Welcome to F1GMAT’s #askAtulJose series. In this episode, I will talk about the ChatGPT craze.

A lot of applicants have reached out to me, asking if getting creative support from ChatGPT is a good idea. I think a lot of applicants targeting Master’s or MBA programs miss out on a very important detail.

The tool is extremely useful as an assistant that can clean the data for your research, generate ideas for your tasks, write really good poetry, and talk randomly about a wide range of topics. But in all these use cases, the tool remains a tool because it needs prompting, and the algorithm doesn’t try to understand you as a person.

In admissions, most time for a consultant is spent understanding the person – their motivations, their fear, their strengths, their weaknesses, and shortlisting stories that will help them stand out. This is not a quantitative exercise. It is a human exercise where the client might not reveal certain details initially. Some will reveal but hesitate to expand on it. Many come with certain assumptions on how an essay should read like. A consultant would have to educate them about storytelling. So there are so many variables when two people try to solve a problem. And the biggest challenge for an applicant, when they start writing is to stop thinking and feel for an event in their life. And then write.

Without feeling for a cause, a vision, or a past event, the essays just won’t connect with the admissions team. The school is not looking for a perfectly worded essay. They want to read you and understand your motivations. Schools can’t afford to take in applicants who waiver from their goals.

The goals essay is not about writing. It is about feasibility.

When it comes to a personal essay, ChatGPT or any Generative AI tools can create great prose, but they can’t read you, the person. The essays sound like what a machine thinks a human is.
Can we use ChatGPT to create an outline? Of course, you can. I have a tutorial on how to outline paragraphs for the essay. But from the 100+ essays I created for Winning MBA Essay Guide, guess how many outlines I created before writing the essay?

Zero.

No real writer/essayist knows where their stream of thoughts is going. They have a vague idea. The consciousness and the random connections to the past, the current mood, and the vision for the future give them themes and ideas that eventually lead to a coherent narrative.

Each one of you has a unique storyline by which you are living your life.

Stories of your life cannot be outsourced to a machine. They don’t sense your insecurities, your ambition, your weakness, your strengths, your desires, and your hope.

Anyone who has written a sentence to connect with someone knows it.

There is a moment between feeling and writing.

That moment comes from your inner being.

You have to feel something to write authentically.

The machine doesn’t feel it.

And it shows in the writing.

If you need guidance in writing authentic narratives for your admission essays, reach out to me, Atul Jose