We’re closing in on the last minutes before the January 10 deadline, but I might as well offer one last thought on application essays.

During our review of Early Notification applications, a few discussions returned to a similar theme — first put in words by Dan — that U.S. students have their undergraduate application process in mind when they write their essays, and they try too hard to “be unique.”  Working with high school students, as I occasionally do, I’ve always lamented that they sit down to write their essays with that impossible standard as their instruction.  Generally speaking, what does a 17-year-old know about being unique?

Fletcher applicants usually have a better sense of the world out there, but the “be unique” advice still doesn’t serve them well.  It occasionally leads to an essay with strange choice of content or an odd tone.  And it’s completely unnecessary.  The first essay should lay out in pretty plain terms what you hope to do at Fletcher and beyond.  The second essay offers a little more latitude for “uniqueness,” but you don’t need to bear that heavy burden when you think about what to write.  Instead, focus on a much more achievable objective: follow the directions.

The fact is that what impresses Admissions readers is a clear study/career plan, backed as necessary by prior experience.  Sure, we enjoy a heart-warming second essay, but there are many aspects of your background that you might want to share, and they aren’t all heart-warming.  And that’s fine!  Pick the topic that’s best for you, without trying to guess whether we’ve ever read an essay like that before.

In sum, be direct.  Don’t worry about being unique.  And use a thesaurus judiciously — don’t try to impress us with big words.  Follow those simple instructions, and your essays will make the case for you.

Only eight days until the November 15 Early Notification deadline.  As there are hundreds of applications awaiting submission (most of which won’t turn up here until January) and only 15 ready for review, I’ll guess that this is still a good time to point you toward past blog posts about application essays.  You may already have noticed that we have a whole category-worth of Admissions Tips.  And then there’s a tag that captures everything we’ve written about the essays.  For all the TLDR folks out there, I will summarize all the many posts this way:

Read the essay questions/topics.  Write the essays.  Follow the instructions regarding word count etc. (knowing that your essay will not be truncated if it goes a word over the limit, but we’ll know if it goes 100 words too long).  Review what you’ve written and check that you’ve answered the question.  Ask someone else to review what you’ve written and check that you’ve answered the question.  Proofread.  Be sure you haven’t left in a reference to another graduate school.  (Yes, it happens.)

That’s it — the secret sauce.  Of course, if you comb through all the posts, you’ll gather other details and also learn about my personal pet peeve: highfalutin vocabulary that randomly drops into an otherwise ordinary essay.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about essays before the January deadline, but I hope today’s brief post will arrive at the right time for November 15 applicants in the proofreading phase, and will also set January applicants up to start their writing.

I didn’t start the week thinking I would dedicate every post to Early Notification applications, but I was inspired by the ideas generated by my survey, so why not?  Today I’m answering a question about the first essay, though not exactly the way the survey respondent suggested (sorry…).

To refresh our memories, the prompt for the first essay reads:

Essay 1 (600-800 words, single-spaced, Arial 12 point font)
Fletcher’s Committee on Admissions seeks to ensure that there is a good match between each admitted student and the School.
Please tell us your goals for graduate study at Fletcher and for your career. Describe the elements of your personal, professional, and/or academic background that have prepared you for your chosen career path. Why is The Fletcher School the right place to pursue your academic objectives and to prepare you to meet your professional goals? Why have you selected the degree program to which you are applying?

You might remember from last summer that I wrote about how we ditched the term “personal statement,” because we felt we were inviting applicants to glue their personal statements from other schools into our application and, in the process, they failed to answer our questions.  I’m sure there will still be people who do that, but at least we’re not the ones leading them in that wayward direction.

To capture the Admissions Office’s thoughts on this essay, I decided to crowdsource my post.  Not quite a crowd, actually.  Just a cluster of Admissions pals — Dan, Liz, and Kristen.  I created two lists and noted my own thoughts and then they added theirs.  With these lists in hand, your objective will be to respond thoroughly to the question above, while keeping in mind the likes and dislikes of the Admissions Office application readers.

List 1: Things we like to see in Essay #1

• The applicant has read the essay instructions (included suggested essay length) and responded to the questions.
• The applicant’s career goals and objectives for study at Fletcher are clear and easy to find in the essay, not buried in paragraph 11.
• The applicant has put some thought into why graduate school, why now, and why Fletcher is the best fit.
• The applicant provides details on why Fletcher is a good match, so that the essay is Fletcher-specific, and doesn’t read like one written for another application.
• The essay is not just a narrative version of the résumé, but a contextualization of information in the résumé and elsewhere in the application.
• The essay is well written, with an authentic voice that hasn’t been edited so much that it no longer tells us about the applicant.

List 2: Things we don’t like to see in Essay #1

• The name of other schools that the applicant has neglected to swap out.
• Proofreading errors.
• Essays that start their narrative with the applicant at age six and build slowly from there.
• Whining about grades or GRE scores.  Save explanations – no whining – for the Additional Information section.
• Footnotes.  This is not a scholarly paper.  Find another way to incorporate the information you might have put in a footnote.
• Fancy-shmancy highfalutin vocabulary words that the applicant has just discovered in the thesaurus (and may or may not use correctly).
• Unnecessary name dropping (which is different from naming one or two Fletcher professors with whom you’d like to work).
• Getting Fletcher’s name wrong or spelling it incorrectly.  It’s The Fletcher School or The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.  Not The Fletcher School of International Affairs.  And not Flechter.
• Long quotations from inspiring historical figures.  We know they’re inspiring.  No need to reinforce.
• Essays that ignore the word count limits.
• Essays that could be for any school, lacking specifics.
• Essays that tell us all sorts of stuff we already know about Fletcher, but don’t tell us much at all about you, the applicant.
• Essays that are, by any standards, inappropriate.  (Sorry, I can’t provide any further details on this one.  You’ll need to trust me, and stick to the topic.)
• Information that doesn’t jibe with other parts of the application, such as mentioning employers that aren’t listed on the résumé or application.

And that’s it.  The essay likes and dislikes of Liz, Kristen, Dan, and me.  While I hasten to add that most of the essays we read are anywhere from serviceable to terrific, I hope the list will help you avoid any pitfalls.

Today I want to discuss the Fletcher application’s second essay.  The prospective student who raised the question on my recent survey (keep the suggestions coming!) asked: What are you looking for in the second essay? Are personal experiences and anecdotes welcome, or does it have to be more work-centric?

The first thing I need to say is that we have no special expectation for the content of the essay.  It truly is up to you, just as the essay prompt says:

Essay 2 (500 words maximum, single-spaced, Arial 12 point font)
To help the Committee on Admissions get to know you better, please share an anecdote, or details about an experience or personal interest, that you have not elaborated upon elsewhere in your application.

So my answer is that personal experiences and anecdotes are absolutely welcome.  Your essay does not need to focus on your professional life.

That said…your essay should support your application in some way, adding depth or detail about an aspect of how you meet the basics we seek in our admitted applicants (strong academic potential, relevant international and professional experience, and clear objectives for Fletcher study and future career).  As an example of the different forms this might take, while one strong second essay could discuss the applicant’s international life, another might describe the obstacles that stood in the way of living internationally and what the applicant has done to fill that gap.  Both can make terrific essays.

An essay that goes into detail about a professional experience can be a good way to use the essay space, as it allows you to tell us more than any of the other application questions permit.  But we would be very bored readers, indeed, if every essay focused only on professional experience.

Over the years, we have used many different essay prompts, including “your greatest challenge,” and “something you especially value.”  None of those prompts yielded consistently good essays, and we have instead gone toward the vanilla topic above.  But your response need not be vanilla.  Tell us something interesting and important about you, whether it relates to your work or not, and it will make a good essay.  Just remember that your objective is to use all the different application components (application form, essays, recommendations, transcripts, résumé, interview) to build your case.  Don’t lose the opportunity that the second essay provides.