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• Catherine Cook served on the Duke University Law School Admissions Committee and also has previously worked with Accepted.
• Dr. Katherine Kidd has advised hundreds of students through their undergraduate careers and on to their graduate education in her capacity as professor and director of two undergraduate international studies programs.
• Dr. Rebecca Blustein served in UCLA's Scholarship Resource Center where she helped hundreds of students craft winning applications and personal statements, for everything from small departmental essay prizes to prestigious international awards such as the Fulbright. Visit to see her complete bio.

If you would like to work with any of these three highly qualified professionals, please submit a service request.

Featured Ebook: The Consultant’s Guide to MBA Admission

We have updated one of my favorite ebooks for the 2008-09 application season: “The Consultant’s Guide to MBA Admission.” In this ebook, fictional MBA applicant and management consultant, Scott Murray, applies to several schools including Harvard Business School. The ebook contains both his story and practical tips as well as Scott’s sample HBS essays for this year’s questions.

The 2008 version of the Consultant’s Guide will be available within a couple of weeks. If you order now, you will receive the updated version as soon as it is available. Please enter coupon code CG2009 upon checkout. MBA Mojo Contest

Accepted's MBA Mojo opens the door to a world of opportunity by combining fun and information. Each month through January, Accepted.com will pose five new questions geared towards developing an MBA admissions strategy and identifying key attributes that will make the applicant's essays stand out from the crowd.

Correctly answering all five questions wins the applicant a membership in the 100% Club and an MBA Mojo t-shirt. In addition, every participant will automatically be entered in a drawing and eligible to win a $50 credit on Accepted.com services or a free MBA admissions ebook.

Blog Posts of Interest

• MBA Admissions: Brownie Points for Visits?
• Approaching the Ethics Essay
• US News May Modify Law School Rankings
• L.L.M. News Round-Up
• Advice for Premeds Attending Two-Year Colleges
• Growth in International Grad Applicants Slows
• US News 2009 College Rankings

Connect with Accepted

The MBA chat season is in full swing. Here are the upcoming chats, hosted by Linda Abraham, for the month of September:

  Sept. 11: INSEAD MBA Admissions

  Sept. 15: Wharton MBA Admissions

  Sept. 25: Yale MBA Admissions

  Sept. 29: London Business School Admissions

Visit our chat schedule page for exact times and more information. All chats will take place in the Accepted.com chat room.

And don’t forget to checkout our 2009 Michigan Ross chat transcript. The chat was a big success and is a must-read for all Ross applicants.

Lively Language

"My position as an analyst at Big Firm X offered me the ability to handle many demanding situations."

You can't get much blander than the preceding sentence. No metaphors. No references to the senses. Wordy. Snore.

Despite realizing that your application essays should be interesting and engaging, personal statements are full of gray prose. Use these five tips to add pizzazz to your writing:

1. Use sensory language. Even the references to "color" and "gray" in the previous paragraphs are visual despite referring to concepts, not something with physical presence. Like metaphors, sensory language concretizes abstractions and brings black-and-white text to life. For example, so far in this article my use of "bland" refers to taste. "Exhortations" conjures up memories of an orator or preacher giving fiery speeches pushing you to try harder. These phrases all involve the senses and make writing more vivid.
2.  Incorporate metaphors. They will make your experiences and writing more vibrant.
3.  Choose active, descriptive verbs. You can write, "The kite went up." Or you can write, "The kite soared." The latter evokes the image of a kite climbing gracefully high into the sky. The former could refer to anything … well going up.
4. Avoid stuffy prose using lots of adverbs and adjectives. Does food "have a severely elevated temperature," or is it "too hot to handle," "steaming," or "burning my tongue"?
5. Use specifics and details. I know that I harp on this a lot, but I can't say it often enough. Going back to my opening example of dull writing, what was the "situation"? Why was it demanding? Who was involved? Or was it a technically demanding project? How so? Give me some substance. Give me some details.

These five key tips will help you avoid the bland, dull prose that plagues so many essays. Follow them to ensure that your essays portray your experiences in vivid, life-like color.

Avoiding "Crutch" Words in Your Resume

With the application season now well underway, many of you are revamping and updating your resume as an important step in the application process. Many will succumb to the temptation to use generalities and buzz words as a crutch to make the process go faster and/or to try to sound in sync with the target audience, the adcoms. What is the problem with such words? They don't say anything. They're deceptive. On first glance, they seem clear, but when you really think about what they mean - nothing is there.

Here are some examples of the two types of crutch words and how to avoid them.

Generalities. Leadership, entrepreneurial - those might just be the two most overused generalities currently decorating resumes. "Provided leadership to newly formed pricing team." Sounds okay - at first. What exactly does "provided leadership" mean? It could mean motivating the team to stick to its recommendation in spite of senior management's initial skepticism, getting a cross-functional group to envision a common goal and utilize their diverse skills to meet it, or numerous other interesting and meaningful achievements. Similarly, consider, "Instilled entrepreneurial attitude among administrative staff." "Entrepreneurial attitude" can mean any number of things - seeking and grabbing opportunities, individual accountability and initiative - but the reader would never know if you used the vague phrase.

Buzz words. "Drive," "add value," "change" (alone or following "drive"), "leverage" are just some. "Drove process to create common technology platform across divisions." Impressive, or so it sounds, until you start to wonder just what the writer meant by "drove." Developing the process? Getting resistant users onboard? Leading an implementation team? Any or all of the above? Or consider "add value" - what value, exactly, and how did you add it? "Change management" is tricky, in that it is an accepted phrase in the business community, yet used alone it doesn't say much. If you feel it would be helpful to show familiarity with the concept, use the phrase and then specify, e.g., "Employed change management by doing [specific thing] when/where/how/with or for whom."

Generalities and buzz words are seductive - don't fall for them!

Cindy Tokumitsu
Senior Editor, Accepted.com
Member, Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants