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
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
Our Services

What's New at Accepted.com

MBA Chat — Strategies for Success

MBA wannabe? Do you have questions about applying to business schools? Well, here is your opportunity. Accepted.com has invited Maxx Duffy of Maxx Associates to co-host with Linda Abraham, founder of Accepted.com, a chat entitled "Strategies for Success." The online chat will be held on September 14, 1999 at 6:00 PM PDT (9:00 PM EDT).

This is a great opportunity to get solid answers to your admissions questions. Our most recent secondary essay chat on August 17 earned the following praise from Matt Oster, one of the participants:

"The advice given on Accepted.com's chat was right on target! They do a great job of helping students not only to focus their answers to specifically match the question, but also to highlight certain unique traits of the student to help the student stand out. I'm glad I attended this chat!"

Don’t miss "Strategies for Success"!

For more information, please e-mail mbachat@accepted.com or visit our chat section.

Win a Palm Pilot!

Check out Accepted.com’s expansion plans and tell us what you think about them by completing our survey. And while you’re busy expressing yourself, you will automatically be enrolled in our Top Secret Drawing. The winner will receive a Palm Pilot IIIe� or a $50 gift certificate from Accepted.com or Amazon.com.

Referral Reward Program

Many of you have been kind enough to refer friends and colleagues to Accepted.com. We truly appreciate these referrals, which have contributed so much to Accepted.com’s phenomenal growth. As our way of saying "Thank You!" we are launching a referral reward program.

We will e-mail you a $30 gift certificate if you:

1. Are now using or have used Accepted.com’s services in the past, and
2. Refer new clients who use Accepted.com's services and say you referred them.

You can redeem these gift certificates with Accepted.com for assistance with future essay editing, resumes, important letters, or other critical writing projects. We look forward to working with you in the future.

Resume Writing

Ah, you may say when you mail that last envelope to the school of your dreams, I’m finally finished with application writing. (Heartbroken, aren’t you?) But don’t forget about your friends at Accepted.com just yet.

We can help you with your resume and the writing associated with a job hunt — both important documents that can, like your essays, help show you to your best advantage.

You’re going to apply for summer internships, perhaps a residency, and ultimately, a full-time job. You can trust Accepted.com’s editors to take a personal interest in you, provide excellent service, and top-quality editing. On future writing projects, you can work with the editor who worked with you on your essays, or you can work with Andrea Smith, a professional resume writer who recently affiliated with Accepted.com. She can write your resume and cover letters for you. And like the editor who assisted you in gaining admission, she can polish your resume and cover letters with a luster that may make the difference in your job search.

Contact Accepted.com (resume@accepted.com or 310-815-9553) if you need help with your resume and cover letters.

Tip of the Month

Transitions, Transitions!

(Reminds me of a song from "Fiddler on the Roof" . . .)

Applicants writing essays face a traditional problem: how to fit disparate experiences into a coherent whole.

You have a few options.

1. Focus on one event or experience so that you minimize the problem.
2. Unite your essay with a clear theme and effective transitions.

Themes were covered in the April issue of Odds ‘N Ends, so in this issue we discuss transitions.

Transitions are words, phrases or sentences that tie paragraphs together thematically. You can join them by comparing and contrasting, or connect different topics or ideas in terms of theme, influence, setting, or chronology. Here are a few suggestions and examples.

1. Let’s say you want to switch from a discussion of your professional experience to one of community service in an essay on leadership. You could talk about common experiences in both types of leadership, or contrast the difficulty of leading in a professional setting with that of leading in a volunteer setting. If the preceding paragraph discussed professional leadership, the new paragraph could begin like this: "The techniques I used in leading my software development team proved equally effective in a tougher volunteer setting."
2. If you focused on certain qualities as a communicator participating in college debating teams, you could transition to your professional sphere by starting the new paragraph as follows, "Later, I used these same skills as an senior consultant for ABC Consulting."
3. If you are writing an essay about someone who influenced you, you can describe that person’s attributes and then segue to how you have been inspired by your mentor. For example, to start a paragraph following the paragraph about a mentor, you could write, "Jack set an example of initiative that inspired me to launch my own business and start a community foundation." Then proceed to discuss your initiatives in business and community service.
4. You can also use a critical word or image from an earlier experience to relate that experience to something you want to discuss in your new topic.

These are just some of the techniques you can use to develop a coherent essay and make meaningful transitions in your writing.

Grad Admission News You Can Use

More Full-Time Profs Have Been Hired

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently cited a 1992 study in reporting that more full-time professors are being hired. The study reveals that most of the hiring takes place at research institutions and relates to professional fields as opposed to the arts and sciences. The study also reports that new female entrants comprised 41.8% of all full-time professors in 1992. Similar strides were made in minority representation among faculty members.

All the news is not rosy for prospective profs, though. Fewer junior faculty members are on tenured job tracks. They expressed less job satisfaction than their senior counterparts and had less job security.

Law Admissions News You Can Use

Students Support Diversity

Diversity, or its absence, has received much attention in the halls of academia. The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University has commissioned a study to measure student attitudes towards diversity and its benefits, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.

The study, conducted at Harvard and Michigan law schools, asked students about their interactions with students of other races and the effect of racial and ethnic diversity. Eighty-one percent of the students supported their school’s affirmative-action program. The remainder said these programs should be de-emphasized or discontinued. Furthermore, 72% of Harvard’s students and 78% of Michigan’s students said that discussions with students from different backgrounds had significantly changed their views on legal issues.

The Civil Rights Project commissioned the study in the hope that the data would convince courts of diversity’s value, the basis of the "compelling interest" upon which Justice Powell based his landmark Bakke decision.

MBA Admissions News You Can Use

The Wild West of Commerce goes to B-School

In past issues, I have written about graduate degrees in e-commerce and the explosion of entrepreneurship programs at business schools. Both trends reflect the astounding growth of the Internet, the Wild West of commerce, and the New Economy. Not surprisingly, these developments are influencing B-school curricula in additional ways.

Business Week reports that a number of top B-schools are adding E-commerce majors to their programs and two offer an E-commerce Master’s degree. MIT’s Sloan School of Management will join Vanderbilt and the University of Maryland in offering an E-commerce major. Carnegie Mellon and Creighton University have previously announced programs that provide a Master’s in E-commerce.

In recent years courses in Internet business have become common at most business schools. Intense student interest in the Wild West of commerce and powerful demand for Net-savvy managers from business drives these changes in b-school curricula. Hi Ho Silver!

Special for MBA Applicants

MBA schools require lots of essays — more writing than any other degree program. To help you with this daunting chore, Accepted.com is offering a special for MBA applicants: Purchase our consulting and editing package for seven essays and you will get the eighth essay package FREE!

For more information, please visit our Help Section.

Med Admissions News You Can Use

Secondary Essay Chat Transcripts

The most recent secondary chat (August 17, 1999) was an active, lively forum with much give and take. Linda Abraham, assisted by Accepted.com’s editor Cindy Tokumitsu, answered questions that had been sent to her ahead of time and then opened the cyberfloor to questions from participants. Most of the discussion focused on particular secondary essay questions and their unique challenges.

If you are having difficulty with secondary essays, check out the transcript. You might discover that you had the same problem as someone at the chat.

Number of Medical School Applicants Declines

The Journal of the American Medical Association reported in its September 1 issue that the number of applicants who applied for matriculation in September 1998 declined from 43,020 applicants for the class entering 1997 to 41,004 — a 4.7% drop. The 1997 number was down 8.4% from those who applied to begin medical studies in 1996. JAMA also reported that early indications for the class entering this September show that the trend is continuing in 1999.

Obviously the fewer MD wannabes applying, the better if you happen to be one of them vying for a space in med school.

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.