senior position indeed. That would indicate that this person has already been in a high-responsibility role in some other organization before... but we don't actually know. We are completely unclear if the entire past career has been spent on the golf range, or if they've had a “real job” (oh that sounds so mean! We don't intend it that way) – if they've worked in an office and on teams and all that jazz. A traditional buiness environment.

Honestly, we have no idea if this is a complete pipe dream or if this is a realistic plan for success.

Here's the final paragraph – and no, it doesn't answer any of these questions:

As my career advances, I recognize there are many skills I will need to improve in order to keep moving forward. To be successful in a high ranking position, I need to develop the ability to weigh the impact each decision I make will have on the employees, facility, company, and each community. Skills in finance, marketing and communications, as well as knowledge from those that have been in similar positions are what I look to gain from an MBA program so that I may continue my path to become a leader in golf.

There's one very awkward sentence in there – the “weigh the impact” one, that one is hard to parse. So the writing could be improved a bit. But even overlooking that stumble, there's nothing here that suggests that this person is qualified for any job, much less this SVP job.

The thing with a very nontraditional candidate is that sometimes, they are seriously attractive to the bschool, because they bring in instant diversity. A golf professional? How cool! That would add color to the class. But unless you can prove that you BELONG IN BSCHOOL, then you're not going to gain the confidence of the adcom.

We're flying blind to a large degree since we don't have GMAT and grades and resume and everything – maybe this BSer is imminently qualified on all of those dimensions. But typically the nontrad candidate is not. And even if we give this person the benefit of the doubt and presume that they've got a decent GMAT score and good grades from college, there's nothing in this essay that shows how they are qualified for any job – much less an SVP job – and much much less a specific SVP of something.

What you need to do in this essay is explain not just why you're in love with golf... but to show HOW YOU'RE READY FOR THE MBA. That's actually the core of the question; the adcom has skillfully hidden it in that very short question that they've asked you.

What motivates you is interesting, and relevant – you do want to cover that in the answer. But what can drive an actual decision to pursue something is the fact that you're ready to pursue it. And we're not getting any of that here.

Now before everyone starts complaining about how short this essay is... You don't have to give an autobiographical account of your life. You also should not simply summarize the resume. The resume is a standalone component which is also working in your favor, to communicate your background.

What you need to do is extract the key elements of your profile that demonstrates your readiness. In a way that also fits the question, and fits your goals.

This is why these essays require so much time. It's not a trivial task to come up with this stuff, usually.

And oh yeah: It would've been nice to say something about Yale in this essay. This could've been written for any school. Not so great.

Another one where we're telling the Brave Supplicant to go back to the drawing board – but that's basically all we ever do, at least when we see first drafts. It's tough to get this stuff right the first time out of the gate. Thank you, Golfing Professional Brave Supplicant, for sharing this draft with us – we hope this was useful!!! You have a profile that could be quite interesting for these schools, but you have a higher bar to reach than some other types of candidates, since you will need to prove how you're ready for this very ambitious venture you're proposing.

Good luck with it!

EssaySnark, Great review, thanks.
One question, Yale second question is the same as the first one - just asks about Yale in specific.
So why should the applicant write about why Yale in the first essay which asks why you want an MBA?

hello everyone and especially Essay Snark!

What a fantastic review, thank you so much for spending the time to review my work. You hit the nail on the head and certainly gave some direction in how to make this more appealing to a committee. I'd recommend this service to anyone applying.


As a follow up / question, one of my thoughts was that my resume would cover the "things I bring to the table to show that I am qualified."

Great question as I was thinking the same thing. The second essay is a "why Yale" essay, with plenty of opportunity to address Yale. However, like EssaySnark said, this could have been written for any school, so maybe it would be good to mention Yale in it? I don't know if it would be a good use of some of the 300 words. Any advice welcome.

@dormor and @ROFLZZ, fair point, maybe we should've been more explicit in that advice (even though we're not really sure why you'd be pushing back on this - how could it hurt you to add Yale content to a Yale essay??). Anyway what we initially said was:
The way we said this, as an offhanded aside, was meant to communicate that this doesn't need to be integrated into every sentence, but that it would be additive. As we stated, this essay gave literally no indication who it's for. Big bummer of a missed opportunity.

Sure, you have a separate essay to talk about Yale stuff, but honestly you can never impress upon the adcoms too much about why you want to go to their school. When you have a school-neutral draft like this one - where it doesn't even restate the essay question anywhere in it, and instead is just covering career goals and nothing else that the school specifically asked about - well, unfortunately your reader is likely to assume that you wrote it for another school and did a Save-As, and that was it. Doesn't appear that any effort was expended to show the reader why you want to go to Yale.

Our advice to everyone - with any school - is always interpret a question about "Why do you want an MBA?" to be "Why do you want an MBA from this school?" (This is important in interviews, too.) Yes, there's a whole second essay for that, sort of - hopefully you recognize the differences. Essay 2 is asking for more of the you-to-Yale part instead of the Yale-to-you part (if that makes sense). And let's be honest. Both essays are a ridiculous 600 words total. That used to be ONE ESSAY out of a set of FOUR ESSAYS that a school asked for - that was the case just three years ago. 600 words total for all your essays??? (and the video thingie)

You're going to be hard pressed to get in everything you should about "why Yale" in that other draft. Tie in something here, tailor it to the SOM, make them believe you care.


As we said:
There's a way to do it - yes, even within the 300-word limitation - that encapsulates the key facts about the background to demonstrate readiness. This is important for anyone, but it's going to be CRITICAL for you, given how non-trad this is.

What happens if you don't do this is you're forcing the reader to pick up the resume and study it. It detracts from the experience of reading your essay and it's, in our opinion, impolite. It's definitely not strategic. It's the same thing as delivering a report that your boss requested with your forecasts for future demand in your sector, yet omitting the key baseline data that she needs to understand it, because you know that she has that information on file somewhere already since you sent that to her last week.

In EssaySnark's opinion, this foundation info is really the basis of the entire question that they're asking you for. What motivates you to go for an MBA now? How are you ready? What do you bring to the table?

This stuff is subjective and we admit that that's one interpretation - but it's one that we doubt you can go wrong with.

Hope that helps!
EssaySnark

Helps a lot! you guys are the best!

Also just a correction to our own prior post - obviously we talked about "600 words total" in our little rant there - it's actually 750 words between the two Yale essays (which all of you who are writing them are well aware). The point is still relevant even though we did the math wrong.