DINGED! Let Sandy Tell You Why Now

Sandy, I live and work in the Bay Area. I know a lot of these new, early stage firms. So I get it. Now tell me why that makes the essay MORE important. 

If your traditional decision metrics are getting crowded or unclear, you are more likely to be influenced by other information. Sure, what I say has been going on for the past five years or so, or more, but it has been accelerated this year, especially with kids applying from firms and situations  that adcoms never heard of and from writing this new essay prompt.

How does that work? 

In the past, the essay did not count much, and still does not count super much. That is just a fact, and one that consultants are probably  unhappy with. As I have said, an essay can make you sit up straight, but it cannot add two inches to your height.

OK, but what is so different about this year? 

The old question– even such a free-form one as ‘what else do you want us to know about you?’–  was asking you to write an essay. An essay is an essay is an essay. For the most part, those essays washed over readers. Sure, there were outliers. The new question is kinda asking you to speak. Almost to sing. That can be much more important. That is certainly Dee Leopold’s view. She has said that the purpose of the essay is to let them hear your voice. Voice is very powerful. It can get under your skin very quickly and very easily, even in written form.

And? 

There are a great variety of ways of doing that and the impact it will have on adcom member 1, 2, 3 or 4, if they have not shared their preferences and biases with others, can be random. As noted, some adcom members really like stories about strict dads who become loved, while others are meh-ish on personal jive like that. Those dad-lover readers, after going through the first 100 essays, begin to develop quick biases and tics about what they want in an essay and what they don’t want, even though they will deny it at the top of their lungs.  That bias gets over determined, as they say,  in the write-up process, the note the app reader adds to the file,  where the tendency is to make a point and prove it, and the entire process can become skewed and self-reinforcing.

Ahem, and you think that happened? 

In a some real number of cases, it could be. Or many variants of that. It’s a subtle process and voice is a powerful and tricky thing. You can really turn someone off very quickly with a voice they don’t like. If you are introducing yourself with your schooling and work history and then said that you were interested in the challenges facing your business like x or y and wanted to share those with classmates, that could get you in trouble with some readers, who are otherwise fair-minded.

If you minimized the personal jive about your parents or illnesses or getting lost in the woods and you got the wrong reader, one who is just in it for the ‘strict dad’ stories, you could get some random-ish outcome, especially given how tight certain buckets are, where a very small difference in who knows what can make a real difference in getting an interview or not. Although that was always the case, I think it is more so now.

Aren’t these files read by more than one person? 

Hmmmm, that is a good one. I think applications are separated into buckets by industry and those buckets are given a shakeout by one person and that actually has the effect of magnifying what I am talking about.

Sure, Dee and Company will come back with some jive about how every admitted application is read by hundreds and thousands of people, but I’m not so sure, in reality. And what we really care about is how many people read dinged applications.

Sandy, we all know how reluctant  you would be to give Dee any advice, but could we provoke you into doing so, even if she might not appreciate it? 

Oh John, I am putty in your hands.

My advice would be to normalize the essay readers the way you have normalized the interviewers (same people, different task). The interviewers often attend the same interview, as either principal or observer, and over time, that normalizes and standardizes what they consider a good vs. less good interview. They may even talk about it in meetings. I’m not sure that has been done in the essay process because in the past, what was a good versus not good essay was more obvious and less important.

I hope they are really discussing this, especially the voice bias, and I hope Dee is asserting some, gulp, leadership about 1. actually making essays LESS important and returning to old metrics, and 2. alerting  the group to the possibility of what I call “approach bias.” That is, just because you like stories about sick childhood dogs, don’t punish the kid who either did not have a dog, or chose not to write about it. Find a way to judge a kid who actually answered the question at face value, AND INTRODUCED HIMSELF IN THE WAY MOST PEOPLE WOULD IN REALITY THE FIRST DAY OF CLASS, on the value of what he said, and do  not punish his low-drama approach.

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AND SANDY WILL GIVE YOU INSIGHT ON WHY HE THINKS YOU WERE DINGED