Amongst history buffs, like myself, there’s a famous story about the Declaration of Independence.  Basically, it was a long, hot summer in Philadelphia, and Congress deputized a committee to write the Declaration.  Everybody on the Committee figured it’d be some dry legal document stating the facts and the Congressional response.  One member of the Committee asked the others to let him handle the first draft; thinking they were ridding themselves of an unpleasant clerical task, they readily agreed.  That committee member, Thomas Jefferson, created a literary masterpiece. The instant John Adams and the other committee members read Jefferson’s draft, they knew that they had missed an opportunity for immortality because they hadn’t seen the potential in this otherwise routine task.

    I want you to review your resume like Thomas Jefferson would: what have you done that’s really far more impressive than it seems?  Everybody got good grades, but how many people did it with a learning disability? Everybody worked at an i-bank or a consultancy, but how many people achieved X?  What’s hiding in your resume that deserves more attention?

    Don’t get me wrong: you don’t need to upsell them on your college or your employer.  You don’t even need to upsell them on your achievements; it’s all about you and what you learned.  Heck, Newton figured out gravity from an apple and a tree (I know that’s not quite true, but literary exaggeration is fine!)  You might have done things that seem fairly ordinary, but what did you learn from those things – that’s what matters.

    You might have the most extraordinary insights from the most ordinary of things.  Heck, Steve Jobs always claimed that studying fonts was key to Apple – fonts? Could anything be more boring, and yet…

    That’s how I want you to approach your resume; I want you to think about how you demonstrated something more significant or learned something more profound than the plain facts of your resume imply.

    I’ll be honest: I don’t care that you increased sales 11% because you might have been lucky; heck, your colleague may have boosted sales by 12% -- the facts aren’t that interesting or persuasive.  But maybe you learned that you had to focus on your customers’ needs, that you had to worry about THEM before you could take care of YOU and, thus, you implemented Z policy. And now you’ve seen how that focus on others could help your business solve Problem Q, which had nothing to do with sales.  And so on and so on.

    As you build out from one small story to an insight to another insight, you reveal more and more about yourself, and your story becomes more and more interesting.  I remember one of the most interesting speeches I ever heard was a recipe – literally, he told the audience how to make a mint julep, but that wasn’t really the topic of his speech.  In fact, he was talking about his own yearnings, his own love of beauty, grace, and simplicity, and – rather than tell us he valued those ideals – he showed us, through his meticulous language and presentation.  

    So it’s not the “facts”; it’s your insight, your presentation that matters.  You can be a very boring astronaut or a very inspiring janitor (Good Will Hunting, anybody?)– which one do you think is going to get in?

I want you to think about your last significant purchase – the last time you carefully considered a few similar items before you picked one in particular.

What was it?  A house? A car?  A vacation?

What convinced you?  How did you decide?

If you chose on something obvious, like price, was it because everything else was pretty much the same or because you were worried more about price than anything else?  If price was your primary concern, would anyone have been able to change your mind?

Do you see what I’m driving at?  I want you to think about your candidacy from the admission officer’s perspective: if he or she is picking on test scores or grades or something like that, can you do anything to change his or her mind?  Probably not.

You just have to accept that some people cannot be persuaded and, thus, some schools won’t be open to you.

But that’s not what we’re interested in; we’re interested in the schools that can be won--what do we have to do win admission there?

Well, haven’t we already made it past the resume?  That is, if we were going to get in (or get rejected) based upon our resume, then we didn’t have a chance; the fact that they’re reading our application without a decision in mind means that our resume won’t save us (or damn us).  

We have to do more; we have to do something else besides putting our resume into essay form.

Now, to be fair, some of you may have an unusual resume or resume line that needs to be explained, and it’s perfectly reasonable to use your application to clarify such issues, but – frankly – most people have resumes that will be familiar and/or resumes that can be understood without familiarity.  (I may never have heard of your PE firm or your consultancy, but I’ll get the gist quickly.)

You know what I don’t know?  You know what’s truly unique to you and you alone?  You. Lots of people did I-banking or consulting, but how did those experience affect you?  That’s something I can’t glean from your resume, so talk about that.

There’s a story here that I think captures the idea perfectly.  When Ralph Lauren’s daughter asked her father for an investment in her candy business, he demurred, explaining that everybody sells candy.  She replied, “But, Daddy, everybody sells suits.” You don’t need a “unique” product; you need a unique perspective for that product.

Likewise, you don’t need a resume that nobody’s ever seen before; rather, you need an insight into your resume that nobody’s ever seen before – that’ll take time, and some soul-searching, but it’s the heart of a great B-school application.

What if you are a diversity candidate?  How should you handle today’s hot-button issues?

First and foremost, remember that you’re applying to business school, not running for office.  Whenever you address a politically-sensitive issue, you’re taking a risk and, generally speaking, applications are risky enough.

That said, diversity can be a plus – it all depends in how you use it.

Remember to think of your application as a sales pitch, with the product being you.  How does diversity make you a better product?

Another way to think of it is this: you know why that school would be great for you, but why would you be great for that school?  And how does your diversity – whatever it is – amplify your sales pitch.

Look, if you’ve never been motivated and/or affected by your diversity, don’t fake it now.  I certainly can’t tell you how your diversity affected you or your life, and don’t let anybody else tell you either.  There’s no right answer; you’re not attempting to find that answer or fit your life into it.

Let me take one concrete example: suppose you’re part of the LGBTQ+ community.  Should that be in your application? Should it be a significant part of your application?  If so, how should it figure into your application?

Honestly, I don’ t know; I can’t know – it all depends on you.  Look, if your life-long dream is to start the next Google, then your diversity might have affected you in very different ways than if your dream is to lead your family’s business into the next century – I’m not saying it would be different; I’m just saying that the answer’s not obvious to me, perhaps it wouldn’t matter.  

Which is precisely the kind of thing that would make a great essay.

Tell me why you think it matters.  Or doesn’t matter. Or might matter in ways I wouldn’t expect.

The admissions officer is not looking at your answer; he or she is looking at how you explain and defend your answer.  You can make a great and compelling case for any conclusion; the point is that you made a great and compelling case.

In the final analysis, you and I may not agree, but that doesn’t mean you can’t impress me.  Or the admissions officers at the school(s) of your dream.

To bring this back home, my point is that too many people think the goal of an admissions essay is to appeal to everyone, but that’s always going to produce a bland, dull essay, and that’s going to make you appear bland and dull.  Far better to argue for something that matters to you because your passion will be obvious, and passion’s what they’re looking for.

I simply can’t stress this enough: everybody who applies to the top business schools is brilliant and accomplished and hard-working, so those things won’t be enough.  You need to stand out and that requires passion. Now your passion can be about anything; it can be as unique as you, but it has to be real, it has to be authentic.

The right answer depends on where you are in your studies.  If you're pretty close to your target, (30 points in GMAT and under 700, or 2-3 points in GRE Quant or Verbal), you're probably fine to just do practice questions. However if you are aiming for 730+ in GMAT or 333+ in GRE, you will need to take a more systematic approach. Go a little more into the theory of the questions and analyze the exact methodology of how you are solving the questions, every step of the way.  The best way to tell how well you've learned something is to teach it.  If you can explain it to someone else and they get it, then you get it.  If they're confused, you may get it a little, but you don't fully get it.  

Hiring a team of tutors to help you with the GMAT is itself a managerial challenge.  You have a finite budget and time course, and want to maximize your score gains.  Having experts to monitor progress is definitely helpful, but you also need it to be simple or it gets confusing.

There is no one-size fits-all right answer to this question.  We'll address it for working with Test Prep Unlimited tutors.

We have multiple tiers of instructor, and most of our students work with tutors from more than one tier.

The higher your budget/higher your score target, the more you should work with upper level tutors. Starting off with lower levels and then switching later results in a weaker foundational base to build off of. For the same number of lessons, it's better to have the expert coverage from start to finish.

If your budget is under 3k and you're not trying to get past 650, you're best off doing it all with level I tutors.  Most of our clients want more help than that, and therefore also (or entirely) work with our more experienced instructors.

Our intuition may or may not be helpful.
PS #102 in 2019 OG Supplement Quant is one example.
A gardener is buying bags of seeds in 5lb 10lb or 25lb bundles at $13.85, $20.43, or $32.25 each. We are asked to minimize the cost for a total between 65 to 80 lbs. Our intuition tells us that we should just aim for 65 lbs, but because of the way the costs work out, it turns out to be cheaper to by 75 lbs. 

Similarly, just because one tier is less expensive than the next, that does not mean that you should work with that tier the whole time.  Doing so may actually cost you more in the long-run than working with the more experienced instructors from the beginning.