Teacher recommendations are an important part of your college application at many schools, with most requiring one or two letters in support of your application. What these recommendations offer are additional insights into your personality, intellectual curiosity, and potential impact on your college community. These letters of recommendation (LORs) are only one element of your…
Ask Away at Your Admissions Interview!
Have you been invited to interview at the grad school of your choice? Great news! This means the program is seriously interested in you, and you are one important step closer to acceptance. To make the most of this opportunity, though, you need to prepare. Overall, your goal is to demonstrate your enthusiasm for and…
Will Your Target B-School Accept the New GMAT Focus?
Say goodbye to the old GMAT exam! Starting in early November, say hello to the new, slimmed down, and reimagined GMAT Focus. Manish Dharia, director of product marketing at the Graduate Management Admission Council, told Accepted Founder Linda Abraham in a recent podcast that the GMAT Focus reflects current needs and realities for business schools,…
How to Project Professionalism, Positivity, and Confidence in Your Statement of Purpose
What is the right tone to aim for when writing your statement of purpose (SOP) or other application essays? Should you try to sound more mature or intellectual than you actually feel? Or is it better to sound casual and friendly? Will boasting about your achievements hurt you? It can be difficult to pin down…
Get Ready for the New GRE
The GRE has been a staple in graduate school admissions for more than 75 years, but big changes are coming to the test beginning on September 22, 2023. In this post, we’ll cover what you need to know. The new GRE will be considerably streamlined and updated; the four-hour window to complete the exam will…
Optional and Open-Ended Essay Questions: What’s the Best Strategy?
Many business schools use open-ended essay prompts, which are usually variations of “I wish the admissions committee had asked me…” or “What is a question that you wish we had asked?” The most common among these open-ended questions is the optional essay, which offers you free rein to discuss anything you feel is important, something…
Make the Most of Your Common App Activities Summary
The activities you have been involved with during high school are of great interest to the college admissions committees. Whether you played sports, volunteered at an animal shelter, or were part of a church youth group, such involvements help the adcoms understand what matters to you and where you choose to invest your free time….
Three Tips for Parents of Applicants
Today’s parents tend to be much (and sometimes, much, much!) more involved in their children’s lives than parents from past generations, and this involvement often extends to the college – or even grad school – application process. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Parents can provide vital support for their kids during the admissions process…
Four Things to Do over the Summer before Applying to Graduate School
It’s summertime, so you might be enjoying a well-deserved break from school or even a more relaxed work schedule. We hope you’ve got a vacation planned and will be firing up the BBQ with friends on a regular basis. This kind of recreation helps you recharge for the busy months ahead, so enjoy! But if…
How Much Does Your Social Media Presence Factor Into the Application Process?
Grad school admissions officers might well be checking out your social media accounts and forming opinions about you based on your profile and content. Will what they see help you or hurt you? The most recent survey of this growing trend – conducted in 2021 by Kaplan Test Prep – involved admissions officers from 247 top…
Four Tips for Displaying Teamwork in Your Application Essays
Teamwork and its close cousin leadership are highly prized by graduate programs and universities. But if you haven’t worked in teams on any regular basis, don’t worry! You’ve probably got a number of examples of teamwork in your back pocket that you didn’t even realize were there. Consider the following four ideas when you are writing…
Seven Ways to Make the Most of B-School Visits, Fairs, and Receptions
Applying to MBA programs in the fall? If so, then you’re probably planning to meet with MBA admissions committee members at various types of events – school visits, MBA fairs, school receptions, and so one – as part of that process. Adcom members are preparing for you as well. Before they meet with you, they…
Admissions Tip: Be Yourself!
Would you like to know one thing that admissions committee members really want from applicants? Here it is: they wish – really, truly wish – that applicants would not try to write what they imagine the adcom wants to hear but instead just be themselves. Time and time again, admissions committee members tell us they want applicants…
Writing a Lead That Pops
How many times have you sampled the first few lines of a book and decided, “Nah, this isn’t for me.” Whether you picked up the book in a store or library, or tested the free sample on your e-reader, you probably made a pretty speedy decision about whether it would hold your interest. The human…
Proving Character Traits in Your Essays
When you write an application essay or statement of purpose, you’re trying to accomplish two equally vital goals at once. First, you need to prove your worthiness for acceptance at your target school. Second, you need to show the adcom that you have the desirable character traits that their program values. But how do you prove…
Revise and Polish Your Application Essays
Check out all of the blog posts in this series: You’ve completed your first essay draft – this is a great milestone! Now it’s time to revise and edit that draft. Outstanding essays are not sprung into the world on the first try. Here’s how to edit and polish your essay until it shines: 1. Let…
How to Start Your First Draft of an Application Essay
Check out all of the blog posts in this series: Now that you have reflected on the questions that helped you identify and develop your theme, you have a clear sense of what will make your essay effective. Time to start writing! First, make an outline. An outline can be formal, with clearly delineated categories…
Writing Your Career Goals Essay
Check out all of the blog posts in this series: The career goals essay demands a laser-like focus. Unlike personal statements that can cover one’s career goals but also allow for more flexibility in content, the career goals essay has a specific and packed agenda. In fact, a career goals essay prompt could actually involve…
Finding a Theme for Your Statement of Purpose
Check out all of the blog posts in this series: All effective essays have a distinctive theme. Referring back to the essays we examined in the previous post, we might say that was her passion for finding answers to significant public health issues. Our law school applicant’s theme was his yearning for greater intellectual challenges while remaining in the…
Identifying the Ingredients of a Winning Essay
Check out all of the blog posts in this series: As you gear up to write your application essays, you might have looked at sample “winning” essays published in books or on websites, only to ask yourself afterward, “Sure, these are great, but what do these essays have to do with me?” This blog series will…