FOUR SAMPLE HBS ESSAYS, WITH COMMENTS
ESSAY 4 — Changing The Family Business
In 1995, during the second year of my internship with Mogul Investment Bank (MIB) in New York, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer, and told he had 6 months to live. My father owned a sporting goods store in Queens. In the next two months, I was able to hire a store manager, add a bill paying system, and educate my mother to run the store alone. My father died four months after the initial diagnosis.
I first used contacts at MIB to obtain a definitive diagnosis of my father’s cancer from world-famous specialists at Sloan Kettering Hospital. After consultation with them, my family elected to peruse a ‘care’ not a ‘treatment’ course for the cancer. That decision gave us more time to focus on preparing my mother to take over the business rather than ‘fight’ the cancer. Through a local priest, I located a recent immigrant from Greece (our own ethnic heritage) who was smart and happy to have the manager’s job. He was a lucky hire.
I spent a month training the new manager and going through the old records. (I took an unprecedented three-week leave from MIB and moved back home.) My father was able to help a little, but he soon became too sick. I computerized the bill paying system, and concluded that computerizing the inventory was not worth it. My mother had worked in the store in the past (as had I), and I was able to make her feel comfortable about taking over by making her a collaborator in the reorganization. Also working in the store was a way to take our minds off my father’s illness, and my father was pleased to know that my mother would be financially secure and the store would go on. [word count--297]
| Comment : ‘Wild card’ good answer in which the facts speak for themselves without much need of ‘buzz word’ embellishments or analysis. We are impressed here most by the writer’s character and his strong family background. Although working in a blue-chip investment banking internship, the writer takes an ‘unprecedented’ three-week leave to deal with a family crisis. Not many people would leave a top Wall Street job to move back to the ‘old neighborhood’ and immerse themselves in a small family business. We are also impressed by the writer’s apparent competence, maturity, and confidence. After all, hiring someone to manage a small business, and training someone else to ‘own’ it, are not skills taught at Wall Street investment banks. The decision not to aggressively fight the cancer, made after consultation with leading experts, is also powerful and ‘counter-intuitive’ to Wall Street and HBS types, but correct under the circumstances. That kind of authentic and ‘wisdom-laden’ detail scores super high with admissions readers (and normal readers too). The answer gains from its business-like recital of both the practical and psychological issues: hiring the manager through the local priest, organizing a bill paying system, deciding early to ‘accept’ his father’s death not fight it, the recognition that working in the store helped the family deal with their grief, his father’s pleasure at seeing his wife taken care of after his death. The set-up is stated quickly in the first paragraph, and what follows is a narrative containing both facts and insights, each of which illustrate ‘specifically’ what the writer did to help an organization change. We are left with a picture of a high-functioning, caring, out-of-the-box thinking and strong family values young man, but the power of the essay is that is shows us those traits through good specifics rather than just telling us. Many writers baldly state “I am determined, hard working, and believe in truth and justice . . . .” but the trick is provide the unique and personalized details that show those things, and this writer has done it. |
