EssaySnark

You are here: Home / Snarchives for general tips

Another “Oh crap. Round 2” post

by EssaySnark Leave a Comment

If you submitted multiple apps in Round 1 and you’ve realized that, shoot, you’ve now got to do it again for Round 2, here is the most important first step for you:

You need to know WHY those Round 1 apps haven’t panned out yet.

First, there’s a handful of schools that seem to take for-ev-er to issue interview invitations, and you can really go through the wringer in the waiting game there. In the past, Stanford GSB has been in this category, though not getting an interview there is what happens to the majority of BSers. They seem to be trying to speed up their process this year, which is awesome, but they still may not get back to you on your app for some time.

Berkeley Haas has also been a problematic offender in the crime of making applicants wait, though they apparently have introduced a new process this season where they are releasing interview invites every Tuesday. Not sure how much better that is, if it means that every single week, you get your hopes up, and potentially crushed. Over and over. The one-and-done process that HBS has is infinitely better, but not all schools have the resources to manage their app flow that way.

Not yet getting an invite isn’t necessarily putting you in the category of getting rejected, so this is truly a case-by-case situation.

However, if you do have the good fortune of having already had an application turned down, then let’s use that for figuring out what to do with Round 2.

Did we just say “good fortune”?

Since when is getting rejected a good thing?

Obviously it’s not — but if you’ve been turned away from Columbia or INSEAD or Duke or Darden with an early-season application, then that’s valuable information indeed. That means that there’s something you need to do differently with your applications for Round 2. If it’s your GMAT or GRE, then you already know that that’s a weakness. If you have poor academic performance from college, then that means it wasn’t handled effectively. If you had a test score and a college GPA that are in range of your target school’s averages, then that almost definitely means that your essays were simply not strong. If your GMAT and college GPA are at the top end of your school’s class profile ranges, then that’s definitely what’s going on.

Now that there’s some distance between that application you submitted in September and where you sit today, you can go back and try to self-assess your performance on what you turned in. Reading over it, do you see anything you could have done differently? Knowing what we just assessed, that an admissible profile that’s turned away from one of these schools at this stage of the season was likely due to problems with essays, can you see anything in what you wrote or how you presented that gives you a hint of the problem?

Diagnosing your own writing problems may be quite challenging — after all, you wrote it, and you thought it was good, or you wouldn’t have clicked Submit on the app. This might be a case where getting some objective feedback can help. Our Post Mortem Rejected App Review can do exactly that for you.

Oftentimes, it’s those that have some pretty good abilities with words who end up not presenting as well as they could through the essays. This is counterintuitive but we see it all the time. If you consider yourself a strong writer, then that could’ve hamstrung you in this process. It’s because writing essays is different than what you likely have done before. You can lose yourself in the ‘snarchives on the topic of writing essays if you want to dive deep and discover why we say this, and how to make improvements to your approach to accommodate the realities of this particular writing task.

If you were turned away from Harvard a few weeks ago, then that experience is likely to be much less useful in the context of applying knowledge to your Round 2 applications. That’s because huge numbers of highly qualified candidates are rejected from HBS every year. You could have done a very, very good application — one that would get lauded over by the admissions teams at many other schools — and still get turned away from Harvard. Still, sometimes people like to get the Post Mortem done on their HBS materials, just to find out what went wrong or why it didn’t work out for them. Sometimes it can only be chalked up to how competitive things are, that you didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just that the pool is too crowded. This may not make you feel any better in the end, so we don’t always see the Post Mortem as terribly useful. Again, it depends on your ability to self-assess and suss out what was the issue. A great app to HBS with a lower GMAT score could still get in. A stellar GMAT and GPA might not move the needle there at all if the profile is too common. It’s not a school where that many conclusions can be drawn from a rejection, in ways that could help you figure out what to do on the next one. Except that we could tell you if you did in fact do an excellent job, and you should have great chances for Round 2 with a similar level of quality.

So along with this important question of figuring out WHY you didn’t make it through with the apps so far in Round 1, which boils down to profile strength and execution on your side, the other important consideration is if you have targeted the right schools for the right reasons. Sometimes it’s a mismatch on profile, as stated above, but sometimes it’s because unfortunately the BSer is not aiming in the right places, given the realities that they are dealing with. This can happen with a more seasoned applicant trying for a standard two-year full-time MBA without giving an appropriate argument behind why that track is the right one. It can come through in being too vague and non-specific on the reasons cited for trying for a school, which is more in the category of poor execution and not being convincing. Unfortunately though, there are often cases of BSers applying only to stretch schools and not recognizing the hypercompetitiveness that they will be facing. This is often profile-dependent, if you’re coming from an especially crowded sector of the applicant population. Or it can be just misunderestimating what such schools really require and expect to see in the core stats of GMAT/GRE and GPA.

So. Today’s post is to encourage you to figure out the reason why you were not selected to interview, or were already rejected at the schools you tried for in Round 1. It’s to encourage you to assess your core stats of the profile against the school’s published entering class, and not make assumptions that you will be the one who with much lower scores that they decide to accept into the Class of 2022 (they will definitely accept one or two with lower scores/stats, but obviously that’s going to be 1 out of like 3,000, or 1 out of 7,000, depending on which school we’re considering — very low odds indeed). Knowing the why of your outcomes to date will be useful input to inform your Round 2 approach.

If you really positively no doubt about it want to be going to bschool next year, then this means you can consider adjusting the targets you’d had in mind for Round 2, and/or suck it up and tackle that GMAT or GRE one more time, in the weeks you have available before Round 2 is due.

If you now know, after going through this process so far, that the MBA isn’t as critical for you to succeed in life and career, then that’s super useful information as well. You can look at your written execution, in the essays and resume and maybe your recommender strategy, and see what you can do to truly optimize the pitch that you’re making. EssaySnark’s tools are designed to support you in exactly that process.

Outside of a renewed attempt and increased score on the GMAT or GRE, if that’s your current app weakness, there isn’t much new that you could add to your profile right now that would significantly affect your chances in Round 2. But. There is still plenty of action you can take, to up your essay-writing game, improve your presentation on the resume, and revisit your strategy of who you’re selecting for recommenders (and possibly support them more directly so they can do a better job on your behalf) — and all of these components can absolutely make a difference in how things turn out.

And yes. Keep coming back to these parts. Maybe one (or more!) of those pending Round 1 apps will come through and we want to be among the first to help you celebrate when that happens!

And in the meantime, you can start thinking about essays, if you’re finding yourself still standing on the sidelines, nobody to dance with. We’ll be focusing on essay topics, writing tips, and, yes, motivation to get you back in the saddle and taming this procrastination beast, so you are set up for success in this project that is of so much importance.

Winter is coming! (aka, Oh wow, isn’t November a great time to write essays?!??)

by EssaySnark Leave a Comment

Yeah yeah yeah, we know. We say this every year. We spent all of Springtime trying to convince you that, um, time passes quickly and this whole applying-to-bschool thing will take longer than you expect in our attempts to remind you that Round 1 was right around the corner. Here we are now, the very first day of November, and we’ve already spent a week rattling cages about Round 2.

But you know what? It’s true!

The holidays are basically upon us already and before you know it, you’ll be chugging the eggnog and decorating trees.

This is a really tricky part of the application cycle. If you’ve been interviewing off your Round 1 apps, awesome! But you’re not in yet. As we posted recently: How do you know if you should be thinking about Round 2?

If you didn’t manage to get any, or the appropriately targeted, apps in so far this season, that’s common, and don’t worry about it. Deal with the reality you have now. You really really really want to go to bschool; you haven’t yet managed to submit any (or the right) apps; OK great, let’s start now and make it happen. You know that Round 2 is in your future. Yet you may be having trouble actually getting started. The worst is to get lulled into that sense of complacency that Round 2 is far off and you have all sorts of time left. We’re here to tell you that it isn’t, and you don’t.

If you submitted some apps in Round 1 yet none of them have turned into interviews yet (and/or some have been outright rejected) then you’re probably also feeling down in the dumps about that, and dreading the whole prospect of Round 2 applications even more.

It’s one thing to be procrastinating on a big project that you know you have to do; it’s entirely another to be facing the unpleasant reality of having to do a big project you’ve already done, that you hated immensely, and that seemed to not have been fruitful.

We get it, Brave Supplicant. This stuff is hard.

The reason for today’s post is to help you recognize those feelings. Sometimes, simply naming them can help you move past them.

As Sun Tzu said, Know your enemy. When your enemy is your own self-sabotage, it’s even more important to recognize the powers that it holds over you.

Because with the proper insight, you can bust those powers. Gaining some insight into the processes that drive them can be key.

We’re really trying to encourage you to find a way to buck yourself up and get started early.

Besides the hopefully-helpful practical application advice, this Be careful! Procrastination will get you!! message is one of the most common themes you get here at EssaySnark. But it’s true — and today we’ll offer some advice from the wise folks at Trello (this is just a link, they’re not sponsoring us or anything) about how you, and all of us, truly suck at anticipating how we are going to feel in the future, and this inability to predict what that future self will want creates so much more pain than it has to. They wrote this useful article about a science-y thing called affective predicting which is — oh hey, we’ll let you just go read the article.

Key takeaway:

“According to a recent New York Times article , procrastination is more about emotion management than laziness.”

 
 
You may also be interested in:

 
 

Are you procrastinating because you don’t know how to start? The Complete Essay Package is designed just for you! It breaks down the whole project of constructing your first essays to your first school through a step by step process that simplifies everything, and validates each individual component to make sure that you’ve got the best foundation on which to build. Pricing is currently the lowest it will be for the rest of the season!

10 Things Not to Do at a School Info Session

by EssaySnark Leave a Comment

Or any conference or meeting, actually.

  1. Sit in the front row and slouch.
  2. Yawn without covering your mouth. (Always cover your mouth when you yawn, no matter who you’re with. Sheesh.)
  3. Sit in the front row and stare at your cell phone the whole time.
  4. Sit in the back row and stare at your cell phone the whole time.
  5. Sit in any row and stare at your cell phone the whole time.
  6. Take up three seats with your bags and jacket when it’s crowded.
  7. Bring in food from the outside. Especially smelly food. Especially noisy food. (If they are serving food, it’s fine to eat it during the event. If not, save it for after.)
  8. Talk. Don’t talk on your cell. Don’t talk to your neighbor. If you need a whispered exchange, make it quick. If you want to chat with someone, take it into the hallway, or wait till after the event.
  9. Sleep. If you’re nodding off, go stand in the back of the room. You worked a long day, you’re exhausted, it happens. But the first time you do that head-dip-jerk-up thing, do like Taylor says and shake it off. If it happens again, don’t pretend you’re OK. Go splash water on your face in the bathroom or get some coffee. Don’t be a jerk and keep doing the jerk.
  10. Not come when you RSVPed. If you can’t make it, let them know. If you were a no-show the night before, email the admissions office the next day to apologize. Seriously. You’re AN APPLICANT WHO WANTS THEM TO ACCEPT YOU. Put 2 and 2 together, people.

For #1-9: It’s seriously hard to present to an audience when someone is doing that. You will be noticed, for all the wrong reasons.
For #10: You will be noticed, ditto on reasons.

People, please. We know the state of the world has grown distressingly casual, but the way you present yourself matters.

If you’re sitting in an audience, you have a job: Pay attention. Be respectful to the speaker. BE THERE.

If you don’t want to BE THERE, then leave. It’s much more polite to do that than to project utter disinterest and complete lack of respect.

Conversely: What if you’re running late, and you feel like you’re a total ahole and you want to just turn around and not go in even after you finally made it to the venue? Or you’re about to leave work and you know you won’t get there on time, so you’re thinking you should just ditch it? This advice may surprise you, given the list of lecturing manners we just laid out. Even if you’re late, you should still go. Honestly. It’s better to come in late than not to go at all.

Oh yeah here’s another tip, this one for All of Life, not just bschool info sessions:

When you’re running late, and you have to come into a meeting in progress, and you feel awful about it: There’s no need to make a bigger disruption than your late entrance is already making by announcing to everyone the excuse that you’ve been rehearsing for the last 20 minutes.

Nobody cares why you’re late. Really truly, they don’t. You don’t need to make an excuse. A quiet and sheepish, “sorry” – that’s all that’s needed as you pass by the lectern and slink into your seat. Please do not feel you need to announce to the room that your car wouldn’t start and the tow truck was late or whatever dog-ate-my-homework excuse you have. NOBODY CARES. You’re making your late arrival an even bigger negative event by doing that. Just get there, integrate yourself into whatever is happening, do your darnedest to minimize the disruption you’re already making, and let things resume as they were. If your boss needs an explanation later, give it to her privately. The whole room does not need to hear it.

Enough life advice for today.

This post was inspired by a tweet we saw from some school’s info session recently, where they were announcing how proud they were of the turnout. It was a crowded conference room of some hotel. Probably in a city, since many of the applicants in attendance were wearing suits. Didn’t look like California, at least.

And there was this guy in the front row…

Yeah. Don’t be that guy.

Mind your manners, BSers. People are watching.

Random tips for filling out the app dataset for your MBA programs

by EssaySnark Leave a Comment

These items are not necessarily going to get you rejected (though some of them might!). These points are designed to help you present a professional, polished image to your admissions reader, which makes it easier for them to like you. Remember, eliminating friction and making it simple for them to read your application and understand your profile is a high priority for everything you present to the adcom in your app.

In no particular order:

  • Use correct capitalization throughout your application. This means capitalize the first letter – and only the first letter – of your first name, and your last name. Don’t enter data in ALL CAPS and don’t do the lazy textspeak thing of not using caps at all. “Surname” means last name or family name.
  • If the application does not force you to enter data in a field, then it’s truly optional. Examples typically include such things as racial identity and ethnicity, gender identity, sexual preference, marital status. However, it’s usually in your own interest to answer such things. You don’t have to, but even if you’re a straight white cisgendered male, there’s nothing in that statement that is going to prevent you from an admit. And saying that you are LGBTQ*, or heck, that you’re a Republican… none of these attributes will ever result in an accept or deny decision unto themselves. It’s not how this stuff works. If you leave all the demographic fields blank, then the adcom reader going through your app simply is unable to visualize you as an individual human being and that’s the reason you don’t want to do that. The most important thing in constructing your app is you want to give enough details that your adcom reviewer can form an image of you in their mind when they go through. They don’t consciously know that they’re doing that or seek out to do it — but they do it. All of us do it. And when that image that’s constructed becomes more vivid and clear, it allows you to be more than “John” or “Javier” or “Jayaramthan” to them; it allows you to be a person. This is majorly advantageous to you when they are deciding your fate.
  • International applicants: Do not convert your academic results to the 4.0 scale used in the U.S. if they are not naturally reported that way by your college or university. Just enter the data from your transcripts or diploma as it’s captured by your registrar. Include the front and the back of the transcripts when you scan them. Follow the schools’ directions carefully!
  • Double-check your dates! One of the most common errors we see in applications when we do a post-mortem review after a poor BSer was rejected (which unfortunately is often the first time that long-term blahg readers come to us for actual one-on-one help on their apps — which is a little late, given all the resources we have available) is dates of employment on the application that don’t match dates presented on the resume. This isn’t something that you’d necessarily get rejected over, but it is an indication of sloppiness and poor attention to detail. If you can’t sweat the details on something as important as your application to bschool, then what do you really care about? It’s not a good look.
  • If you qualify for an app fee waiver and you have not requested it yet for each of your schools – do that this week! Some schools have an approval process that takes a few days or a week. If you run out of time, and have to pay the fee in order to submit by your deadline, they won’t refund you even if you would have qualified for a waiver.

Remember that the app dataset is an application asset unto itself. It’s not just a tedious form you have to fill out. It’s part of your presentation. This seems to be an overlooked opportunity for many. Check out the category of posts we have here on the app dataset to learn more about how to leverage this element.

If you get our Sanity Check pre-submit app review, we’ll go through your application to make sure that you’re not committing any major foolish mistakes. And, Speedy Review is built in to that service – fast turnarounds!

 
 
*Kudos to Wharton for being the first school (that we know of) to publish the percent of LGBTQ in their incoming class — which for the Class of 2021, is 5%.

Prediction: What will cause you the most pain and suffering in the next six months?

by EssaySnark Leave a Comment

EssaySnark don’t know you.

Who is EssaySnark to say?

Ahh, au contraire, little buttercup, EssaySnark DOES know you.

EssaySnark knows your heart.

EssaySnark knows who you are.

And EssaySnark knows that what will cause you the most pain in the next six months’ time comes down to one thing:

 
 
 
 
 
 

PROCRASTINATION

 
 
 
 
 
 

How can we be so sure???

Well lessee….

1. You are reading this.

2. You want to apply to business school.

3. You are human.

Yup, that about sums it up.

You are a procrastinator.

Some of you will suffer ungodly amounts over this; others, just mild or relatively minor suffering — though all of it feels the same to the sufferer.

Despite your best of intentions, there will come a day in the next, oh, say two months… and possibly much much worse three months after that…. when you will be absolutely cursing yourself and possibly crying.

Because there will be

NO

MORE

TIME

So.

We write this today, weeks and even months before the first deadline is upon us, to exhort, implore, entice, plead, and somehow convince.

GET STARTED EARLY.

Like hey! Today is a good day!!

 
 
 
 
 
 
So how are we so convinced that you too will fall into this Procrastination Trap and be subject to suffering? Because we’re writing this on January 4, 2019, when we’re watching the fallen remains of exhausted and sad BSers all over the battlefield of Round 2, and we know that that’s your fate, too, unless you intentionally plot a course of awareness to avoid it.

($) Speaking about values: What is the Behavioral Assessment at Yale and should you be scared?

by EssaySnark - Discusses

We’ve been focusing on values this MBA admissions season because it’s the term du jour for bschools everywhere. Though it’s not exactly new. But it is gaining greater prominence. More evidence: The Behavioral Assessment is a “no right answers” type of personality or characteristics survey that you’ll complete if you get to the interview stage…

While much of the blahg is available completely for free, the content here is reserved for members with full blahg access only ($9.95/month for six months, cancel anytime). Please login to view this content or purchase a membership.

Questions to ponder courtesy of UVA Darden!

by EssaySnark - Discusses Leave a Comment

Want to start thinking about your MBA app strategy without doing any heavy lifting?

Here’s a great series of questions posted on the Darden admissions blog late last year . These are meant to illustrate how they look at candidates but they’re an excellent set of questions for you to sit down and consider right now, before you’ve actually started thinking about essay topics or which schools you’ll be trying for. Not all schools evaluate on exactly these dimensions, and even Darden was only using this to illustrate the perspective they take. But these are quite interesting things to ponder! They touch on things like teamwork and collaboration and leadership and all the standard buzzwords that you’ll get so sick of hearing about as you traverse this process of applying to bschool:

  • Are you collaborative?
  • What kind of teammate are you?
  • Do you freely share your expertise?
  • Do you enjoy learning from others?
  • Do you want to be an active participant in your educational experience?
  • Are you relationship-oriented?
  • Do you value different backgrounds and perspectives?

Don’t just breeze over this list nodding your head and saying, “Hmm interesting questions!” Instead, get your MBA essay planning notebook and jot them down – consider putting each one individually at the top of its own page. Do some brainstorming. Can you think of an example from your life that fits each question?

Keep a running list as you go through the rest of the day, and week, and month.

This should be an ongoing process.

Some of these questions are actually quite deep. What does it mean to be “relationship-oriented”? Can you redefine that term? Now, can you think of an instance where you acted that way, that would demonstrate you being that way?

Don’t feel you need to be “relationship-minded” in order to get into or succeed in bschool. It’s OK if you answer “no” to that question. But give yourself space to ponder it. Maybe tonight on your commute home, set up some time for just thinking about these concepts.

But you will need to do some serious self-reflection if you’re going to be coming up with quality essay content in a few short months! That’s true at every school, definitely not only Darden.

The best essay topics are considered over time. Starting with this list will be your first effort to prime the pump and get that brain trained to spit out the good stuff.

($) MBA admissions and background checks

by EssaySnark

Different schools definitely do this differently, and not all schools even conduct background checks — but many of them do now and the process may seem intimidating. “Ohmygosh. They’re going to dig into my background. I have so many skeletons in my closet. What will they find?!?” Relax, Brave Supplicant. If you are an honest…

While much of the blahg is available completely for free, the content here is reserved for members with full blahg access only ($9.95/month for six months, cancel anytime). Please login to view this content or purchase a membership.

Now is a great time for thank-yous!

by EssaySnark 2 Comments

Hopefully you’re celebrating with some big news of acceptances — at least one, and maybe multiple! We’ve been inundated with many happy emails and updates from excited Brave Supplicants who are headed to bschool in the fall, and we do hope that you also are in that position.

In the rush of your big news of successes then there’s one important task you should not forget about:

Remember all those people who recommended you for admission? The current and former bosses who spent all that time on your apps? Now would be an excellent time to say THANK YOU!! to all of those people.

And we don’t mean just the excited “OMG thanks!” when you announce to your boss you got in. Yes you will do that, obviously, but there’s more to be done at this moment of power.

Having a gesture with people who believed in you, who went out of their way to make effort on your behalf, is a way to close the loop and make sure they know that you appreciate what they did.

It’s not like those people did it because they expected to get thanked or gifted later on.

However, you’re in a moment of power — a big win has happened that you worked hard to achieve. There’s an opening with that, and if you stay humble, and appreciative, and capture some of this energy in a way that sends it back to people in your life that you admire and respect, then it is a way of honoring it, for yourself and for them.

You can say “thank you” in any way that feels right for you, that’s appropriate to the nature of the relationship. Maybe you’ll take your manager out for a drink, or sport for a really nice dinner. Maybe you’ll buy a round of drinks for everyone on your team. Maybe you’ll buy a formal thank-you card from a nice stationery store, and write your appreciate by hand. Maybe it’s a nice box of chocolates that she can take home to her family. Obviously the minimum would be a well-crafted email but our opinion is that this moment deserves more. Reflect on this person. Take some time to think of something meaningful to say. Do more than just thank them. Tell them what you appreciate about them. Share some way that they helped you to develop and grow. Include a small reference to something that they may not even have recognized that was meaningful for you. Make it specific, and personal. Highlight their value to you in some way. Make it explicit.

Or if that all seems like too much, then at least be sure you directly communicate your gratitude and appreciation. Do what feels right to you, based on the nature of the relationship you have with him or her as an individual.

Don’t believe us on the difference it can make?

 

Showing some class, and good manners, at these moments in life will make an impression, especially in this day and age when people seem to always cut corners and be in a rush and it’s easy to forget the niceties of life. But that’s not why you’re doing it. You’re doing it for you. These people did something for you when they didn’t have to, and they clearly did it well enough that the schools want to have you. They didn’t phone it in or just rattle off meaningless answers to the questions that the schools asked for in the recs. (Or maybe they did, but even if so, they still went to the effort of completing them!! and whatever they said didn’t prevent you from getting accepted.) So an acknowledgement and a heart-felt ‘thank you’ is warranted. That’s just about being a decent person.

But what will actually happen if you go to the trouble of doing something more than the minimum is you will capture the magic of this moment in your life, this phase when you’re flying high from your successes, and like embedding in amber, it will crystallize in very fine memories. Those you will have for the rest of your life.

Beginnings and endings are important. You’re in a moment of big transition and these moments will float by so fast. Having a gesture with the people who matter and who have played a role in your life at such times will change you. As they say, sweat the details. The details are all that we have.

 
 
 
 
Just to be clear, this post is not a veiled attempt to get people to say ‘Thank You EssaySnark!!’ — we’re always thrilled to hear of BSers’ acceptances and MBA wins so such emails and updates announcing your admits are certainly fun to receive, but that’s not what this post is about. If you wanna let us know you got in we would love to hear it! But if not, that’s ok too. You should still thank your recommenders, either way. 🙂

Most common mistakes in applying to bschool that won’t get you rejected but also really are not good.

by EssaySnark Leave a Comment

Regardless of what stage of applying you’re in, there are plenty of mistakes you can make. This post has a little bit for everyone! 😉

  • apply in round 3 — this is a weird admissions season and it’s impossible to say how things will be looking at all of these schools by the time their final round appears on the calendar, but we are highly pessimistic that there will be gobs of seats available at any of these programs at that point. We never recommend a Round 3 app because it makes your reapplication efforts all the harder, since it’s highly unlikely it’ll work out. However, there are always exceptions! Our Late Season Targets Review can be useful for input on what you have planned.
  • low GMAT and assume it’s fine — this is the place from which reapplicants are born; ’nuff said. Hopefully you’ve been through the posts on the blahg about low GMAT.
  • low GPA and not taking action — actually, reapplicants are born here too — and no, a high GMAT is not really enough to fully offset poor college academics, but it depends on what the actual stats of the profile are. Lots of posts on academics and low GPA here, too.
  • poor choice of recommenders — this is just a misstep in strategy. We often see some missed opportunities, even fairly major ones, by applicants not understanding the importance of the recommendations (and/or not effectively preparing their recommenders). Check out some of the posts here on the blahg about recommenders.
  • asking the admissions office questions you could find out on your own — no you definitely won’t get rejected for this, but some schools do track contact with candidates, and you don’t want to end up being flagged as “That Guy” (or Gal)
  • believing everything you read on applicant forums — dang there’s a lot of bad information out there! Be careful who you listen to, Brave Supplicant!

If you have a specific situation you want input on, you can use our quick-hit Private Consult service to ask a one-off question, or anyone is always invited to post questions for the ‘Snark publicly here on the blahg — we respond to all comments even those left on posts deep in the ancient ‘snarchives. We’re happy to help if we can!

Again, none of these are necessarily showstoppers, but they’re all unforced errors that can end up being roadblocks, especially if there’s more than one of them occurring at once. Stack them and you run into problems. At this late date, you may have much of your app strategy set in stone, but it’s possible that you can still make adjustments that pay off tremendously — so please enlist our help if you think we can add value!! The Sanity Check is a great way to know how your app chances are looking based on what you have pulled together so far, and if you sign up for that now, you could even get feedback well in time to make significant changes if needed, before that Round 2 deadline shows up.

Good luck to all you scrambling to make Round 2 a reality! We’ll be around if we can provide value to your efforts to submit some great applications.