Lynne Curry, '93

Characteristics of Successful Essays

• Deeply personal. Show how defining experiences influenced your development. Thus, what is important is your reflections, growth, not the experience itself. Reveal experiences especially traumatic or rewarding; how did you learn from them?
• Link personal experience, academic knowledge, plans for the future. In other words, you reflected on a personal experience from a conceptual perspective, and look forward to dealing with similar problems in from a position of leadership.
• Essays must be interesting, make you sound interesting enough to merit an interview.
• Essays reveal doubts, contradictions, ambiguities; you don't have all the answers, but appreciate the complexity of a problem.
• Essays suggest you understand the broader context of yourself and your experiences.
• You appreciate other persons, circumstances, opportunities that contributed to your successes.
• Demonstrate values you consider important by referring to another you admire, wish to emulate.

References

• Half academic, half from other experiences, including individuals in the past that had a special impact on you.
• Recommendation s should be brief, to the point, concrete. Demonstrate qualities with specific concrete examples.
• Recommendations as a package should demonstrate diverse talents, achievements.