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How many total hours are you investing per application?

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GMATT73
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pelihu
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jaynayak
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aaudetat
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It gets WAY faster, but keep your records straight.

I have a spread sheet that showed my essay questions, so I could eyeball them to know when i could recycle, which ones would take longer, etc.

Also, make sure your historical stuff is in a Word doc, even if the first app you did had you enter it into fields. Easier access.

And I kept a separate file for each school. I remembered which essays were where, and could just jump in and get them.

I think Cornell and UNC - I did those two concurrently - took a lot of time. Hours and hours.

Duke took me a couple days.

Yale took no time at all (recycled essays both).

And I didn't find myself rewriting that much - there are many shared phrases and concepts across the essays.
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lepium
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My experience: after the first couple of apps, the work for the rest of the apps was restricted to:

1) Tackling the Why School aspect - obviously -.
2) Fidgeting with essay lengths when recycling.
3) Maybe writing 1 or 2 at the most new (usually short) essays to answer some question not asked before.

cheers. L.