I will talk about the structure of the personality essays in this article. Personality essays are the ones where you are supposed to write a story about your leadership skills or about some challenge or ethical dilemma that you faced.
This essay should follow the START framework. S – Situation, T – Task , A – Action, R – Result, T – Takeaways. Try to pick up a professional story or a story from your work place.
The essay should start with a brief description of the situation. This sets the context right in the beginning. This part should tell the reader the challenge that you were facing. Ideally there should be a single situation/challenge in the essay. The most common mistake people do is they write about more than one challenge. The problem arises when you have to write the “action” part. Each action that you take should address the challenge. If there are multiple challenges, there will be multiple actions and the essay gets lengthy.
The second part is the task. Here you should write about the actions that you were supposed to take in the given situation.
The third part is the action part where you should elaborate on the actions that you took to meet the challenge or handle the situation. Here you should take care that the challenge and actions are aligned. For example, if the situation was that there was no unity in your team, the action cannot be that you started the culture of brainstorming in the team before solving any problem. It should be something that makes sure that in the end there is some unity in the team, say, you started the concept of monthly team building trips.
Next, you should write about the results. Here you should write that the situation/challenge was successfully resolved and briefly write a story which shows that the problem was solved. Again this should be aligned with the situation/challenge and the action you took. So for the given example, the result should be – after the implementation of your actions, there was a marked difference in the bonding of people. This was displayed in the way the team executed the next project.
The last leg of the essay is the takeaways. This is the most important part of the essay. No matter how strong or weak your story is, this part of the essay will give the admissions committee to understand you as a person. Most applicants tend to ignore this part and just write a few common leadership traits in the end to complete this part. So think deeper about the actions and then write the takeaways accordingly.
No comments:
Post a Comment