Accepted.com Odds 'N Ends

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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

BusinessWeek Online Chat

I was invited to participate in an online chat at Businessweek Online on Wednesday June 27. I enjoyed the spirited exchange with over 130 prospective MBAs. Thanks to Businessweek for the invitation. You can view the transcript at BusinessWeek Online.

New Book from Accepted.com Editor

Accepted.com editor Sheila Bender has written a new book, Keeping a Journal You Love, published by Walking Stick Press. This is Sheila's fifth book on writing about personal experiences. To find out more about Sheila's book, please visit Amazon.com.

Price Incrase Coming

The early bird may or may not get the worm, but at Accepted.com that bird is going to save money. To keep offering you the best editors and outstanding service, we must raise our prices effective September 1. ("Boo!!! Hiss!!!" I know. I know.) But you can beat the price increase. Sign up for your editing packages by August 31, 2000, and you will pay current rates. Just register before August 31, 2000.

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...

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Essay Tip of the Month

Think! Think! Think!

One evening my daughter came to me for help with her math homework. She had mechanically applied a method her teacher taught her for finding the size of an angle in an isosceles triangle . to a triangle with three unequal sides. Mindlessly using the technique, she couldn't solve the problem. The next day, my son asked if the writing techniques he had learned in English would also work in history. I assured him that good writing will be as effective in history as in English. Automaton-like, he promptly applied a template for a book report to a history essay that didn't refer to a book. It made no sense.

Both my children failed to think. One may be able to perform certain activities without thought, but writing (or solving geometry problems) isn't among them. Before you apply any writing techniques — even those recommended in these columns — you have to think. Thought is an essential prerequisite for your application writing.

What should you mull over before you sit down to write?

1. For graduate students: Why do you want to pursue this particular course of study? What are your goals after you complete your studies? How will this specialty help you achieve them? Whether you call it a "statement of purpose," "goals essay," or "vision statement," you need to know why you want to be come a doctor, lawyer, tycoon, or Indian chief.
2. Why are you applying to these particular programs? Why would you choose to attend Program A and not Program B? Rankings, geographic location, outstanding faculty, and excellent reputation are not sufficient reasons. You need to know exactly how this school will help you achieve your goals (for grad applicants) or what aspects of this school's educational approach appeal to you and why (for college applicants).
3. What is important to you? Why is it important? How did you develop these values? In particular, which experiences and activities influenced your values and reflect them?
4. What is distinctive about you? What anecdotes reveal that distinctiveness?
5. What are you proud of and why?

Once you have thought thoroughly about these topics, you can intelligently apply the techniques and advice found in this newsletter and on the Accepted.com Web site.

The bottom line for you (and my kids): "Think! Think! Think!"

Resume Tip of the Month

Starting The Resume with a Bang

You may reasonably wonder why it is important to start your resume, a summary of professional experience and achievement, with a summary. Yet where exactly will the reader's eye first fall when she first scans your resume? You can direct the reader immediately to the most compelling information by putting a "Professional Summary" (or "Professional Profile" or "Career Overview") at the top of the resume.

This summary is a marketing tool, ideally enticing your reader to read further no matter how busy she is. Thus, its contents are critical. It should be the length of a short paragraph, with bulleted points, and should cover three areas:

1. Your professional role, e.g., "Product manager with profit-and-loss accountability and technical oversight."
2. Your expertise, illustrated through an achievement that benefited your employer or client, e.g., "Expert negotiator, developing and completing innovative contracts with three materials vendors that allow quality review for the first time, yield cost-savings averaging 7%, and provide vendors with stable revenue."
3. Evidence of the positive impact you have made on your client or employer, e.g., "Devised and implemented new system for product development teams that decreased re-design from three times per item to zero."

Beware of a common pitfall in the professional summary or profile: general statements about your skills that aren't substantiated. "Excellent communicator," "strong problem-solving skills," and "team-oriented manager" are typical examples. To avoid this problem, consider what you want to communicate in that brief space and then create a vivid verbal sketch rather than a verbal blur, saying nothing that isn't substantiated or quantified.

Finally, the summary or profile must be set off visually from the rest of the resume. A heading is not enough. Either shade or border the summary, drawing the reader's eye to the space. This can be done conservatively or creatively, depending on the target reader, but the visual device is essential.

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

Grad Admission News You Can Use

ETS Adds Writing Section to GRE

As of October 1, 2002, the Education Testing Service will add an Analytical Writing section to the GRE and remove the current analytical measure section. The new section will consist of two essays. The first essay will require the test taker to develop an argument and support a position on an issue. The second essay will require the test taker to analyze another's argument.

Ranking of Research Institutions

Evidence Ltd, has ranked research institutes throughout the world based on "bibliometrics," a method of analysis that evaluates their performance based on the number of publications they produce and the amount of times they are then cited by later publications. Citations are used because they reflect the value of a particular piece of research. The top producers of research were Canada, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. Other significant producers include Japan, France, Australia, and Spain.

The Guardian published the results for the four top countries in the areas of clinical, biological, physical and environmental science, mathematics, engineering, and social sciences.

For the details, please visit the Web site.

Law Admissions News You Can Use

Legal Gold Standards

A recent article in Time's Global Business supplement highlighted the enormous influence of American law, in particular N.Y. law, on the global business scene. According to this article, "U.S. law is becoming the lingua franca of international business." As a result, increasing numbers of international applicants are applying to U.S. law schools. Especially popular are one-year LLM programs, where international enrollment has increased 62% since 1996. For many American firms overseas, international graduates of these LLM programs are highly valued because they bring to the firm American legal skill AND an intimate knowledge of their native country's language, culture, and business mores.

MBA Admissions News You Can Use

Alumni Prove Critical in Helping MBAs Obtain internships

The Wall Street Journal reports that several management consulting firms and technology companies have rescinded or cancelled their internships leaving first-year MBAs without the summer positions that in the past frequently led to full-time employment. To help their students, some of the business schools are reaching out to alumni and professors as sources of summer employment. The article profiled Tucks' successful efforts to assist twenty students who remained without summer internships at the end of their first year at Tuck.

Med Admissions News You Can Use

Chat Transcripts

We had a great chat with Dr. Cynthia Lewis of Lewis Associates on medical school admissions practices. In addition to addressing the factors that should determine which schools you apply to, Dr. Lewis had suggestions on dealing with the current web-based AMCAS application mess.

View the transcript.

The chat on June 18 became a discussion focused on taking advantage of the additional writing opportunities provided by the vision essay and experience sections of the AMCAS application. The transcript is not online yet, but will be posted soon. You will be able to link to it (as well as all other pre-med chat transcripts) from our Medical Transcript Index.

Allied Healthcare Fields Web Site

I stumbled across a most useful web page devoted to allied healthcare fields. So if medicine appeals to you, but you don't want to or can't become a physician or dentist, check out this page. It lists, with links to job descriptions and educational requirements, close to fifty professions in healthcare.

College Admissions News You Can Use

Tuition Continues to Increase

Although I would rather write about increased financial aid, as I have over the last several months, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that tuition at private colleges continues its inexorable climb. According to the Chronicle, a number of private colleges are reporting tuition increases in the 5% range, which exceeds the national inflation rate of 3.3% for the year ending in April. And the Ivys, which previously announced more favorable financial aid programs, are also increasing tuition 3-5%.

SAT II Provides Opportunity if English is Your Second Language

The Wall Street Journal on June 26 had a lengthy article on the role SAT IIs are playing in increasing opportunity for Hispanics and other immigrant groups. SAT IIs are offered in Spanish, French, Chinese, Latin, Korean, German, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, and Italian. These tests are receiving more weight in college admissions at a number of public universities, including the University of California, which no longer has an affirmative action program.

The tests are designed to test the knowledge of those studying a language as a second language. Native speakers tend to perform extremely well on them, and the relatively high scores earned by Hispanics on the Spanish test are helping them to attend schools like UC Berkeley, where Latino representation has historically been low.

Tell a Friend

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