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
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!
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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.