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Essays - reach the word limit?

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Essays - reach the word limit?

by baume7 » Mon Oct 31, 2011 4:03 pm
I have already submitted my application essays to ESADE but am still in the process of writing the ones for IE. It states that the minimum word count per essay should be 250 with the maximum at about 1,000. All my essays are just a bit over the minimum, is this a bad thing? Should I push for a higher word count?

It's just that I feel like I've said all I need to say and don't want to sound forced. For example one question is "If you could ask the president or leader of your country something, what would it be and why?" And I don't necessarily have anything interesting to ask him. My current answer is along the lines of how influential his advisers are in his decision-making, but since it isn't so specific, my essay seemed short and all over the place. One other question I really want to ask is in relation to improving our local sports teams, but since being a varsity athlete is a big part of my profile already, I want to show that I'm interested in things other than sports.
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by essaysnark » Mon Oct 31, 2011 7:45 pm
baume7, those IE essays are *hard* aren't they??

We actually think that if you're just over the 250-word minimum, you're probably not offering as in-depth of an answer as the adcom expects.

The main point of that specific IE question about the president is to see how you think -- the adcom will be just as interested in what you say in response to the question (the actual answer you provide), as they will in how you approach it. They can learn a lot about a candidate from this one question -- which might be sort of surprising, since it doesn't even seem to relate to anything MBA-ish at all, right?!?

If all your other essays and answers to the other questions are rock solid, you might be fine with this one in particular being s a bit weak... but obviously that's not ideal. So, we recommend circling back to it, given what you're saying about how it seems all over the place. It's good that you're providing a different angle than the sports stuff, if you feel you've already covered that elsewhere. You might want to take a fresh start at it, in a different direction than where you began. We do NOT suggest trying to just pad it out with more stuff; you need to have a core around which you would naturally want to expand. If you have run out of things to say on the original topic, then perhaps there's something else you could explore instead.

We actually ran across an unrelated-but-relevant post on nearly this exact topic today: https://billharper.me/2010/an-editors-plea

Hope this helps (but likely it won't - we feel your pain on this one, the IE essays are HARD!!) :-)

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by Jon@Admissionado » Mon Oct 31, 2011 11:03 pm
Rule of thumb: you can go quite a bit over. You can go a wee bit under. But going a lot under ALWAYS looks bad. Cause it sounds like you have nothing to say (which you corroborate :) )

BUT, If as you write "I have nothing to say" I'd go through the essay one more time, because one thing you certainly don't want is to give them that impression.
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by baume7 » Wed Nov 02, 2011 7:46 am
To essaysnark and PrecisionEssay,

those are REALLY great tips!! Thank you so much. And i know, you'd think that questions that initially sound easy would be easy to answer as well, but when asked about things that you have no interest in or don't really care to answer, well, then they become surprisingly hard! Will get back to the essays tomorrow and will try a new angle in hopes that my creative juices get flowing since I can usually write in depth about something as long as it doesn't bore me :)
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