As I followed this first African World Cup, I marveled at how close many of the games were, and how relatively minor plays decided the outcomes. Spain beating Germany on a header off a corner kick was all that mattered. Then there were the refereeing mistakes and questionable judgment calls that seemed to affect whether a team advanced or was eliminated. Did that obvious goal by England against Germany that was missed affect the player’s spirits, thus contributing to their eventual loss? What really was the impact of that clear offside by Argentina against Mexico, or the phantom American foul on a US goal against Slovenia?

As exciting as the games have been, you might be wondering what they have to do with the admissions process. Several parallels strike me.

First, being heavily favored going into the games doesn’t mean making it to the final one. Germany, Brazil and Spain were favored by many at the beginning of play; Spain is the only one that survived. Essentially they had “good stats.” Similarly, a candidate might have outstanding credentials and qualifications for admissions, but the application process seeks people of achievement, leadership, initiative, and impact. Stats are not enough and may not determine the winners.

Second, the ability to take full advantage of opportunities is crucial. Spain’s goal against Germany showed the importance of being fully prepared to use an opportunity to score, just as making it to an interview round in the application process demands that a candidate be fully prepared to beat out other closely qualified candidates in that crucial step of the process.

Finally, each of the 32 initial World Cup teams was talented and well qualified, but each had to prove it had the ability to make it to the final game. Applicants must similarly understand that admission decisions are made by people doing their best to put together a class that is balanced among many different metrics. Using your application, especially your essays, to showcase why you are qualified to “win” can make all the difference.

P.S. Having lived in the U.S., Japan and Mexico – none of whom made it to the final – and having good friends and relatives in both Spain and The Netherlands, I claim neutrality regarding Sunday’s game.

Robbie Walker is a writer, columnist and editor who received her MBA from Chicago Booth. She is happy to assist you in targeting the right schools and identifying the details that best highlight your candidacy.

• Advanced Placement examinations are becoming more and more popular among high school students. According to a recent Inside Higher Ed article, 25% of high school grads take at least one AP test. Top private universities now expect their applicants to have a few APs on their transcripts. A new study soon to be released by Harvard Education Press, however, reveals that the AP examinations may not be as valuable as most students and adcoms believe. A major criticism is that low-income high schools are scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to offer AP programs, rather than spending that money on improving already existing (and more important) programs. On the other hand, the tests do offer students with a chance to get ahead on their college courses, ultimately saving money.

• A BusinessWeek article, “Three Top B-Schools Look for New Deans,” provides an overview of the great search for new deans at Chicago Booth, Northwestern Kellogg, and Harvard Business School. Kellogg has already filled the position of dean by hiring Sally Blount from NYU Stern. HBS has not yet chosen a new dean, but most believe that the position will not be filled by an outsider.

• The GRE seems to be hitting all sorts of records recently. A recent ETS press release reports record-breaking GRE growth rates in Europe. European test volume increased 15% in the last year, marking the highest yearly increase ever for Europe. Another record-breaker: More test scores were sent to European institutions this year than in any other year. One reason for such an increase in GRE tests is the simultaneous increase in the number of business schools accepting the GRE in addition to the traditional GMAT exam. According to David Payne, VP and COO at ETS, “In this economy especially, the flexibility to use one test for admission to both graduate and business programmes is great for students who want to ensure that they have options. It’s a huge benefit to them.”

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This online survey should take just 10 minutes to complete.  We would love to receive as many responses as possible before the closing date of Friday, April 9th – and will be giving away an iPod Touch and two iPod Shuffles as a token of our gratitude!  We’ll also be sharing the results of the survey this spring to help candidates better understand the nature of today’s applicant pool.

Thanks in advance for your participation!

Simply click here to begin. http://surveys.marketpointsinc.com/mba10a.asp

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• The Chronicle’s recent article, “Shrinking Newsrooms Put Colleges in the Content Business,” discusses a missing element in modern media relations: someone who haunts the halls of universities, “stopping by people’s offices and really getting to know them.” As Geoff S. Larcom, a former reporter, states, “You don’t see that much anymore, because everyone’s stretched so thin.” While original reporting on higher education may be on the decline, blogs and online forums related to higher education issues are on the rise, as can be seen in national newspapers like The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today. But without true reporting and relying almost entirely on opinion blogs, user comments, and online forums, can we be sure that we’re getting accurate information? Where have all the big stories gone, especially those in the area of the sciences and research? Facebook and Twitter updates are fun to read and can even transmit important information; but is it really news?

• In a related article, “J-Schools to the Rescue?” Inside Higher Ed writer Steve Kolowich asks if journalism schools can help save journalism. He suggests that struggling newspapers hire journalism students (who will work for credit) to “fill the gaps left by the pros whom the news outlets could no longer afford to pay.” Such a partnership has indeed been forged, between New York University and The New York Times. The NYT recently cut about 200 newsroom jobs and NYU journalism students are eager to fill those spots. Other universities in other cities are establishing similar alliances in television news studios in addition to newspaper newsrooms. And why not take advantage of students who are willing to work for cheap hire or even for free? However, the problem still remains: When these j-school students graduate, will they be able to find paying journalism jobs, even with some New York Times experience under their belts? So can j-schools save journalism? As long as there are students writing, there will be news content, but students should think long and hard about whether that experience will be valuable in the long run.

• If you’re creative and just a little tech savvy, then applying for b-school financial aid just got a lot more fun, reports a BusinessWeek article. Scholarship applicants from the Netherlands’ Nyerode Business University can now apply for the YouTube Scholarship. Applicants must create a two-minute YouTube video explaining why they think they should win the $15,000 b-school scholarship.  The school’s program director, Professor Eric Meise, explains that these two-minute videos portray a much clearer picture of the applicants as compared to the previously used five-page application essay forms. You can view one of the recent YouTube scholarship videos here.

Related Accepted.com Resources:

• Financing Your Future: Winning Fellowships, Scholarships and Awards for Grad School, an instantly downloadable ebook.
• Navigating the MBA Maze, an ecourse.

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• The Harbus, the HBS newspaper, reports on Harvard’s Immersion Experience Program (IXP), an initiative that focuses on “participant-centered, field-based experiential learning activities.” About 400 HBS students shipped off to six different international programs in India, China, Vietnam, Rwanda, Peru, and UAE/Bahrain.

• State universities continue to make huge budget cuts and plan to further hike up tuition costs, reports BusinessWeek last week. The article “State Universities Brace for Another Brutal Year” discusses how the economic downturn is far from over for state universities, some of which have cut upwards towards $45 million just in the last year and have hiked up tuition 15%. State support for public universities has dwindled, and doesn’t seem to be improving any time soon. Students all over the country are up in arms about this, especially those in the University of California system who suffered a 32% tuition increase. The fact that professors and other university personnel are getting laid off certainly doesn’t help control the anger factor. Private universities are also in the midst of severe cuts and hikes: Yale just cut $50 million from its yearly budget; Dartmouth plans to lay off non-faculty members to help close its $100 million deficit.

• While UC Berkeley may have its share of budgetary problems, at least in the area of diversity the funds are flowing due to a $16 million donation received to support diversity initiatives. The donation is from one of Berkeley’s largest donors, the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, and is intended “to support both research and teaching on diversity and to cultivate a campus ‘built on fairness and acceptance.’” The goal to include incoming freshmen and community college transfer students who are deemed racially and economically diverse is proving a difficult one since affirmative action in California has been banned. (The Chronicle)

Related Resources:

1. Financing Your Future: Winning Fellowships, Scholarships and Awards for Grad School, an ebook.
2. MBA BlastOff: 45 Terrific Tips to Launch Your MBA Application to Acceptance, an ebook.

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The third of Made to Sticks six key principles, concreteness, doesn’t seem to apply to intangibles like leadership, achievement, teamwork, or character – the topics you typically need to cover in your essays. Yet, even when discussing abstractions, if your essays are concrete they will communicate more effectively and more memorably.

Here are five tips to make your personal statements and application essays concrete:

1. Use sensory language when appropriate. Write in terms of sights, sounds, smells, touch, and taste.
2. Break down large ideas into smaller sub-topics and concepts. (For more on this idea, please see “Fatal Flaw #4: Superficiality.” ) The grand summary or platitude won’t cut it.
3. Quantify when possible. Did you increase membership a lot when president or did you increase membership by 50%? Did you lead a team or did you lead a 10-person team?
4. Without using clichés, relate events, entities, and concepts to ideas that the reader already knows and trusts. For example if I say that “Accepted is the McKinsey of admissions consulting firms,” clients will expect top-notch work and a strategic approach to admissions.
5. Think about the human beings you are addressing in your essays. You have read interviews of and met with admissions committee members. Perhaps create a character that represents Chris Adcom for you. For me, Chris is usually smart, professional, and hard-working. Typically a “people-person” with a genuine interest in others, she also has a well–practiced nose for baloney and doesn’t like the odor. She is always short on time and consequently ends up skimming essays if they are boring or don’t answer the question, even though she doesn’t like to do so. She is dedicated to helping her school create a diverse, talented class of students who will be happy to attend her school, contribute to campus life as students, and add to the school’s reputation as alumni. That’s her job. Write your essays for Chris.

Use these five keys to concreteness when crafting your essays to make them more compelling.

Additional Resources:

• MBA 5 Fatal Flaws
• Med 5 Fatal Flaws
• Law 5 Fatal Flaws
• Grad 5 Fatal Flaws
• College 5 Fatal Flaws

By Linda Abraham, President and Founder of Accepted.com.

The transition from minor importance to main spotlight will not be an easy one, especially given the highly “centralized and burdensome” higher education government. “Indian higher education,” explains The Chronicle, “is huge, complex, and full of contradictions…much like the country itself.” With a huge pool of potential students, the country can only accommodate about 12% of eligible students. 12% may not seem like a lot, but in a country the size of India, that translates into 22,500 institutions of about 600 students each. 450,000 Indian students study abroad; the majority of Indian students stay on Indian home turf. Most of them study in the public system which has been neither motivated nor pressured to improve—that is, until now.

With the growth of private institutions in India and the growing role Indian graduates play in the global business economy, even small public universities and vocational schools are interested in moving away from a rather apathetic attitude to a more ambitious and improvement-oriented one. This change is especially true for information technology programs.

Educational reforms are in order and include:

• Implementing a “choice-based” curriculum.
• Creating and updating new and varied syllabi.
• Establishing an autonomous educational authority.
• Improving the anti-educational-malpractice system.
• Erecting an educational tribunal to fast-track conflict resolution.
• Implementing mandatory assessment practices.
• Ensuring proper accreditation practices.

Changes in Indian educational policy will help encourage American universities to begin setting up shop in India. India’s education minister, Kapil Sibal, has been described as “reform-minded” and has “endorsed the entry of foreign universities into the country.”

India will benefit from the foreign investment necessary to set up a university branch on Indian soil, but how will the international institutions benefit from establishing a base in India?

“A robust presence in overseas markets like India or China could enhance a college’s academic standing, intellectual, prestige, and reputation,” explains another Chronicle article. “A presence in a country brings access to power, people, and principal”—three strong pulls for a country like the United States.

Sibal has singled out Harvard (his alma mater), MIT, and Stanford as “desirable providers for India.”

There are many questions that American institutions need to ask themselves before making this move: Will fewer Indians choose to study abroad at the American-based facilities if they can get the same education closer to home? Who will then fill those empty spots—will schools be lucky enough to find the right students (who can pay the high fees)? Will the international university be able to maintain all its own rules, policies, curricula, and tuition rates? Will American educational traditions mesh with India’s culture and values? How will the move affect the U.S. partnership with India, not to mention its relationship with other countries and other schools?

There is a lot to gain, a lot to lose, and lots to consider.

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Bingo! That’s relevant to applicants. One of the most commonly asked personal statement questions I see on Twitter is “What should I write about?”

You need to write about when YOU made a difference.

So if you are a Michelangelo, Einstein, Gates, or Buffett, you may be able to write about your incredible talents and how they propelled you to achieve, although you may appear arrogant if you take this approach. In any case, you geniuses can stop reading this post.

For the rest of you, please continue.  Think about those times when your participation in a project, organization, business, team, or club made a difference.

• What was the situation? the problem? the challenge?
• What was your role in meeting that challenge?  What did you do?
• What was the result?

You may or may not want to tie this story explicitly to your educational and professional goals. That decision will depend on many factors, but one evergreen topic for your personal statements and application essays remains: times when you made a difference.

Related Resources:

• “PAR” or “CAR” Anyone?
• MBA 5 Fatal Flaws
• Med 5 Fatal Flaws
• Law 5 Fatal Flaws
• Grad 5 Fatal Flaws
• College 5 Fatal Flaws

By Linda Abraham, President and Founder of Accepted.com.

According to a press release by Duke University’s Office of News & Communications, a groundbreaking ceremony was held last Friday in China along with a formal announcement of the partnership between Duke, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the city of Kunchan, the site of the new educational complex and a fast-growing economy located in China’s Yangtze River Delta. The 200-acre five-building campus will include educational, research, and living facilities, and will be built by Kunchan’s municipal government.

Duke’s Fuqua School of Business will lead this initiative, using the campus for the first time for EMBA, pre-experience masters in management program, and non-degree executive education programs as well as training PhDs and recruiting top faculty members.

Richard Brodhead, president of Duke, explains:

We look forward to working with the Ministry of Education, the government of Kunchan, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University to support education and business development in this most dynamic region of China. The Duke-Kunchan campus will create great learning opportunities for our students, and represents a new model of international educational collaboration.

Following the success of the b-school expansion, Duke intends on expanding other graduate and undergraduate programs to the new campus.

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• BusinessWeek reported some good news last week regarding the job market, particularly for new college graduates. The National Association of Colleges and Employers reported a turnaround in college hiring. Surveys show that the recent economic recession hit college graduates ages 22 to 27 among the hardest. BW states that this new job market optimism may be a bit premature, but remains hopeful from this year’s graduates.
• Ash Martin, an MBA student at MIT Sloan, writes in BusinessWeek early last week about his experience with the MBA internship. Martin describes the internship as a test: A company evaluates your performance in a particular job. Do you fit with this office’s environment? Can you get the job done? Can you put your MBA skills to good use? Martin explains that your MBA internship should not be something you should fear (like possibly other tests you’ve taken in your life) but one that you enter with confidence—it’s a test, after all, that you should know all the answers to.
• As India’s middle class emerges, so does the growing desire to study abroad at a top college or graduate school program in the U.S. A recent article in The Chronicle explains that international college recruitment is at an all-time high in India. The streets, taxis, and storefronts in New Delhi, according to the article, are plastered with advertisements for test-prep and admissions counseling and promises of securing a solid educational future abroad. Many factors contribute to this increasingly popular trend of attending overseas universities, but one reason remains strictly practical: The Indian universities simply cannot accommodate the number of students who would ideally attend locally. Colleges in Britain and Australia have pursued more active recruitment strategies than the American universities, which in general have little trouble attracting Indian students.
• In an effort to expand its global footprint, the Financial Times reports, Harvard Business School will open its first overseas branch in Shanghai. The new Shanghai facility will open its doors this month for short executive courses and will serve as a base for full-time MBA students involved in international projects.

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