This week we offer an oxymoron of sorts: extreme humility. We suppose that one candidate could be more humble than the next, but one could never refer to oneself as \u201cextremely humble,\u201d because doing so would undermine the very claim to humility.<\/p>\n
Our philosophy at mbaMission is that candidates should let their experiences\u2014not just their word choices\u2014captivate the admissions committees. Sometimes we find that candidates attempt to emphasize their actions with \u201cextreme\u201d adjectives and adverbs, and this is an approach we strongly discourage.<\/p>\n
Example:\u00a0\u201cAs others withdrew their support, I remained remarkably dedicated to our crucial fundraising efforts. I dramatically increased my participation in our strategic planning meetings and insisted that we push forward with a wildly creative\u00a0guerrilla\u00a0marketing plan, which brought forth tremendous results\u2014$1M in \u2018instant\u2019 proceeds.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n In these two sentences, the writer uses the descriptors\u00a0remarkably<\/em>,\u00a0dramatically<\/em>,\u00a0wildly<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0tremendous<\/em>\u00a0to make his impression. We find that a more effective approach is to eliminate these \u201cextreme\u201d descriptions and let the experiences do the \u201ctalking.\u201d<\/p>\n Example:\u00a0\u201cAs others withdrew their support, I remained dedicated to our fundraising efforts. I increased my participation in our strategic planning meetings and insisted that we push forward with a\u00a0guerrilla\u00a0marketing plan that brought $1M in \u2018instant\u2019 proceeds.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n In this second example, we do not need to be told that the results were \u201ctremendous,\u201d because the $1M speaks for itself; we do not need to be told that the marketing campaign was \u201cwildly creative,\u201d because this is implied in the nature of\u00a0guerrilla\u00a0marketing. In addition to truly showing a level of humility on the part of the candidate, this approach is also less wordy. Although the eight words saved in the latter example may seem inconsequential, we removed them from only two sentences. If we can remove four words from each and every sentence, we would be able to significantly (but of course humbly) augment your essay with other compelling ideas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"