The benefits of introspection

When it comes to writing bschool essays, "introspection" is one thing that you will hear more often than you would have thought. Admissions consultants will talk about you, current students will talk about it, alumni will talk about it, and today - I will talk about it. Let's see if we can answer the basics in a question answer format.

1) What do you mean by introspection ?
Without taking a peek into dictionary.com, introspection to me would mean looking within me, for experiences, moments, events - the good and the bad ones, the happy or sad ones, the successful and failure ones. But our work doesnt quite end there. We will need to delve a little deeper. For each experience, think about why you behaved in a certain way, what you might have been thinking at that point of time, and how that experience has affected your current thinking. What would have been different if things went the other way. Would you be the same you ? Did that failure in your first job interview make you realise that you should put in more effort, and what would have happened if you had got that job because a company exec is a friend of your father. You get the drift, right ?

2)Why do we need it for writing bschool essays?
Simplistic answer - Because adcoms like to read such stuff ;))
The better version - Introspection will tell you a lot about yourself. I am not sure about you, but for me I knew a lot less about myself before I joined the bschool rat-race. My parents knew a lot more about me(and still do). Once you start to get acquainted to the real you hidden deep under, you start to realise what you like, and what you dont. You can make decisions where you want to go from here on, and you can tell me the story of what brought you to where you currently are. This is the stuff which is the real meat about your personality, and this is something which adcoms would like to *probably* read about, because its you they want to learn about(and not just about your accomplishments).

3)Why am I writing about this today ?
I was looking through the Chicago essays for this year, and realised that they ask a lot about you as a person. Tackling questions which ask "What is the one thing that most people do not know about you" is clearly an intent to take an insider tour of your personality, in turn making the question even more difficult to answer. It would really need good amount of thought to pick out that one thing (among many attributes) that you would like the adcom to know about.

4)My final thoughts on this subject.
As important introspection might be, the art of articulating those experiences in the right words is equally important. Also important is to choose the right subset of experiences from the whole big set your life is. We all have many stories to tell, but are each of them worth telling when you are applying to a *business school*? Do those stories chime with the passions of the school? Those are big decisions, and to me - finding answers to those seem to be a lot of work. So I will get back to doing some meaty stuff, and will conclude this didactic blog post here. Wish you all good luck as you go treasure hunting.