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Accepted.com Odds 'N Ends
In This Issue:
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What's New at Accepted.com |
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What's New at Accepted
Enhancements to MBA Interview Feedback Database
An MBA applicant suggested that we enhance the MBA Interview Feedback Database by allowing interviewees to indicate if they are applying for full-time, part-time, EMBA, or Sloan programs. We listened. After you interview you can now indicate the program type, and applicants reviewing responses will be able to tell whether the response was for a full-time, part-time, EMBA, or Sloan program.
Robbie Walker, Michelle Stockman Join Accepted
Accepted welcomes two new editors to our staff.
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Michelle Stockman joins Accepted after serving as an application reader for Columbia Business School. She will also bring extensive writing and training experience to her work with you.
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Robbie Walker, who has an MBA from the University of Chicago, has worked as a writing teacher, edited application essays, and is a published author online and off.
Admissions Mini-Courses
Accepted has launched several mini-courses over the last few weeks. Each course consists of succinct tips emailed directly to you daily for 5-7 days. Oh yes, did I mention that they are free?
You can sign up by clicking on these links:
Featured Ebook:
Don't Let Writing the College Application Essays Drive You Crazy
Experienced Accepted.com editor, master teacher, and award-winning author Sheila Bender shows you how to engage your parents constructively while applying, remain in control of the writing process, and produce great essays for your college applications in
Don't Let Writing The College Application Essay Drive You And Your Family Crazy. It's 20% off during the month of August.
Price Increase Coming September 1.
Upcoming Events
August is the calm before the season - the application season, that is. So we have no events planned this month, but Accepted is planning a full schedule of admissions chats for the fall, starting in September.
To receive reminders of all admissions events for your specialty, please visit our
announcement subscription page.
Accepted Buzz
07.24.2007 MBA Podcaster
Linda Abraham, Accepted's founder and president, is a featured guest on the MBA Podcaster segment
"Answering Your MBA Related Questions: You Asked The Questions, We Have The
Answers" Linda responds to a question about how to use extra-curricular activities to distinguish your candidacy.
07.27.2007 BusinessWeek Online
In "Applying Oneself
Creatively" BusinessWeek Online seeks Linda Abraham's input on responding to creative questions. Accepted's founder and president gives some great tips for answering those unexpected queries.
Blog Posts of Interest
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Essay Tip |
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How to Choose Where to Apply
What is the one common thread in all graduate school application questions, be they for law, medicine, business, or academia? Goals. The reason(s) for choosing a particular profession, program, or school.
I am frequently surprised by the percentage of applicants to grad school who have NO idea what they want to do with the degree, which makes it much harder to decide on an appropriate program, not to mention justify in an essay or interview your choice of a particular school.
You will have to determine your professional goals, but I can provide guidelines for helping you choose schools. You do not have to address this topic in all grad school essays, but it is extremely important in many of them.
Grad school is not a place to find yourself or define your goals. You need to identify them before you apply. Business schools in particular insist their students have clearly defined goals. Law and medical schools want applicants to have concrete, but more general goals. These institutions acknowledge that law and medical students will refine and narrow their aspirations as they go through their respective programs. Academic programs require a statement of purpose, obviously because they want their applicants to know the purpose of their studies.
Once you know what you want to do after you complete your graduate program, you need to match your goals with school strengths. Too many students look exclusively at overall rankings or school reputations and don't do the necessary research to learn about schools' specific attributes. A school may rank below the Top 50 overall, but earn #1 in a particular field. Look at Babson in Entrepreneurship.
When you match school strengths to your goals you have part of the equation for choosing the schools to which you will apply. What's the missing variable? Your qualifications. It makes no sense, unless you want to throw away time and money, to apply only to programs to which you have virtually no chance of gaining admission. Don't sell yourself short, and of course, give one or two dream schools a shot even if your stats are below their averages, but be realistic. Must you go to Harvard to achieve your goals? Do you have a prayer of gaining acceptance to Harvard? Would a Top Twenty (or Fifty) school in your particular field take you where you want to go? Would a top regional school do the job - and provide financial aid?
Obviously, you will have other variables to consider, too: finances and scholarship opportunities, significant others, and personal preferences for climate, geography, and urban vs. rural locations. But unless these other issues are set in concrete, first match school strengths and your goals, school requirements and your qualifications.
This article is one of the great tips contained in
Submit a Stellar Application: 42 Terrific Tips to Help You Get Accepted.
You can get the other 41 by purchasing this informative ebook.
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Resume Tip |
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Job Resume -> B-School Resume
Pull out your current job-hunt resume. If you're like most people, you first wrote it years ago. You've been gradually changing or adding material-a new address, another technical skill-as your career advanced. But the core of the thing has remained the same. As a result, it probably gives too much emphasis to the early part of your career and not enough to your current position. Are there any references to high school jobs, education, or activities? If so, you should probably delete them (unless they are truly unusual and outstanding). Does your resume list every internship and part-time job since high school? Unless the school you're applying asks for this level of detail, weed out these sections. They take valuable space away from more recent full-time work. Does the section on your resume for your first entry-level job after college have as many bullets as the section for your most recent job? No matter how emotionally attached you may be to these long-gone achievements, delete as many as you can, retaining only the ones that still seem (a) exceptional and (b) relevant to your goals. Once you've eliminated all the fossilized material from your resume's first incarnation you'll have opened up precious new space for the recent accomplishments the business schools are most interested in.
By Paul Bodine, Senior Editor at Accepted and author of
Great Application Essays for Business School and
Great Personal Statements for Law School McGraw-Hill 2005)
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Our Services
Writing a personal statement is a tough challenge. A former
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