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.
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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,
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Index
What's New at Accepted.com
Essay Tip of the Month
Resume Tip of the Month
MBA Admission News You Can Use
Law Admission News You Can Use
Medical Admission News You Can Use
College Admission News You Can Use
Our Services
Accepted.com Chats
Accepted.com series of online admissions chats continues. Last month we hosted chats with representatives from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Michigan, and Tuck along with a general law school admissions chat with Accepted.com's own Catherine Cook. This month we have additional MBA and pre-law chats scheduled.
Time Marches On
In fact, it seems to march at double time. It's hard to focus on essays and keep all the personal, professional, and educational balls in the air. Those application deadlines somehow manage to creep up mysteriously out of nowhere.
We want to help you, but please give us enough time to do so. We are extremely busy. Don't wait to sign up for Accepted.com services or to contact your editor until you only have a week left in which to write and submit your applications.
School Visits
Accepted.com president, Linda Abraham, took a quick trip to the East Coast and met with admissions personnel at the Tuck School of Business, Harvard Business School, and MIT Sloan.
Acceptances!
A few lucky medical school applicants and early decision applicants have already received their acceptances. 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 were admitted, how we helped you, AND how we can do better. E-mail acceptances@accepted.com or visit our share-your-success page at http://www.accepted.com/services/shareyoursuccess.aspx .
A Good Failure
"Good failure." Oxymoron? No. It's a disconcerting necessity if your school asks you to discuss a time when you failed.
First of all, don't be afraid to discuss a time when you really blew it. I'm always happy to see a client hesitate and squirm when we start discussing this essay, because then the chances are I'm about to hear of a "good failure." It's not that I'm sadistic. I realize that schools ask about failures because they want to admit people who have the self-awareness to analyze their own actions critically, and the confidence to take calculated risks. If you've never failed, you've also never experimented, initiated, or innovated.
So what makes a "good failure"? Let's discuss a few attributes:
- An incident when you took initiative, attempted to lead, and failed to achieve your goals.
- Analysis showing that you grew and changed as a result of this fiasco.
- An experience that isn't too recent. A little distance in time allows you to demonstrate that you used your "lessons learned" to succeed in a later, similar situation.
- Use of this essay to highlight an activity, interest, or side of you not discussed elsewhere in the application.
Your failure doesn't have to have all these qualities, but the more it meets the above criteria, the more likely it is that your failure essay will strengthen your application and turn a negative into a positive. Success with this essay increases the likelihood the memory that causes to you to squirm could cause you to jump for joy when the fat envelope arrives.
Resume Tip
Just as there are right and wrong ways to handle "failure" in your essays, so in your resume as well, a career setback can be handled intelligently and honestly, as John J. Marcus explains in his classic The Resume Doctor. For example, suppose your current job represents a clear step down from your previous position. A traditional chronological resume will advertise this fact for all to see. A better approach is to use a resume that groups your accomplishments across all your positions by functional area, without dates. Is this deceptive? Not really, because this type of resume ends with a brief Employment History section that presents your positions in the traditional chronological order. You are providing the same information, but reorganizing it so it advertises your skills rather than your career timeline.
What if an employment history of rising managerial responsibility is marred by the two years you spent as a hotel doorman to recharge your batteries? Here again, the functional approach highlights your functional skills and banishes the chronology, without job titles, to a small section at the end. By listing "Ritz-Carlton, 1994-96" but omitting "doorman," you focus the reader on what matters: your relevant skills.
Of course, unemployment, though nothing to be ashamed of, presents the greatest challenge. When you're unemployed, the traditional chronological resume announces the fact loud and clear. Once again, the functional format saves you: divide your resume into skill areas illustrated by bulleted achievements and relegate the dates to the end. By the time the employer has realized you're between jobs, he or she may be so impressed by your accomplishments that you get the interview anyway.
By Paul Bodine, member of Professional Association of Resume Writers and Career Coaches
Rankings, Rankings, and More Rankings
October must have amounted to the sweepstakes for MBA rankings. Businessweek published its much-followed biannual rankings. The Economist published its own ranking, along with a poll of polls that combines the rankings of US News, Businessweek, The Economist, The WSJ, and the Financial Times into a "super ranking."
You can find the rankings at businessweek.com and economist.com:
In addition to listing the top ten MBA programs according to each of these publications, The Economist article provides an analysis of what each ranking measures and emphasizes. To use the rankings effectively, you must understand the methodology behind them.
Finally, it is useless to look at any one ranking as an absolute measure of the quality of that program or education. Look at the rankings as indications of relative strengths and weaknesses among the schools.
Transcripts Online
This past month, we hosted great chats with adcom directors, students, and other representatives from CMU, Michigan, and Tuck.
For transcripts of all prior chats, please visit http://www.accepted.com/chat/transcripts/.
Full Line-up of Chats in November
Nov. 4: Don Martin, the University of Chicago's Associate Dean for Enrollment Management, three students, and Go Yoshida, a member of the Chicago adcom, will be available to answer your questions about the University of Chicago.
Nov. 11: Natalie Grinblatt, Director of Admissions and Financial Aid at the Johnson Graduate School of Management; Ann Richards, Associate Director of Admissions and Director of Financial Aid; Dick Shafer, Associate Dean for Corporate Relations; Cathy Dove, Associate Dean for the MBA Program; and four second-year students representing a cross-section of the diverse Johnson student body will participate in a chat devoted to Johnson's MBA program and student life, as well as career opportunities for Johnson MBAs.
Nov. 18: Dawna Clarke, Darden's Director of Admissions, and two Darden students will participate in an online admissions chat dedicated to answering your questions about this top general management program.
Nov. 26: Elissa Ellis, Assistant Dean of the McComb's MBA Program; Matt Turner, McCombs' Director of Admissions; and Ludy Cuello, President of the International MBA Student Assoc. and a co-chair of the McCombs Admissions Committee will be available to answer your questions about UT.
Nov. 26: Elissa Ellis, Assistant Dean of the McComb's MBA Program; Matt Turner, McCombs' Director of Admissions; and Ludy Cuello, President of the International MBA Student Assoc. and a co-chair of the McCombs Admissions Committee will be available to answer your questions about UT.
All chats take place at http://www.accepted.com/chat at 6:00 PM Pacific Time/9:00 PM Eastern. If you are in a different time zone, please check with http://www.timeanddate.com to determine the chats' time in your time zone.
GMAT Volume Goes Up. Again
GMAC reports that the volume of GMATs taken this year through September 30 has increased 8% over the same period last year. Most of that increase comes from US test-takers (a 10% increase) as opposed to a smaller increase internationally (3%). The increase in GMAT volume between 2000 and 2001 was 15% worldwide with an 11% increase domestically and a whopping 22% increase outside the U.S.
Significant declines in test taking occurred in Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Korea, and Israel. England, China, India, and Canada experienced marked increases.
View the report at this link.
Pre-law Chats Past
Here is an excerpt from Accepted.com's recent law schools admissions chat:
"Diversity ?: I can understand a school trying to build a 'diverse' group of students. I am a white female, and I feel I am struggling to create myself in a diverse light. Besides URM status, can you provide insight on what Adcoms might consider diverse or different for admission purposes?"
For the answer, please visit http://www.accepted.com/chat/transcripts/2002/law10162002.aspx.
Pre-law Chats Future
Accepted.com welcomes back Loretta DeLoggio of the DeLoggio Achievement Program, who has been helping applicants gain admission to law schools for many, many years. Please join us and ask her your questions on November 14 at 6:00 PM Pacific Time/9:00 PM Eastern Time at http://www.accepted.com/chat.
For additional information, please visit http://www.accepted.com/chat/schedule.aspx#prelaw.
FSU Receives Provisional Accreditation
The Florida State University College of Medicine announced that the Liaison Committee on Medical Education has granted provisional accreditation to FSU. It becomes the first new medical school in the country since 1982 to receive the LCME's initial seal of approval.
FSU currently has 70 students enrolled and hopes to graduate its first class in 2005. The accreditation gives FSU all the rights and privileges that apply to fully accredited medical schools, including eligibility for federal grants, federal student loan programs and armed forces scholarships. Students at FSU are also able to take the USMLE licensing exams and to join the AMA's student organization. Graduates can obtain residencies approved by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.
UCLA Biomed Programs Increases Scrutiny of Foreign Applicants
In response to increased findings of fraud, bribery, and cheating among Chinese applicants, UCLA has decided to verify foreign transcripts accompanying applications to its biomedical and life science programs. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, although all foreign applicants will be affected, the initial effort will focus on Chinese applicants.
Grad Admissions News You Can Use
Who Are Today's Grad Students?
The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study 1999-2000, discussed in a recent NAGAP Perspectives article, reveals some interesting statistics about today's graduate students:
Master's Students:
34% are full-time students and 66% are part-time.
59% are female
51% are over 30 and 22% are over 40 with an average age of 33.
They work an average of 38 hours per week.
37% have dependents.
Doctoral Students:
59% are full-time students and 41% are part-time
50% are female.
57% are over 30 and 25% are over 40 with an average age of 34.
They work an average of 33 hours per week.
32% have dependents.
You may not be as non-traditional as you think.
USC Upgrades
According to the Los Angeles Times, USC has moved to increase its full-time faculty by 25% at the University's College of Letters, Arts & Sciences as it seeks to hire 100 high-profile professors over the next three years. USC's provost, Larry Armstrong, indicated that a successful fund-raising campaign launched in 1993 has raised more than $2.5 billion so that USC already has the funds necessary to finance this initiative.
Other universities are concerned that USC's move could heat up a bidding war for professorial talent at a time when most public universities and many private schools dependent on endowments are hurting and even contemplating hiring freezes or layoffs.
Tuition Soars at Public Colleges
The College Board reports that public four-year colleges and universities have raised tuition by an average of almost 10%, the steepest increase in a decade. Private four-year institutions also jacked up tuition and fees, but by a relatively modest 5.8%. The tuition increases were accompanied by increases in room-and-board costs of approximately 6% at public four-year institutions and 4.6% at private ones.
The colleges are responding to tougher economic conditions: shrinking endowments, stingy government budgets, reduced alumni giving. But all the news is not grim. The College Board also reported that financial aid increased by 11.5%
Book Recommendation
Jacques Steinberg's The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College is a must read if you want to have some insight into admissions decisions at elite colleges. Steinberg reports on the admissions process through the experience of Ralph Figueroa, an admissions staff member at Wesleyan and a few of the students who applied to Wesleyan. With a fine journalist's eye for relevant detail and skill in telling a good story, Steinberg also reveals the sheer subjectivity of admissions as well as the hard work and dedication of those involved in it. "Each applicant to Wesleyan was considered by at least three admissions officers, if not the full committee, and all the materials that Wesleyan requested - grades, essays, teacher recommendations - would be read. That much was assured. But there were few other certainties about how the process would play out. Admissions was messy work, done by humans, not machines."
You can purchase this excellent book at amazon.com
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