We tinkered with our application essays this year.  Our intention was to ensure applicants would provide the information we need in the personal statement (Essay 1).  The unintended result is that we’re hearing a lot of questions about Essay 2.  For those of you who haven’t started the application yet, Essay 2 asks:

Share something about yourself to help the Committee on Admissions
develop a more complete picture of who you are.  (500 words, maximum)

What applicants are asking is what, exactly, we really want them to tell us in answer to Essay 2.  The implication of their question is that we’ve left the question too structureless.

As I’m sure savvy blog readers would expect, I’m going to tell you that there’s no correct or expected answer to the essay question.  And I’d understand if you roll your eyes while muttering blah, blah, blah in your heads.  But it’s true:  there’s no correct or expected answer to the essay question.

Still aiming to be helpful, I’ll suggest, instead, a way of approaching the essay.  Think about the information you have provided in your application through all its parts.  What dimension of you/your background might you still want to share?  That is, don’t view the essay as a throw-away, and use it to fill in some gaps left after the rest of the application is complete.

Elaborate on your international experience.  Share your thoughts on leadership.  Talk about your hobbies (assuming there’s a link to your international affairs interests).  Describe a challenge you have faced.  Tell us how you needed to learn Spanish to speak to your rescue dog.  Describe the importance of community to you.  Tell us how your family upbringing made you the person you are.  Provide more detail on the origins of your interest in international affairs.  Write about your quest to cook the perfect dish from a country you love.  Any of these approaches (and many, many others!) would be a nice addition to an application.

In past years, we’ve used essay prompts that resulted in a few interesting responses and a zillion similar ones.  When we asked applicants to describe an item of particular importance to them, nearly all the responses were:  passport, bookcase full of IR books, hiking boots, or backpack.  We moved away from questions that draw such responses because we really want to know about you — not about what you think we want to know about you.

So, friendly applicants, choose a subject that boosts your application and go for it.  There’s no correct or expected answer to Essay 2, and we’ll enjoy learning about what’s important to you.

I’m taking a class this fall.  It isn’t a regular offering, but it’s taught by a professor at a nearby university, and I’d describe it as similar in workload to the classes I took in college back in the day.  Why I didn’t think about homework before signing up is a little bit of a mystery.  By the time the class met in September, I was already behind in the reading.  I tried to catch up from the first week and didn’t do any of the reading for the second week.  Then there were two weeks when we didn’t meet.  Good opportunity to catch up, right?  No.  I was utterly undisciplined and was lucky to have finished the reading for the third class, having abandoned the idea of finishing the work for weeks one and two.  I’m prepared for tonight, but I wouldn’t describe my preparation as thorough.  Sigh.  At least this experience allows me to connect with our sometimes-overwhelmed students.

Whenever I manage to do the reading, there’s another way in which the class connects to my work.  As I’ve read, I’ve been contemplating the nature of academic writing.  Must it have big multisyllabic words?  Or can complex thoughts be expressed in clear language?

Regardless of my ability to achieve my own ideal when I write, I adhere to the concept that clear language is something to which we should aspire, and that use of big words should not be our goal.  Why, then, do so many applicants seem to write a draft of their application essays and then randomly select words to which they’ll give the thesaurus treatment?  It’s as if they ask, “Why use an ordinary word like ‘ordinary’ when we can substitute ‘quotidian'”?

Dear blog readers, I implore you to consider the readers of your application.  We’re all educated people, and we won’t be won over by a thesaurusized essay.  Instead, make your essays clear and straightforward.  Use a ten-dollar word if it’s natural for you and suits your sentence, but don’t strive to do so because you think the Admissions Committee expects it.  Your aim should be to make your experience and objectives clear to the Committee.  As you put the finishing touches on your essays for an Early Notification application, or start the process of writing essays for a January application, keep this in mind:  plain language can go a long way toward winning over your readers.

Continuing to explore the commonalities between undergraduate and grad school admissions processes, I’ll point you toward a New York Times education blog post on cutting an application essay down in length.  Though Fletcher doesn’t limit you to 500 words in the first essay, you’d be surprised how many people find it challenging to state their purpose in even 800 words.

In case you’re curious, we do not count the words in each essay.  But read enough writing on the same theme and you, too, would quickly develop a sense of what’s too short and what’s too long.  My recommendation:  Practice pith!  Our tired eyes will appreciate it.  Word count: 107.

I had a great high school physics and chemistry teacher, Mr. Burdman, and he had a standard line of advice.  When seeking the solution to a problem, Mr. Burdman would tell us to “Draw a picture” to reflect the facts we know.  Using the Mr. Burdman method, I’m going to provide an answer to a question we commonly hear, “What type of work should I do/should I have done to be a competitive applicant to Fletcher?”

So we can start to answer this question by saying that the questioner wants to go from A to B, where A represents the start of her career:

The applicant thinks that B represents admission to Fletcher.  But, dear blog readers, the applicant has it wrong.  The picture, correctly drawn is:

Point A still represents the start of the applicant’s career, but B is the applicant’s career following graduate school.  So what is the arrow?  That’s Fletcher.  In other words, studying at Fletcher is an opportunity to develop knowledge and skills that will take the applicant from one point to another, but admission to Fletcher shouldn’t be seen as an endpoint.

How is this relevant for blog readers who are planning to apply to Fletcher this year?  Well, it should help you to frame your personal statement and second essay.  The best experience leading up to the arrow (admission to Fletcher) will support you when you’re at B (your post-Fletcher career).  Given the incredible array of post-Fletcher work our graduates pursue, is it any wonder that the experience that best supports an application would also be varied?

As an example, let’s consider two applicants, Tim and Jim.  Tim wants a career in international energy consulting, while Jim is interested in international education. Generally speaking, Tim’s best pre-Fletcher experience would involve either the energy field or consulting.  Jim’s would involve education, whether it’s within or outside his home country.

But what if Tim’s and Jim’s career goals were reversed?  Would Jim’s teaching experience be equally relevant to a post-Fletcher career in international energy consulting?  Well, it’s hard for me to say, but I’d advise Jim to use his essays to explain how his experience to date is relevant to his future work as a consultant.  In other words, there’s no single Point B, so there’s also no path to Point B that works equally well for everyone.

When I talk to recent graduates, I advise them to find work that pushes them along the A-B continuum.  For those who will apply this year, regardless of your Point B, be sure the Admissions Committee will understand how your experience, augmented by a Fletcher degree, will get you there.