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Schools: HBS - Class of 2005
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What to do if You have an Interesting Story to Tell 18 Oct 2019, 15:15
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What if You have an Interesting Life Story?

Most MBA applicants are average people. Us average people may have had one or two interesting things happen in our lives, but those events usually aren’t unique enough to make inherently interesting stories. You’d need a talented writer to make our mundane existence seem fascinating to people who are living the same way—a truly Knausgårdian struggle. Applicants often come to us asking “I DIDN’T build a nuclear reactor in my back yard when I was 12, I HAVEN’T spent two weeks surviving alone in the taiga after a plane crash, I am NOT an Olympic bronze medalist in skeleton… what can I possibly say to impress the adcom?” If you’re asking that question—you’re not as unlucky as you might think.

See, those few of you who DO have a genuinely awesome story to tell are too often neglected by the admissions consulting community. The truth is, telling a good story is not enough. To make your story relevant to the adcom, you have to do very similar work to the guy who doesn’t have as interesting of a background. Here are some real world examples from successful candidates we’ve worked with:

    1. A founder and CEO who created a $20,000,000 start up in college.
    2. A gal who sailed a broken sailboat across an ocean—injured for most of the journey.
    3. An executive who was the target of an assassination attempt by local officials for his anticorruption drive.
    4. An athlete who set national records in three entirely different sports.

Just from these four statements, you can tell we’re dealing with an interesting and accomplished group of people. These folks demonstrated incredible personal character and had an impact on the world around them. So can we just fit these cool, inherently dramatic stories into each school’s essay prompts, and leave it at that?

    1. In case of the CEO, sure. The startup was this guy’s life’s work, the story was impressive, and it had an obvious relevance to both his desire for an MBA, and his business skills. But in the other three cases, story alone isn’t enough…
    2. The sailor (hopefully) wouldn’t have to jury-rig a single halyard to get her MBA, but she would need determination, grit, ingenuity, and all the other characteristics that helped her get home in a damaged vessel. We cut the story down to the dramatic moments when she had to rely on those traits, and showed how she had drawn on the experience when facing a later disaster at work. Now the adcom knew she wasn’t just a good yachtswoman—she was also a good strategist in high pressure situations. Unlike tacking, that’s an MBA-relevant skill!
    3. The executive’s first draft was almost all about the moment of the assassination attempt. He spent most of his MBA essay ducking bullets and making Jason Bourne-style slides across the hoods of cars. It was super cool—but also sadly irrelevant to his desire for an MBA. We encouraged him to probe deeper into WHY he was attacked, and revealed some really interesting insights about the corruption problems in his country and industry. To solve these problems, he would need… an MBA. The attack went from 2/3rds of the essay to just an introduction, but it served an absolutely essential purpose of drawing the adcom in and making them really believe in the applicant’s sincere desire for radical change.
    4. In this case, the athletic achievement was secondary to another salient fact: the athlete was a woman in a very patriarchal culture. On one hand, that made the national records a little less impressive—our woman had less competition than she would have in a larger, more egalitarian country. On the other, it actually made the records much more impressive from an MBA perspective. Suddenly, instead of a “woman versus herself” or “woman seeking physical perfection,” we had “woman leading and influencing her community.” And trust us, a person’s ability to get a group to agree with her opinion is much more interesting to an MBA adcom than her marathon time.

The takeaway: whether you have a “good” story or not, the important thing is knowing how to deploy it in a way that appeals to an MBA adcom. Not everyone understands that, and there will be plenty of people with boring tech consulting jobs beating out fighter pilots this season. Do you have any stories you think are impressive but that you're having trouble framing? Let us know in the comments below!