Ivey AEO Activity Essay #1 - my candidacy to be enrolled in the HBA program

Ivey AEO Activity Essay #1 (Verify the content/don't be afraid to be critical)

teamwork, commitment and success

For Ivey, I want to please verify if what I am saying is what they're looking for. Also, I want to ensure that I have no stupid grammatical and spelling errors, and if the wording is suitable. I would appreciate all the help.

When I reflect back on my time of serving as an executive member of the Student Activity Council for over two years, my memories are flooded with lengthy lunch and after school meetings, the excitement and frenzy of our events, and most importantly, the exhausted yet satisfied euphoria I experienced at the end of a successful event.

I began my journey in the council as a junior PR representative. My main duties were to manage our council's twitter account, along with writing the morning announcements. With my concurrent involvement with the announcement team, I became a valuable asset to the council. For this year, I was an observant yet eagerly opportunistic leaner. My innate desire to be a leader sparked at any given chance, diminishing the stigma around a Grade 10 student taking charge. SAC demanded tireless commitment from its members, and I gave in no hesitation to dedicate my time and effort for the student body. For the first time, my school days began to span over nine hours, with nearly half being dedicated to the council. With my drive and passion to continue, along with gaining experience and familiarity of the council, I decided to run for an elected position in the following year. After an interview, creating an election view, and a week-long of an interactive campaigning period, I became the senior representative for the following year by a landslide. In Grade 11, I fully grasped my role in leading the junior council and successfully went on to organize events for the school. Since our council was in charge of social and charitable events, we organized numerous spirit weeks and stand-alone events. Most notably, our focus relied on the semi-formal dinner and dance, followed by the Charity Week and Carnival. During the semi-formal, I formed a committee and took charge in the decoration aspect of the event. Corresponding with the theme, my committee and I brainstormed feasible ideas that would attract the attention of the guests while being practical and affordable. Over weeks of hard work and preparation, followed by hours of execution on the day of, the semi-formal was enlightened by streamers, center pieces, murals and more. Additionally, I was included in the advertisement and public relations for the event, taking initiative for/over others and using my skills and experience to market effectively. I often edited announcements and brought up the idea to play music along with the announcement as it captured the student's attention.

For the carnival, I was assigned to co-lead a team of individuals focusing on the entertainment aspect of the entire event. My duties laid contacting and communicating with companies about inflatables, which is the main attraction of the carnival. Also, I created several homemade carnival games that were stationed throughout the event. Additionally, I was responsible for assigning roles to volunteers and teaching them how to operate their stations.

More so,I was involved in marketing the event. I contacted local newspaper agencies, participated in word-of-mouth advertising through my friends and classes, and created event pages to market through social media. Most importantly, my team and I focused on displaying our advertisements in feeder school and local community hot spots. Our collective efforts raised over $15,000 for Canadian Feed the Children. In comparison to the previous year, I transformed from an avid participant to a strong and anchored leader.

My valuable business experience gained from organizing and planning these events along with my excellent abilities as a leader produces an ideal candidate for the HBA program at Ivey. The skills I learnt through teamwork, commitment and success have outlined my candidacy to be enrolled in the HBA program at Ivey. (I am aware of the repeat, hoping to find a way I can combined these two statements to avoid just that.)

Mahnoor, before we can accurately edit and revise the essay, we first need to know what the prompt requirement for your activity essay is. The direction of the discussion, the theme, and the relevant activities will be based upon the instructions and requirements of Ivey for the essay. Right now, we can only review the content of the essay for you due to a lack of assessment criteria stemming from the missing prompt requirements. Please upload those instructions as soon as you can for a more complete assessment of your written work. For now, I have a feeling that the essay is offering too much information in terms of your leadership discussion. Based upon the prompt requirements, I will be able to tell you which leadership activity to keep and further develop. At the moment, the essay lacks a specific focus in terms of developing your leadership story. In order to highlight your leadership skills and development, we will need to pick the best story among those you have presented here and then make sure that it is accurately supported in the overall essay. I'll wait for the prompt before I decide on which story might best fill that role for you.

Consider all the extracurricular activities (community involvement, paid and/or volunteer work experience, entrepreneurial ventures) that you have been involved in during the past four years. Select three activities that you feel demonstrate your leadership abilities best. Focus your description on elements that demonstrate: teamwork, initiative, achievement, commitment and breadth. Each description should focus on one activity only.

Sorry, here is the question that is being asked! My first activity is being the senior representative in my student activity council.

Mahnoor, in the second paragraph, you need to separate the paragraphs so that you can clearly show that you as speaking of two different leadership abilities. Separate the Grade 10 activity from the Grade 11 activity because I see two different leadership characteristics presented. Make sure to use the keywords, the words written in bold in the prompt somewhere in each paragraph as you describe your leadership ability. That way you are sure that the reviewer will be conscious of the leadership talent or ability that you are displaying. Don't leave anything to chance. When you don't use the keywords, it will seem like you are just discussing one leadership highlight in your personality. Remove your final paragraph for now. It doesn't fit in with the prompt requirements. Give me some time to help you develop a more relevant conclusion. I want to get a feel of how you will revise the essay first.

I rewrote and took a different approach to the essay, going into detail about the specific tasks at the events:

The student activity council is responsible for organizing the social and charitable events at my school. One of the largest events hosted by the council is the semi-formal dinner and dance. During the planning of the event, I formed a committee and took lead in the decoration aspect of the event. Firstly, I formulated an effective floor plan correlating with the theme and brainstormed feasible ideas to be implanted throughout the venue. With my team, I delved into research online and began to bring the visual components to life. We contacted local party stores to obtain the best price for our needs and brought together an inexpensive yet aesthetically pleasing setup. Throughout the planning, we faced numerous obstacles, like financial constraint and availability of products, that had halted the process. I urged my team to look for suitable substitutes and continue forward. I spent countless after school meeting designing headers on banners, creating centrepieces and piecing together the small aspects of the decor together. Throughout the final setup process, I guided volunteers to bring our ideas to life and found solutions to rising problems quickly. Additionally, I was responsible for the main advertisement of the event. I wrote and implemented the idea of playing music of all announcements for the event, which increased the engagement of the student body and comparatively, increased the sales of tickets.

In the following months after the semi-formal, our attention deviated towards planning our largest annual event, the charity week and carnival. In this, I took the lead in the main aspect of the event, the entertainment. My team and I contacted companies that offered the best deal for inflatables and food machines to plan out the main attractions for the event. As well, I took the initiative to add a new component to the carnival. I designed homemade original carnival games, like ring toss and bottle knock over, from recycled materials. This cheap and effective attraction raked in unforeseeable revenue and made a valuable contribution to the fundraiser. Additionally, my expertise in marketing allowed me to co-lead the advertisement of the carnival. I focused on announcements as per usual, but branched out to contact local newspaper organizations. As well, I ran the event page for the carnival through Facebook, along with tweeting regular updates on Twitter. To reach out to our target market of children, my team and I created letters and posters to be distributed to feeder schools and community centers. Our tireless commitment and efforts granted us the largest turnout for the festival since its start, with a grand total of over $15,000 raised for Canadian Feed the Children.

I don't have a solid intro or conclusion, I was wondering if its better to cut this paragraph down and combine it with the previous draft.

Combining the paragraphs just might work. Your current paragraphs have more definitive presentations of the skills as required in the prompt. However, I am not sure about how you plan to combine them. I have something in mind but I don't want to influence your idea as to how you plan to mix and match the content of your essay. I would like you to merge your past and present essay in the manner that you feel best represents your idea for your response. After you do that and I review your work, I will be able to present you with a more accurate instruction regarding finalizing your content. Overall though, these new paragraphs are great. Make sure to replace the old description with these new ones in the essay. Totally remove the original references you made. I think your essay will become more prompt adherent once you complete that process.

Hi Holt, I appreciate all your help. I got these essays edited and reviewed by others, and have gotten mixed responses. You suggest my second draft is better and I should combine it with my first, but should I focus solely on one event? And should I expand beyond to discuss its impact and what it meant for me? I'm conflicted as to what Ivey would expect from me.

Actually, you should only present one activity that clearly represent the 3 character traits indicated in the prompt. Being the student council president, and owing to the various activities that you have presented here, I feel that you should concentrate the focus of the essay on the semi-formal dance because that is the biggest event that you led which requires you to display all 3 character traits in the performance of your duties. Portray the method by which you were able to influence the team to deliver a memorable dance based upon the way that you used the character traits of teamwork, initiative, achievement, commitment and breadth to deliver the expectations of the school faculty and the students. How do you accomplish this?

For the teamwork aspect, discuss how you developed the committees in charge of the dance activities and how you influence the members to work together during times of misunderstanding or different desires. For initiative, show how you led by example during this period. Perhaps there was a time when the members of the dance committee felt lazy or did not want to do their jobs and you took over from them. That shows initiative. Commitment and breadth would be how you pursued the plans for the dance even when it seemed like there were so many obstacles before you. Achievement would be the result of all your efforts on the night of the dance.

Try to review your previous versions of the essay. Find the situations that I indicated in my second paragraph. If you have them, then merge them into a smooth discussion for the revised essay. If you don't, then develop the discussion for inclusion in the new version of your response.