“The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.”
Cartography, according to us, has strange parallels with composing your essays. It helps you understand your place within the world, albeit alongside a positional relationship, all while leaving a profound impact of geography on your life.
Essays, on the other hand, work on maps, too.
Mapping Your Essays
While writing essays for your PGP TBM application, we encourage you to pay careful attention to the lens and disposition of the reader. Structuring your essay well means thoroughly examining your thesis statement, followed by determining the sequence, tone and style of how you would want to present your argument.
On writing/editing your essays, ask yourself at every step - would the reader be expecting more context, more empirical evidence, more data? The essay map should allow you to answer many preliminary questions surrounding the ‘how’, ‘why’, and ‘what’ of your essay.
Crafting your Essay Responses
The Masters’ Union application allows for three kinds of responses - text, PDF and video based.
Two of the questions in the Masters’ Union application essays are text-based responses. We feel these are straightforward, checking your own understanding of your fitment with Masters’ Union in your career trajectory, as well as your understanding of the culture at Masters’ Union.
We’d want a keen insight on how your own values align with those of the institute. We certainly feel a synergy in core values would lead to a better fit, both for the applicant, as well as the institute.
One essay asks for a video based response. With the dominance of Instagram and reels, we feel it’s extremely easy to generate high quality, front-facing videos of yourself with basic editing thrown into place.
From this question, we’re looking to determine your critical thinking, communication, creativity and presentation skills. Tasked with explaining a business/tech concept, we’d encourage to let your imagination and passion run wild - choosing a topic that most authentically represents your passion and interest. From choosing to explain concepts in fluid dynamics, to technical/fundamental analysis of stocks to Pep Guardiola’s tactics at Manchester City - we’d encourage you to be creative and express your passion!
Our final question asks for a response through a PDF. While we could have accepted just plain text, we thought we’d give some consideration to all the graphic designers out there! Pull out your (digital) paintbrushes if you’d like!
With a question that asks you to design a course, we’d like for you to think how well you know the Masters’ Union pedagogy and how well you’ve done your research around it. We’ve already started receiving some creative and expressive answers and we’re looking forward to more!
For our other prompt, don’t worry - it’s not a math test! Our mix of mathematics and philosophy only asks your interpretation of the question. There is no right or wrong answer! What we’re looking for is how you’d interpret mathematical transformations of a qualitative matrix and what it would mean for you.
Here’s all our insights rolled up and put on display! We hope this helps you craft a better essay for your PGP TBM application at Masters’ Union.
Our admissions deadline for Round 1 is fast approaching on the 22nd of January, 2023! If you’re keen to be a part of our upcoming PGP TBM cohort, we encourage you to complete your application early!