I got accepted into a Master's Program that I've been working towards at Emerson College. Let's go!
I'm proud, grateful, and, most importantly, pretty damn sure that it is the best program for me at this point. I'm glad I put some space between undergrad and grad school for a lot of reasons, but, more than anything, it helped me narrow in on what I wanted to study in graduate school, and it led to Emerson. I think I would have rushed into the wrong decision if I had chosen to go right after undergrad.
On the other hand, I am pretty aware this is going to be me walking into class on the first day as a 28 year old:
There is so much work that goes into the application process, and it's not lost on me that it takes a certain amount of luck and privilege to find yourself in a position to even consider graduate school, much less apply, and get accepted.
But I wanted to focus on the admissions essay. These are standard across applications, no matter the school.
I can't say how much my essay contributed to my admission, but I will say that many of the cover letters that I have written in the past have at least received responses from recruiters. And the admissions essay is a similar dance. I'm confident in the formula I've built and wanted to share it.
The prompt for the Emerson essay was: Explain your short-term and long-term professional goals. What motivates you or makes you passionate about these goals? How will an Emerson education assist you in achieving these goals? Reflecting on any relevant work, educational, or personal experiences, describe how you would contribute to the program and to the profession.
This prompt feels pretty standard and doesn't invite a creative answer on the surface.
But you have to imagine the admissions committee, reading through tens / hundreds of these, drool hanging out of the corner of their mouth after the 40th essay starts with (My short term and long term goals...)
You have to make your essay engaging from the first sentence, and pique their curiosity. Here's how I started mine:
I kick off with a definition and a story. It hasn't come close to answering the prompt yet, but it puts the reader right into the middle of a story, and at that point, they should be curious enough to see if I was going to make a point in the essay.
So, now we have their curiosity, but now we have to put our money where our mouth is, and actually answer their question.
The problem that I've seen people run into with creative answers to standard prompts is that they swing the pendulum too far in the creative direction. You have to address the prompt, but first, we need to put ourselves in position to answer it. We have to build the thread.
Here's how I connected the above story to the prompt.
Boom. This part took a lot of time to get to a place where it worked. Notice how the story remains pretty seamless, there's no obvious gap where I stop to say: these are my short term and long term goals. At the end of the first paragraph, I say that my long term goal is to teach at the collegiate level, and at the end of the second paragraph, I talk about my short term goal of building a strong professional career in marketing.
The tested secret it writing is to try to show more than you tell, and I think wrapping those two points into the narrative accomplishes that.
Alright, now we are in a good position to transition to answering the prompt more directly.
If this was following a narrative arc, this would be the climax. This is where you make your strongest, and most clear statement to address the prompt. This is the paragraph they will circle.
Here's how I shifted from the story to directly answering the prompt:
Ok, there is some stuff to unpack here. I had to rip the reader out of the story into the present and say "OK I'm being serious now". The first sentence was a snappy and effective way to do that.
Then I move in to my "why" for applying, and I answer the part of the prompt that asks "What motivates you or makes you passionate about these goals? (I want to level up my strategic thinking) How will an Emerson education assist you in achieving these goals? " (By helping me learn how to think critically and creatively about larger marketing decisions).
At this point, there is only one part of the prompt left to address: Reflecting on any relevant work, educational, or personal experiences, describe how you would contribute to the program and to the profession.
But I also never really explained why I chose to start with that story, so I tackled both of those things in the conclusion:
There's a lot happening in these two paragraphs. The blue highlights the paragraph that connects/closes the story with the line "ever since Doc unicycled into that classroom".
The yellow highlight connects back to the first line of the essay with the definition of philomath.
And the last three sentences address the final part of the prompt: my contributions to the program and to Emerson.
So there you have it, folks.
In the beginning of this post, I outlined the formula, and then I showed you how I implemented the formula for an essay that contributed to my acceptance to Emerson College.
It can be tough to get started on these, so I hope this framework helps do just that.
Good luck out there.