Just Before You Submit

Either as a student, recent graduate, postgraduate student, young professional or maybe you’ve gotten a 5years+ experience under your belt.

You would be constantly faced with reasons to write essays, statements of purpose, personal statements, motivational write-ups all to buttress your application for either an opportunity, offer or a scholarship.

These essays and write-ups always form important parts of your application and they are the medium through which the selection committees or reviewers get to assess you and also decide if you’re a qualified enough to get selected.

A lot of criteria are set down when these essays are being reviewed and you don’t need to be sermonized to put in enough effort and construct a wonderful essay. There are tons of articles on the internet on how to write a good essay but this article is to help you see through the reviewers’ eye.
I’ll be sharing how it feels to be at the other end reviewing applications, and you should draw some lessons from that.

After a deadline, applications are divided for groups of selected people to review and grade. If you’re applying for a really competitive opportunity, then there would be lot of applications to review by an individual.

You should take note of some these things:

1. Whosoever reviewing your application is human, hence he or she gets tired and can’t wait to be done with it. What this implies is that if you just copy a template online and you edited it, whosoever reviewing your application would have seen ten or more of that same format during the course of reviewing applications, he or she gets pissed off at your laziness and moves on to the next essay.
2. You must make your essay real and original. You can make use of storytelling and also communicate your points in a way that would reveal your originality. One way to keep up your originality is to do a voice recording of your essay, most people express themselves verbally than via writing. So you can record your essay then play it, write it out and make amendments. Have you paused to imagine what happens if your essay lights up the mood of whosoever is reviewing it.
3. Take notes of keywords and use them appropriately. I never knew about this until I was reviewing applications for the role of a project manager. I didn’t have enough patience to read through all the essays and CV, so I was looking for the major keywords. Once I saw the keywords in more than three places, it fuels my desire to pay attention to that particular essay. Imagine you’re applying for a conference on “Sustainability” and you don’t have words like: green, sustainable, circular economy, biodiversity, environment, recycling, conservation, consumption etc. scattered all around. You should look for keywords that pertain to the essay you’re writing so you’ll brilliantly place them in your essays. So if your reviewer is too tired to read all your essay and he or she is searching for keywords, you’ll be on the safer side.
4. Do a thorough proofreading. It would not be so good if the first thing that attracts your reviewer is a grammatical blunder or a misspelt word. You never can tell where he or she would start reading from. So in order to be safe, ensure to proofread and also share with professional writers to help you review your essay. Having another eye view your essay might help you point out what you won’t see.

Applying for opportunities and getting rejections hurt and sometimes you might do everything well and still not get accepted. Rejections here and there aren’t reason to stop or give up, I talked about drawing positive energy from rejections in this article.

Make sure to give your best to any application, because “If it’s worth doing at all then it’s worth doing well.”