Aja Edmond is a 2012 graduate of Stanford Graduate School of Business, the No. 3 MBA program in the world in 2021. This is the essay she submitted.

The personal essay is an essential component of your application. How compelling it is — or isn't — can make or break your acceptance.

The personal essay is a critical opportunity for college applicants to showcase their creativity, original perspectives, and unique qualifications for admission. Crafting a dynamic and engaging essay ...

Before I pioneered writing personal essays about quitting things, people simply quit things and maybe told their friends and family about it. They didn’t quit things as fodder for an overlong essay ...

Journalists chase, find and cover stories, and sometimes, they become one. From intriguing exposés to provocative thinkpieces and raw memoirs, the personal essay has long been a media staple, enjoying ...

There’s a certain kind of personal essay that, for a long time, everybody seemed to hate. These essays were mostly written by women. They came off as unseemly, the writer’s judgment as flawed. They ...

A mark of a good writer, whether fiction, essay, or poetry, is the ability to unflinchingly illuminate the emotional issues that people often try to suppress. An exemplar is Phillip Lopate, long ...

I'm not gonna lie: the hardest thing to get printed on Bustle as a freelancer is a personal essay. That said, personal essays are also what I'm most in need of as our features editor. The reason ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. The personal essay isn’t dead. It’s just found new life. Personal essays are alive and well today, just in a different form ...

Writing a personal essay can be a full-body activity, replete with tremors and tears and physical aches. Recollection is strenuous. Recreating a scene can be downright exhausting. In those instances, ...