This week we offer an oxymoron of sorts: extreme humility. We suppose that one candidate could be more humble than the next, but one could never refer to himself as “extremely humble,” for doing so would undermine the very claim to humility.

Our philosophy at mba

Mission is that candidates should let their experiences captivate the AdComs. Sometimes we find that instead, candidates attempt to emphasize their actions with “extreme” adjectives and adverbs — an approach we quickly advise them to avoid.Example: “As others withdrew their support, I remained remarkably dedicated to our crucial fundraising efforts. I dramatically increased my participation in our strategic planning meetings and insisted that we push forward with a wildly creative guerilla marketing plan, which brought forth tremendous results — $1MM in ‘instant’ proceeds.”

In these two sentences, the writer uses the descriptors “remarkably,” “dramatically,” “wildly” and “tremendous” to make his impression. We find that a more effective approach is to eliminate these “extreme” descriptions and let the experiences do the “talking.”

Example: “As others withdrew their support, I remained dedicated to our fundraising efforts. I increased my participation in our strategic planning meetings and insisted that we push forward with a guerilla marketing plan that brought $1MM in ‘instant’ proceeds.”

In the example above, we don’t need to be told that the results were “tremendous,” because the $1MM speaks for itself; we don’t need to be told that the marketing campaign was “wildly creative,” because this is implied in the nature of guerilla marketing. In addition to truly showing a level of humility on the part of the candidate, this approach is also less wordy. While the eight words saved in the latter example may seem inconsequential, we removed them from only two sentences. If we can remove four words from each and every sentence, we would be able to significantly (but of course humbly) augment your essay with other compelling ideas.