September is already a week old, putting the round one deadlines for a number of programs just around the corner. With most applicants targeting multiple schools and many of them still working to narrow down their school selection, we wanted to take some time today to stress the importance of taking a deep breath and a step back, and formulating a timeline for the coming weeks. Establishing a set of incremental goals with regard to essay composition, recommender management and, if applicable, GMAT preparation at this relatively early point in the season will help you to avoid feeling overwhelmed and ensure that your aims are realistic.
One of our most important pointers pertains to the process of writing essays. The urge to make progress on multiple fronts leads many applicants to work on essays for several schools in parallel, an approach that can be problematic. One reason for this is that when one spends time immersed in three sets of essays at once, it’s easy to lose sight of the full picture he or she is presenting to any one school. While it’s important to be oneself in the application process, it’s also crucial that an applicant tailor his or her materials to each school, a process that is made harder when constantly going back and forth among responses for various programs. Another issue is that it’s easy to waste time implementing the same edits across documents for multiple schools, or to lose track of what one has changed in which essay. For these reasons, we generally recommend focusing one’s full essay-writing attention on one program at a time.
Of course, your writing and story will improve with practice, and the last application you finish will likely be your strongest: a tricky situation, given that most applicants take care of their top choice school first to ensure that they’re able to submit in the earliest possible round. With this in mind, we recommend that you build space into your timeline to allow yourself to revisit and revise each set of essays before submission.
The order in which you tackle tasks will naturally depend on the deadlines for each school. With this in mind, let’s take a look at this fall’s deadline calendar:
October 9: Cornell
October 11: Harvard, Columbia ED*
October 12: Tuck EA**, Wharton
October 18: INSEAD, Chicago
October 19: Darden EA**
October 20: Kellogg, LBS
October 25: Stanford, UCLA, Yale
October 27: Kenan-Flagler EA**
November 1: Fuqua, MIT Sloan, Michigan, Emory
November 6: Haas, CMU
December 1: NYU Stern
* ED = Early Decision
** EA = Early Action
Best of luck to all of our readers who are presently working their way through the lenghty application process. Stay tuned to this blog for additional tips, news and notes as the admissions season unfolds.
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