MBA Admissions Essay Event: Friday June 26 2015

I will be co-hosting an MBA admissions event with my colleague Eiki Satori at Affinity on Friday, June 26, 2015 in Tokyo, Japan. The event is free and you can register here. Please consider it should you have the time and inclination.

The topic will be the Columbia MBA essay set for the 2015-16 admissions season. It's a good one, as applicants need to choose carefully what to write about and (importantly) demonstrate a strong fit with the program. It also features 4 essays, including the optional one, and so is a good essay set for discussing overall balance. You can find the Columbia essays here.

John Couke
john.couke@gmail.com

John Couke or ジョン カウク

My family name is difficult to pronounce.  The English spelling - as if often the case - causes a lot of misdirection, and leads people to say things like "coke" or "kook".  The correct pronunciation is something more like a combination of the word "cow" and the "k" sound that comes at the end of "book".

Thankfully, in Japan the katakana character system is phonetic, and so once people here learn how to write my name using katakana characters, they pronounce it well.  In katakana my family name is written using these three characters: カウク.

So where does this name come from?  Apparently, the family name Couke goes back 8 generations in Canada, and 4 more generations before that in what is now North America. Prior to that, someone arrived in North America on a boat from somewhere else (probably in Europe). There are two ideas as to what happened next:

1) They used the opportunity of moving to a new country to change their name from whatever it actually was to Couke.
2) Off the boat, they were asked for their name, and while they said something like Louk or Locke or Louche or Couche, it was taken down incorrectly as Couke (it seems a lot of things were done by ear then).

Whatever the case, a new family name was born.

John Couke
(ジョン　カウク)
john.couke@gmail.com