Accepted.com Odds 'N Ends

We have decided to publish this newsletter as a service to our clients and others who register for it on our Web site. Accepted.com's Odds 'N Ends will bring you our tip of the month, admissions information for grad, law, MBA, and medical school applicants, and news about Accepted.com.

We also welcome contributions from readers. If you have comments, questions, or perhaps an article idea, please e-mail our editor. We cannot publish everything we receive, but we will try to respond to everyone. And as always, we appreciate feedback.

Index

What's New at Accepted.com
Essay Tip of the Month
Resume Tip of the Month
Grad Admission News You Can Use
Law Admission News You Can Use
MBA Admission News You Can Use
Medical Admission News You Can Use
College Admission News You Can Use
Our Services

What's New at Accepted.com

Acceptances!!!!

Those acceptances are rolling in! Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg, Penn, Yale, Columbia, Duke, Tuck, UCLA, Chicago, Cornell. If Accepted.com played any role in your application process, whether as an informative Web site or advisor and editor, please let us know where you are admitted, how we helped you, AND how we can do better. Visit our acceptance survey or e-mail acceptances@accepted.com. Alternatively, let your editor know how you fared.

Your Opinion Please

We are currently evaluating our site performance. If you have found the Accepted.com site slow, or if you have suggestions for improving its content, please send your comments to feedback@accepted.com. Thanks!

Essay Tip of the Month

Standing Out

You have competitive stats, but you also have a problem: How do you distinguish yourself from your competition?

There are three keys to using your essays to differentiate yourself from the pack of qualified applicants:

1. Distinctive Experiences – Write about what is unusual and distinctive in your background, especially if doing so reveals an obstacle overcome, your motivation for making certain choices in your life, or the way in which you will add diversity to your class. For example, if you grew up in a neighborhood plagued with gangs and drug trafficking, describe the environment, how you avoided that scene, and how your background influenced you.
2. Unique Insights – Whether the subject of your essay is "ordinary" or "extraordinary," your reaction to events and your insight into your own experiences will distinguish your essays as long as you avoid superficial clich�s. For insight to provide value, especially with more common experiences, you need to dig deep within yourself. For instance, if you are applying to med school and volunteered at a free clinic, it is not enough to say that this experience confirmed you want to help people. How did your experience confirm that you want to help people in this way? Furthermore, if you had an unusual internship experience, don't say that it was "challenging and interesting." I could have told you that and I wasn't even there! Tell me something I don't know.
3. Details and specifics – I've said it before and I'll say it again: Details and specifics distinguish you from your competition. Don't write about your volunteer work; write about one child, Cindy, whom you worked with and the influence she had on you. Don't say that a particular project you headed was successful. Briefly reveal the number of people who reported to you, the purpose and goals of the project, and if possible some quantitative measures of your success. Then, without "consultant-speak," $64 words, or platitudes, discuss how this experience influenced you.

Use these keys to unlock the door to your own distinctiveness. Then the adcom will see beyond the jumble of statistics found in other parts of your application and meet you through your essays as a unique human being.

Resume Tip of the Month

Preparing a Medical Curriculum Vitae

Not only is medical school longer than most other forms of education; the medical resume, or curriculum vitae (CV), is longer than other forms of resumes. In fact, the CV contains all the details of just about everything you've done that's related to your medical career. Thus, the CV is both easier and harder to write than a "regular" resume - harder in that it's long and you still have to present your information carefully; easier in that you don't have to make tough decisions about what to include. You include everything.

Here are the items that you should detail in your CV. They are presented in suggested order from beginning to end:

• Education – degrees, schools, theses, city and state
• Medical training (fellowships, residencies, internships)
• Licenses and certifications – include year, state if relevant, and number
• Professional experience
• Publications
• Presentations (at conferences, symposia, etc.)
• Honors and awards
• Professional affiliations – note organization and also specify any special roles or involvement you have had (e.g., Chair, Education Committee)
• Related volunteer and/or community work
• Other relevant information, e.g., languages

Include dates where relevant. "Professional experience" can sometimes encompass a range of work; if you have several different areas of experience you might break this section up into separate sections, e.g., teaching appointments, clinical experience, research. CVs are expected to be long, so don't feel constrained and try to cram bullet points onto one or two pages; rather, leave space, use a conservative font, and make the layout comfortable to read.

The tone of a CV should be modest, straightforward and dignified, less assertive than a resume. An overt attempt to sell yourself might offend the reader. You can assume that the reader will be digging through the details, so focus on accuracy, thoroughness and clarity.

Once it's done, your CV will only grow, so just remember to add new items as they occur – luckily, you don't have to worry about re-positioning the whole document as your career progresses!

Cindy Tokumitsu
Editor, Accepted.com
Member, Professional Association of Resume Writers

Grad Admission News You Can Use

Harvard Scales Back Teacher Training Program

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Harvard's Graduate School of Education has temporarily reduced enrollment in its teacher-training program by 50%, from 80 to 40. The cutback follows the school's decision to revamp its teacher-training curriculum and provide more mentoring and additional opportunities for placing students in elementary and secondary schools. As Harvard hires more staff and revamps the program, it plans to increase enrollment again gradually to 75 students.

Law Admissions News You Can Use

Women's Enrollment Expected to Surpass Men's in 2001

According to the ABA, women accounted for 49.4% of the 43,518 students who enrolled last fall in law school. As of March 16, more women, 33884, had applied for admission to law school than men, 33,355. Some schools, such as Yale, Columbia, and NYU, have already crossed the 50% women's enrollment mark. Women's representation in law schools today is in stark contrast to their 4% enrollment in 1960.

MBA Admissions News You Can Use

Wharton and INSEAD Team Up

Wharton and INSEAD have announced the formation of a powerful alliance in global executive education. According to a joint announcement from INSEAD and Wharton, the two schools are responding to ever-increasing demand for superior global education programs among multi-national corporations. The program will take advantage of Wharton's facilities in Philadelphia and San Francisco as well as INSEAD's campuses in Fontainebleau and Singapore. The two schools plan to develop new courses as well as to co-brand certain existing courses.

Students enrolled in both schools' regular MBA programs will be able to take courses at any of the two schools' four campuses. In addition they will be able to participate in elective summer programs at Wharton's San Francisco campus and at INSEAD's Singapore campus. Credits will be linked between the two schools. Most importantly, students from either school can use the other school's career placement services, which will expand tremendously the international employment opportunities at each school.

Latest Dot-Comer Report

ZD Net and the Industry Standard reported last month that dot-commers are recognizing the value of that piece of pigskin with "Master in Business Administration" appearing prominently on it.

This reappraisal of the degree's value following the NASDAQ's dive has increased the number of applications to business school, particularly in the last couple of rounds of this year's application season. More importantly for next year's applicants, the number of people who took the GMAT increased 7% from 2000 for the same period in 2001 and the number enrolled in Kaplan GMAT prep courses increased 20% over last year for the same period, according to the Industry Standard. (The May 1 edition of the WSJ reported that 10% more people signed up for the GMAT during the first four months of 2001 than did so during the same period in 2000.)

Although Boston University School of Management reports a 60% increase in applications over the same time last year according to ZD Net, most schools, such as MIT and Haas, report far more modest overall increases and a surge in application in the later rounds of the admission cycle. Some schools, such as Stanford and UT, are only reporting smaller declines than they saw in previous years - 6% and 10% respectively according to ZD Net.

Bottom line: Look for another extremely competitive application season in 2001-2002, perhaps even more intense than 2000-2001.

For more information, please visit ZDNet and the Industry Standard.

Best School for New Economy

The Industry Standard has examined the curriculum, extra-curricular activities, entrepreneurship programs, and recruiting practices of high-tech companies and attempted to determine which schools "get" the new economy. The top ten in alphabetical order:

1. Anderson (UCLA)
2. Haas (UC Berkeley)
3. Harvard
4. Kellogg (Northwestern)
5. London Business School
6. McCombs (UT - Austin)
7. Owen (Vanderbilt)
8. Sloan (MIT)
9. Stanford
10. Wharton (Penn)

For more information please visit the Industry Standard.

Med Admissions News You Can Use

Bugs Delay AMCAS Web Application

Due to technical problems, the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS) will have ready the web-based application for medical school on May 1, not April 1 as first announced.

The bugs, however, do not need to delay your application or its preparation. You can start work on your application by using the downloadable AMCAS 2002 Application Worksheet at AAMC.org.

Emerging Specialist Shortage

Reports from the Council of Graduate Medical Education Council that appeared in the NAAHP newsletter indicate growing shortages of certain specialties, particularly in suburban areas. The affected specialties include anesthesiology, gerontology, cardiology, pulmonology, urology, oncology, gastroenterology, hematology, and certain intensive care fields.

In years past, clients almost felt compelled to pursue primary care fields because they felt that specialties would not provide them with employment opportunities. This latest report of shortages in certain fields, as well as earlier ones reported in O&E (see our January 2001 issue), indicate that there may be a real need for additional physicians in some specialties. Today you may be able to pursue your interests and fulfill a real societal need. Keep your eyes and ears open for opportunity. O&E certainly will.

Top Primary Care Schools

The April issue of The New Physician, AMSA's monthly magazine, recently published its annual ranking of primary care programs along with profiles of the top programs. AMSA ranks the schools by calculating each school's percentage of graduates entering family practice, internal medicine, pediatrics, or pediatric internal medicine. The top ten schools are:

1. University of Minnesota-Duluth
2. SUNY - Stony Brook
3. Wright State University
4. Univ. of Illinois-Rockford
5. Univ. of Missouri - Columbia
6. East Carolina Univ.
7. East Tennessee State Univ.
8. Oregon Health Sciences Univ.
9. Loma Linda Univ.
10. Univ. of S. Carolina

College Admissions News You Can Use

Dartmouth Joins the Parade

Dartmouth recently announced a major restructuring of its financial aid program, which will take effect immediately for the class of 2005. The program will increase the grants given to Dartmouth students and decrease the work requirement and the loan requirement for Dartmouth students.

For additional information, please visit Dartmouth.edu.

Tell a Friend

Please share this issue with friends and colleagues who share your interest in graduate school admission. Tell a friend or two about Accepted.com's powerful array of online pre-professional resources. They will thank you and so will we!

Our Services

Writing a personal statement is a tough challenge. A former client, an NBC journalist with over twenty years of experience in the field, once said that his personal statement "was the toughest thing I ever had to write." He sought our help. Shouldn't you?

Accepted.com's editors are here to help you write your best essays — eloquent, compelling essays that distinguish you from the competition and transform you from a transcript and test score into a competitive applicant and unique individual.

Check us out. Complete information on our services, including prices, testimonials, and information about our top-notch professional staff, can be found at http://www.accepted.com/help/essay_help.htm. If you have any questions please feel free to contact us at info@accepted.com or Phone.

We look forward to serving you.