Today’s word: Essays

Only eight days until the November 15 Early Notification deadline.  As there are hundreds of applications awaiting submission (most of which won’t turn up here until January) and only 15 ready for review, I’ll guess that this is still a good time to point you toward past blog posts about application essays.  You may already have noticed that we have a whole category-worth of Admissions Tips.  And then there’s a tag that captures everything we’ve written about the essays.  For all the TLDR folks out there, I will summarize all the many posts this way:

Read the essay questions/topics.  Write the essays.  Follow the instructions regarding word count etc. (knowing that your essay will not be truncated if it goes a word over the limit, but we’ll know if it goes 100 words too long).  Review what you’ve written and check that you’ve answered the question.  Ask someone else to review what you’ve written and check that you’ve answered the question.  Proofread.  Be sure you haven’t left in a reference to another graduate school.  (Yes, it happens.)

That’s it — the secret sauce.  Of course, if you comb through all the posts, you’ll gather other details and also learn about my personal pet peeve: highfalutin vocabulary that randomly drops into an otherwise ordinary essay.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about essays before the January deadline, but I hope today’s brief post will arrive at the right time for November 15 applicants in the proofreading phase, and will also set January applicants up to start their writing.