We’re
off to a great start for the 2005-2006
admissions season. Several of our admissions
consultants are already at full capacity, and
others are approaching that point. Our
consultants’ work load is limited by our
commitment to providing clients with a maximum
72-hour turnaround time. That means that even
our full-time consultants work with a relatively
small number of applicants. We stick to this
policy to ensure that all our clients receive
the prompt, customized attention they need to
maximize their admissions chances.
One reason we have our 72-hour policy is that
timing is a crucial factor in admissions. In
fact, if you read all the way through our
newsletter this month, you’ll see a recurring
theme: application deadlines. Medical school
application deadlines start falling in
mid-October. College early admission deadlines
and business school Round 1 deadlines come up in
about 8 weeks. Law school deadlines for
2005-2006 are about half a year away, but these
schools will start taking applications next
month, and the sooner applicants get their
applications in, the better.
Of course, it’s vital that you meet the final
deadline for any program you hope to enter. But
another theme you’ll see throughout this month’s
newsletter is that application timing is about
more than meeting a deadline. There is often
some advantage to submitting an application
early in a decision cycle. That doesn’t mean,
however, that it pays to send in your
application before you’re ready to. You’re
better off submitting a strong application a
week before the deadline than you are submitting
a weak application early on.
So how do you know when your application is
ready to be submitted? We can help you figure
that out. We provide advice throughout the year,
on our
website and in Insider
Edge, on how college, university, and
professional school admissions work, and on how
to increase your chances of success in the
admissions process. In addition, our consultants
provide focused and personalized guidance to
their clients on every aspect of the admissions
process, from selecting schools and programs,
through preparing essays and personal
statements, to preparing for interviews.
Look through this month’s
Insider Edge
and see what information is of interest to you.
If you don’t find what you’re looking for, by
all means
contact us. We’ll be happy
to try to help you – after all, our favorite
activity is helping applicants gain admission to
the schools and programs of their choice.
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Round 1 Deadlines
Harvard’s Round 1 deadline for 2006 applications
is October 11. Wharton’s is October 13,
Stanford’s is October 19, and Kellogg’s is
October 21. Does that give you enough time to
prepare an application for Round 1 submissions?
It does, if you’re already focused on the task
and willing to work hard. That means already
having chosen your schools, taken the GMAT,
selected and sketched out your essay topics, and
contacted your recommenders. Even with all that
groundwork done, you should still count on
putting in a lot of hours to make sure your
application is complete, accurate, and polished,
and to draft and polish (and proofread) your
essays. Only you can decide if it’s worth the
payoff. It’s true that there’s some advantage to
applying in Round 1 – but only if you present
yourself as a strong candidate. If you’re not
sure you can do that, you’re better off taking
the time to put more work into your application
package and waiting to submit it for Round 2.
Make Sure Your Applications Fly 'Green Flags'
MBA admissions consultant Nicole Witt urges her
clients to make sure that their applications fly
‘green flags’ rather than red ones. The green
flags she’s talking about include “focused and
school-specific personal statements and essays
that highlight significant personal and
professional experience.” Evidence of sound
judgment in choosing recommenders is another
important green flag. “There are three types of
recommenders - academic, professional and
personal,” warns Witt, a Cornell MBA who also
worked on the Johnson admissions committee.
“Professional recommendations are the most
helpful and personal recommendations are
generally the least helpful.”
Red flags include poor reasons for why an MBA or
why XYZ business school, in addition to spelling
and grammatical errors. “There is only so much
you can do about a low GMAT score or lack of
quick job promotions, but it is inexcusable to
have poorly-constructed answers to these basic
MBA application questions,” advises Witt. “Make
sure your application is free of red flags like
these, and full of green flags like the ones
mentioned above. It’s the green flags that will
get you to ‘go’ – to your school of choice.”
Schools Want Essays to Be Your Essays
Almost all of the country’s top b-schools have
now released their essay questions for the
2005-2006 applications. In comparing this year’s
application forms to last year’s, we noticed
that several schools – notably, Stanford and
Sloan – have added language to their essay
instructions stressing the importance of
applicants submitting their own, original work.
We’ll take this as an opportunity to repeat our
often-stated point that the purpose of an essay
is to present you to the selection committee as
a unique human being they should want as a
student. Only you can convey what makes you
especially well suited for their program. Using
someone else’s essay – or even just a
commonly-used essay outline, template, or set of
arguments – undermines that purpose from the
start and will put you at a severe competitive
disadvantage.
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College Admission News
Early Admission Deadlines Are Coming Up
Summer will be over sooner than most of us like
to think – and early admissions deadlines
(November 1 for many top colleges and
universities) will come not long after that. If
you have your heart set on going to a
highly-selective institution, you should give
serious thought to applying through its early
admission program. There is a significant
statistical advantage to applying in the early
admission round. In recent years,
Ivy League
schools have given 40% or more of their freshman
seats to these early applicants. If you’re sure
that you want to go to a particular school and
confident that you can prepare a strong
application by the early deadline, by all means
do so. On the other hand, if you have any
doubts, you’re better off holding back. You
definitely don’t want to apply to a school under
a binding early decision policy if you’re at all
uncertain about wanting to go there. And you’re
better off submitting a strong, polished
application by the regular deadline than you are
submitting a hastily assembled one by November
1. For more information on this topic, see our
Web page on
Early Action and Early Decision Admissions.
'Gap Year'
a Good Idea – For
Some
People (Maybe Not You)
We would like to draw your attention to a slew
of recent news stories on students taking a ‘gap
year’ between high school and college.
Proponents say it’s a good way for less
competitive students to position themselves for
college admissions. It is true that some
students benefit by taking a year after high
school to take courses, travel, and gain
volunteer and work experience that will make
them more attractive candidates than they would
be on the basis of their high school records
alone.
However, while a gap year is a sound strategy
for some students, it has to be thought about
carefully. When you do fill out your college (or
job) applications, you’ll want to be sure you
can explain that year as a choice, and not as an
accident. It’s one thing to show that you chose
to travel overseas or to work for a year before
returning to the US for college, or that you
made a responsible change of plans in the face
of an unexpected situation. It’s another thing
to imply that you’re just drifting from one
thing to another – or that you took a gap year
just because you heard other people were doing
it. As with every other aspect of college
selection and planning, you want to make sure
that you’re making the choices that are right
for you, and that you’re making those choices
for your own, unique reasons.
College Planning can Help Manage College Stress
All this college planning you’re supposed to
doing might seem like a hassle – but in fact it
can help you manage your stress over your
future, advises Sara Hernández, a college
admissions consultant and former Assistant
Director of Admissions at
Cornell
University.
She appreciates that the college admissions
process is an exciting yet stressful experience
for many students. It’s not uncommon to start
feeling swept along by a flood of tests to take,
essays to write, and forms to fill out. Students
can regain some sense of control over their
situation by staying focused, keeping informed,
and being prepared for what lies ahead. These
actions will help students manage their time as
well as their stress, and help keep what should
be an exciting adventure from turning into an
overwhelming challenge. The most important
thing, Hernández says, is that students never
allow any part of the admissions process to
cause them to lose sight of what’s really
important – which is “finding the colleges that
best fit their overall academic and personal
needs, so that they may realize their tremendous
potential for success!"
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Law School Admission News
2005-2006 Application Season Opens
Top law schools will start accepting
applications for the 2005-2006 admissions season
in September and continue accepting them until
early next year (February 1 is the final
deadline at many schools). Heike Spahn, a law
school admission consultant and former Assistant
Dean at the
University of Chicago Law School,
always encourages aspiring J.D.s to send in
their applications as soon as they feel
confident they are ready. She strongly believes
that applying early increases an applicant's
chance for success. Later applicants, even if
they beat the final deadline, may find that, for
all practical purposes, the class is already
filled. "I've seen almost perfect applications
denied because they applied too late in the
process," Spahn says. This is especially
important advice for anyone applying to schools
that make decisions on a rolling basis.
Dayton Introduces 2-Year J.D. Program
The third year of law school is well known as a
time for students to kick back a little. A
recent survey of 11 law schools showed that
third-year students put in half as many study
hours on average as first-year students did.
While many law students relish their final year
in school as a chance to relax before formally
entering the workforce, others are questioning
whether the expense of the third year is
justified by what they get out of it. In
response to this trend, the University of Dayton
is introducing a program this fall that will
allow students to earn a J.D. in two years
instead of three. Students will complete the
normal J.D. requirements in less time by
following an intensive class program and working
through the summers. Dayton hopes that the
program will make law school more appealing to
students who hesitate at taking on the debt
necessary to finance a traditional three-year
program. Other schools may follow suit if
Dayton’s experiment proves successful.
The Rankings Game – Revealed
If someone asked you to name the factors that
make one law school come out above another in
the US News
& World Report rankings, you'd say it
was things like faculty-student ratio, student
LSAT scores, bar passage rates - right? But
would it ever occur to you to say plumbing,
garbage removal, or property taxes?
According to the July 31
New York Times,
some law schools already include expenditures
like those in the per-student spending they
report to
USN&WR. Others schools are thinking
about doing so. Silly as it might sound, this
manipulation can raise a school's numerical
score enough to move it up in the rankings. This
revelation gives us one more reason to encourage
aspiring law students to take what the numbers
say with a grain of salt. You should focus on
picking the law school that's right for you –
regardless of where it comes in on yards of
plumbing per student.
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Medical School Admission News
2006 Application Deadlines Approaching
Columbia,
Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and
Yale are just some of the medical schools with
an October 15 deadline for 2006 applications.
However, notes medical school admissions
consultant Dr. Ramin Rafie, it’s not a good idea
to wait until the deadline to submit your
application. “It's definitely to applicants'
advantage to submit their primary and secondary
medical school applications as soon as
possible,” he says, even if the applicant hasn’t
yet seen his or her August MCAT test scores. The
reason for this is that “many medical school
admissions committees time stamp the
applications they receive, and admit students on
a rolling basis, until their class is full."
Waiting to see your MCAT score could mean
submitting your applications after a class is
already filled. Dr. Rafie has worked on the
admissions committee for the College of Medicine
at University of California, Irvine.
A comprehensive list of medical school
application deadlines is available on the AMCAS
Web site (www.aamc.org/students/amcas/deadlines.htm).
MCAT Going to Computer-Based Format
The MCAT will be computer-based by 2007,
according to a recent press release from the
American Association of Medical Colleges. AAMC
has signed a contract with Thompson Prometric to
develop and administer the computer-based MCAT
at its test centers. The change will give test
takers more options in test locations and dates,
and provide both a shorter test day and faster
score reporting. The computer based test will
also have significantly fewer questions than the
paper one does. If all goes according to plan,
the first all-computer MCAT administration will
be held in August 2006, and the paper MCAT will
be phased out entirely by the end of that year.
We’ll keep you updated on this changeover as
developments take place.
Medical Schools Encouraged to Accept More
Students
US medical schools are being asked to increase
their class sizes to help fend off a looming
shortage of trained physicians, according to an
August 12 report in the
Philadelphia
Inquirer. This marks a drastic
turn-around from the conventional wisdom of
fifteen years ago, when it was widely assumed
that managed health care would lead to a surplus
of doctors by 2000. Instead, several trends,
including the medical needs of aging baby
boomers and a trend toward doctors working fewer
hours, have led to expectations of a shortfall
in trained doctors by 2020. The American Medical
Association has asked medical schools to
increase their class sizes by 10 to 15 per cent
over the next ten years. As an example of this
trend, the
Inquirer cites Jefferson Medical
College, a private medical school in
Philadelphia, which has increased its intake
from 228 to 255 students each year. Increased
class size does not seem likely to reduce
admissions competition, however. A Jefferson
official is quoted as saying that the school
receives about 8,000 applications annually.
Are you unsure of how to proceed from here? We
can help.
Call us at 703.242.5885,
email us, or
visit our website to find out more about our
services. An initial one-hour consultation with
one of our consultants will help you understand
your situation and lay out a plan that will
maximize your admissions chances!
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AdmissionsConsultants
is a full-service admissions consultancy that
maximizes the admissions chances of its clients.
Our consultants have admissions committee
experience,
meaning they have made accept/reject/waitlist
decisions and, therefore, truly have expert
knowledge of the application process. It is this
admissions committee experience that enables us
to know exactly what differentiates successful
from unsuccessful applicants including:
strategies, essays/personal statements, letters
of reference, resumes/cvs/activity statements,
applications, and admissions interviews. We
understand that admissions committees care about
more than just typo-free essays and that is why
we offer comprehensive services.
We recently assisted a former undergraduate
admissions officer with some graduate school
applications. She chose us because she
recognized she would benefit from the expert
advice of someone with the appropriate
admissions committee experience. We offer this
same expert level of service to you.
If you would like more information about our
services, you can call us at 703.242.5885,
email us, or
visit our website. We will be glad to advise
you through the application process and ensure
that you maximize your admissions chances!
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For
Immediate Release: 