John Yates, 33, won a full MBA scholarship valued at that amount to the University of Iowa’s Tippie School of Management.
Yates responded to the university’s call for “best tweet” application — dubbed the #TippieTweet challenge — with a clever, classic-form haiku to answer the prompt, “What makes you an exceptional Tippie Full-Time MBA candidate and future MBA hire?”
The “application tweet” was offered as an alternative to the school’s usual long-form essay question; it tasked candidates to answer the essay question in 140 characters or less, but did not require them to literally tweet their responses.
Yates won over the judges and beat out 57 MBA candidates with the following 68-character poem:
“Globally minded (5)
Innovative and driven (7)
Tippie can sharpen (5)”
“Mr. Yates had the discipline and creativity to submit a tweet by writing a haiku,” the tweet judging committee wrote. “He has taken one of the newest modes of communication in Twitter and one of the oldest forms of poetry in Haiku and combined them into one winning entry.”
The winning “tweet application” would be a monumental social media achievement if not for one little detail — the Twitter-sized essay never made it on Twitter. “He did not tweet this live as that was not something we requested our applicants to do,” Jodi Schafer of the Tippie admissions office says. “I do not believe John has a Twitter account.”
Yates could not be reached for comment.
The financial award package and tweet application contest served as an initial test run for the Tippie School of Management. The school is considering adding a required “application tweet” to its traditional application process.
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