Sunday, August 24, 2008

Recommenders, Editors and Contacts.... Ahoy!

Essays are the most important factor...
You have got to concentrate on your essays...
Essays take up 80-90% of your app time...
Essays this and Essays that... so much has been said and written about it that one tends to marginalize the other factors of the application (I know I did!) and then when you actually get down to filling up all those other blanks the enormity of the 'small' tasks strike you!

I have been having an especially bad time with it all (that's not to say that my essay-writing is going great guns but facing trouble when you expected a cake-walk can be very stressful). Over the last couple of weeks, I have talking with my recommender #1, prepping him and feeling quite confident after the experience I was ready to approach recommender #2 when I get the mail that he would be on vacation the next week!! Woah! I did not see that coming.... now its nothing to be overly worried about, you say, but considering I would be going on a vacation soon after I had planned everything such that I have all my recos worked out long before then... and now I would have to re-plan, 1 week delay equals less time for me to prep him equals less time for him to put his words of praise equals less impressive reco :(

On the essay front, I have been working on 4 essays at the same time (working on one essay for more than a day gives me a severe case of mental block) for almost 2 weeks now but I am no where near submitting them... I dont feel confident enuf, hell, I dont feel like reading them myself (but that's probably because thats all the reading I have been doing lately... ) Nyways, I think I desperately neeed some editors - a couple atleast - but people who know me don't know the Bschool app process and because of my technical background, I don't know any Bschool grads! Another thing being, the essays bring out so much personal stuff about you that it is really difficult to just hand it over to someone for review... Its not just the essay they are judging, its ME! (probably a good thing from the adcom perspective but not so good when looking for editors)

That brings me to another issue that is causing me some headache... no Bschool contacts! Be it current students or past alumni... I just cant seem to be able to get in touch wid any... probably I haven't tried hard enuf, probably I havent tried all my sources, probably I am just not doing it right! Watever be the case, I know that making some contacts is imperative and that is what I will be concentrating on over the next coupla weeks, apart from the essays, the recos, the forms, the editor-hunt, the research...

All this before I go on my eagerly-awaited vacation! Adios...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No B-school contacts??
SHould not be a cause of worry.. Just locate some student-ambassadors on the school-site from your geographical area/career-backgraound/hobbies and drop a mail to those with your queries..

From my experience (and one of my froend's), I can assure you that most of them will respond. I've tried this with Ross (one of ur target schools) and have got replies from 3 out of 4 I hav contacted..

Coronet said...

thanks for that! My experience with Ross has been the exact opposite... dropped a couple of mails and never got any response :(
Well, I guess I will have to try again...