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It may seem like you've got plenty of time until those Round 2 deadlines, but if you're not careful, that time will tick faster than you realize, forcing you to rush to beat the clock and potentially submit sloppy applications.
So what can you do now to ensure that you spend your time between now and early January wisely? What steps can you take to make sure that you stay calm, collected, and organized come Deadline Day?
Two words for you: START NOW. Not in a month, not in a few weeks, not even tomorrow. Now.
Now you have just enough time to methodically and thoroughly work on your applications and submit them for those Round 2 January deadlines. Let's say it takes you three weeks to complete your first application and 1.5 weeks to complete each subsequent one—that means that it'll take you roughly eight weeks to complete five applications.
So yeah, now would be a good time to start.
Here are some tips to help you proceed:
- Create a schedule…and stick to it! Make your schedule as detailed as possible, including time for drafting, writing, and editing each of your application essays.
- Work on one application at a time. If you try and write all your goals essays one after the other, and then all your achievement essays, and so on, you'll end up with a bunch of too-similar compositions, none of them catered specifically to the schools you're applying to. Instead, write all of Stanford's essays conveying your story as it relates to Stanford, and then do the same for Harvard, Kellogg, Wharton, MIT, and Columbia. Each application is its own unit—once you start mixing and matching and moving out of order, your individual applications will lose the glue that binds their components together.
- Choose experiences that best answer each question. Don't try and cut corners by using the same experiences from application to application. Adcoms can generally tell when you've tried to take the easy way out since the result is usually a sloppy essay that doesn't really answer the essay question. Determine which experiences work best for a given question, and then make sure that that answer complements the experiences used in other essays for that application.
- Don't submit application #1 until you've completed all your applications. Practice makes perfect, and as you make your way through your applications, you'll find that certain points that were fuzzy in application #1 are now clearer in application #4. Use what you've learned in writing later applications to hone in on and sharpen ideas from your earlier applications.
Do you need assistance jump starting your Round 2 application process? Or are you already well into your Round 2 applications and need help perfecting your essays, buffing them and polishing them until they shine? Take advantage of Accepted.com's Fall Special and receive $75 off your order of $1200 or more. Browse our MBA catalog of services and enter coupon code FALL75 at checkout to save! The sale ends Monday, November 15, 2010, so act quickly!
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