Advice on applying to business, grad, law, and medical school.
Rank #1: Med School Admissions Veteran Shares Her Experience: How to Get In.
Accepted admissions consultant Cydney Foote sheds light on the medical school application process [Show Summary]Are you not quite ready to submit your AMCAS application? Don’t panic. We’ve got the advice you need to polish off your personal statement, MMEs, and activity descriptions. Listen to the podcast for answers to “How many schools should you apply to?” “How should you choose where to apply?” “What’s the difference between the personal statement, the most meaningful experiences, and the activity descriptions.” Plus we’ll give you some tips on how to manage a deluge of secondaries and even your residency personal statement.Cydney Foote shares her tips for applying successfully to medical school [Show Notes]Our guest today, Cydney Foote, has been a medical school admissions consultant since she started at Accepted in 2001. Needless to say, she’s helped hundreds of happy clients get accepted to allopathic and osteopathic medical schools as well as residency programs. During this podcast she’ll address some of the most common questions we get and also some of the most common myths out there about med school admissions.When this show airs it will be June 4. The first day to submit the AMCAS this year was May 31. If applicants haven’t submitted already, are they “late?” Have they missed the boat and is their application already doomed to the reject pile? [2:30]That is a really good question, and people panic about this every year. To be honest it is one of the biggest myths out there that you need to get your application in on the first day. From recent years I know that even those who submitted on June 7th had their information sent the same time as those who submitted the first day. A week or two later than the first submission date is not late, but if you are getting into July and August that is not the ideal time to apply. I’ll also say, though, that it is really important for you to apply when you are ready. If you are a week away from getting what you need, it is far better to submit a week or two into June than start rushing.How do you advise applicants to select the schools they are applying to? [3:55]I look at the stats first – what’s the lowest accepted value of MCAT and cumulative GPA. If it is in the range, then I look at acceptance rates. Are they looking to apply someplace that only accepts a very small percentage of out-of-state applicants, or do they have an overall low acceptance rate? If so, those may not be the top picks. You want to choose a mix of schools where you are competitive, but also a few reach schools. I think a lot of people overweight their reach schools – while they might reach the lowest accepted value, they are not near the mean. Once the quant factors are set, then it is digging into the schools themselves – looking at position statements, or specialties you are interested in. You have to make the connection with what the applicant wants. In-state vs. out-of-state matters, too.Linda: Accepted has the Med School Selectivity Index of almost all allopathic and osteopathic schools, and also tools that show acceptance rates in-state and out-of-state.How many schools do you recommend they apply to or does that vary by client? [7:30]It really varies. Some people just apply to a handful for whatever reason – the fewer you apply to, the more you need the higher stats and connections. I have some who only apply to 3-4 schools because they had done research at the particular schools or have other connections. I think most people who have more average stats apply to 20-25 schools and some to as many as 30 schools. Some apply to a lot of allopathic and osteopathic schools. Keep in mind that you will have secondaries for a lot of those schools and you don’t want to overburden yourself. You can actually stagger your secondaries so they don’t come all at the same time, which is often a good strategy - you only need to select one school for your AMCAS application to be verified.
Rank #2: The Interviewer Becomes the Interviewee.
Accepted Founder Linda Abraham Provides an Inside Look at the World of Admissions [Show Summary]For 299 episodes, Linda Abraham, founder of Accepted, has interviewed school deans, admissions directors, students, and more. Today we learn about her!The Interviewer Becomes the Interviewee [Show Notes]Linda Abraham: This is our 300th episode and since those round numbers seem to beg for special treatment, I decided to do something that members of my staff for several years have asked me to do: Be the interviewee.Jen Weld, Accepted admissions consultant and former assistant/associate director of admissions at Cornell Johnson’s EMBA program is going to be the interviewer. I’m going to turn the mic over to her and climb into the hot seat.Jen Weld: Our “guest” today, Linda Abraham, attended UCLA for both her bachelors in Political Science and her MBA. She started Accepted in 1994 as Linda Abraham & Associates. After putting up Accepted’s first web site in 1996, the company was incorporated as Accepted.com in 1997. Linda is also the co-founder of the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants and the co-author of MBA Admissions for Smarties. She has been sought by the media, including CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Poets & Quants, Bloomberg Businessweek, and others for her admissions expertise.Linda, welcome to AST!Can you tell us a bit about your background and why you decided to start Accepted? [2:48]When I was a senior in college there was a lot of concern about declining writing abilities based on the “nefarious influence” of television in the 1960s. UCLA, where I was a student, was increasing writing requirements for Poli Sci 1, and I was asked to be a tutor for that course. I was a Poli Sci major but also had taken a lot of English courses for a non-English major. I loved the tutoring and editing work - helping individuals clarify their ideas and get them down on paper was really rewarding to me - but I didn’t think I could make a living at it.I am a child of immigrants, which meant that I needed a defined profession – a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, for example. My parents weren’t very happy when I graduated and I didn’t know what direction I wanted to go in, so they were relieved when I decided to go for an MBA. About halfway through the program I got married, and shortly after graduation in 1979 my husband and I started our family. In the early 90s my husband and I needed some more money to make ends meet. I had gotten my real estate license but was no longer enjoying the work, and I wanted to work from home to be more available for our six children, who at the time ranged in age from 3-12. I decided to go back to editing which I loved, and advertised in UCLA’s paper, the Daily Bruin, and got work. I was frequently asked to edit personal statements and application essays, and I’ve always loved biographies, personal stories, and historical fiction - a lot more fun than research papers! I also experimented with writing experience pieces and studied journalistic techniques. I realized that if applicants applied journalistic techniques to their personal statements and application essays, those pieces would be much more effective.The other major development coming on to the commercial scene at the time was the internet, which removed all geographic boundaries. Initially I was able to work with people maybe 30 minutes away, and suddenly I could work with people in Hong Kong, India, anywhere! Initially we would be faxing applications back and forth. When I started applications were all paper-based, then it was disc-based, and then web-based. Similarly, the way the Accepted team and I communicated with clients evolved over time, from phone/fax to email, Skype, video conferencing, etc.How has admissions evolved? [6:34]One of the biggest differences is that most information about the programs was provided by the schools in the beginning.
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