Amber Smith asked: After you’ve finished one graduate school application, you probably won’t be excited about completing more. In fact, you might have even left out a few keys for creating a great graduate school application the first time. Try the following to improve you grad school application and your chances for success.
Short and Sweet
You might be tempted to ramble on forever about your accomplishments or activities. Please don’t do it. The admissions officers have to read a lot of applications, and they don’t want to read pages and pages of information about you. It doesn’t make you look better; it makes you annoying.
But Complete
Although your application should be short and sweet, it should also be complete. You want to give all the information required in the most precise way possible. Make sure you go over the application a couple of times to make sure that you didn’t leave anything out. Often people forget to mark a box or fill in a blank, and that can slow down the application process by days or weeks.
Essays
When it comes to completing your graduate school application, the hardest part is writing the essays, particularly if you have been out of school for a while and are out of practice. You should try to fill out the rest of the application early so that you will have more than enough time to write a great essay.
In your essay, be sure that you use specific examples. If possible, tell a story instead of just straight facts. It will be a lot more interesting. Try to use active verbs rather than passive ones to make your story more interesting and readable. Just like with the applications, the admissions officers and program directors have to read a lot of essays, so you want your to be the interesting one that they still remember at the end of the process.
Proofread
Please make sure you proofread before you turn in your application and essays. If your documents include a lot of misspelled or missing words, the program will likely consider you to be irresponsible and unorganized. Have an old teacher or a friend look over the documents to make sure that everything is correct before you submit it.
Henry