Roxana’s List of Admissions Tips

The real application guru in our office is Roxana, who has been my main source of admissions tips. I’m sure that many of you are hard at work to meet our January 15 deadline, so I’m going to include all the rest of Roxana’s suggestions in this one entry.

I believe that we have had seven tips previously, so here goes:

Tip #8 is: Make sure you know which school you are applying to, and be sure to double-check that you are uploading the correct Personal Statement and Supplemental Essay. Obvious, I know, but the number of essays we receive that were written for another school makes me think more people need to pay attention to the next tip.

Tip #9 is: Always edit your essays. Read and re-read them making sure there are no grammatical errors. (See #8 for other things you should be looking for.)

Tip #10 is: Do not expect to have your transcripts sent back to you. Once you submit materials as part of your application, we cannot return them.

Tip #11: If your culture is one of the many that puts surname (family name) before given name, be sure you make your surname clear to us in all documents and correspondence. It can be very confusing for us (and lead to lost documents) if correspondence comes in alternately for Yao Ming and Ming Yao. Not that this Houston Rockets basketball professional is applying this year. But if he were applying, we would want him to remember to include his legal name on all documents, even if he sometimes goes by Mike Yao, or some other adopted English name. (And he should remind his recommenders to do so, too!)

Those are all the tips I have at this time. I’ll see if any more come to mind in the next few weeks as we read Early Notification applications, and then I’ll index them all for future use.