Admissions Tip: Plan of Attack

by Clear Admit, Dec 6, 2013

With November wrapping up this week, Round Two deadlines for a number of programs are just around the corner. As most applicants are targeting multiple schools and still working to narrow down their school selection, we wanted to take some time today to stress the importance of taking a deep breath and a step back and formulating a timeline for the coming weeks. Establishing a set of incremental goals with regard to essay composition and recommender management at this point in the season will help you to avoid feeling overwhelmed and ensure that your aims are realistic.

One of our most important pointers pertains to the process of writing essays. The urge to make progress on multiple fronts leads many applicants to work on essays for several schools in parallel, an approach that can be problematic. One reason for this is that when one spends time immersed in three sets of essays at once, its easy to lose sight of the full picture he or she is presenting to any one school. While its important to be oneself in the application process, its also crucial that an applicant tailor his or her materials to each school, a process that is made harder when constantly going back and forth among responses for various programs. Another issue is that its easy to waste time implementing the same edits across documents for multiple schools, or to lose track of what one has changed in which essay. For these reasons, we generally recommend focusing ones full essay-writing attention on one program at a time.

Of course, your writing and story will improve with practice, and the last application you finish will likely be your strongest: a tricky situation, given that most applicants take care of their top choice school first to ensure that theyre able to submit in the earliest possible round. With this in mind, we recommend that you build space into your timeline to allow yourself to revisit and revise each set of essays before submission.

The order in which you tackle tasks will naturally depend on the deadlines for each school. Therefore, lets take a look at a selection of this winters deadline calendar:

December 9: Kenan-Flagler R2

January 2: Ross R2, Tepper R2

January 3: Tuck R2

January 5: McDonough R2

January 6: HBS R2, Fuqua R2, CBS Deadline for Merit Consideration

January 7: Sloan R2, Darden R2, Wharton R2, Kellogg R2, Anderson R2

January 8: Booth R2, Stanford R2, Haas R2

January 9: Yale R2

January 10: Judge R2

Best of luck to all of our readers who are presently working their way through the lengthy application process! Stay tuned to this blog for additional tips, news and notes as the admissions season unfolds. For more information about how we can help you prepare for these deadlines with our application editing services, simply contact Clear Admit and sign up for a free initial assessment or call our offices at 215-568-2590.