Columbia J-Term Application up on 4/20

For those considering or planning to apply to the Columbia Business School January Term 2010 Program, the application will be up on the web on April 20. I intend to analyze it immediately once available. In the meantime, you can find my previous posts on Columbia January 2009 Term, Early Decision, September 2009 Term, and interviews. It will be interesting to see what questions they ask for January 2010 term.

I expect that the number of January Term applications will be huge, so getting one in early would be a very good idea.


NEED MBA ADMISSIONS CONSULTING?
If you are looking for a highly experienced admissions consultant who is passionate about helping his clients succeed, please feel free to contact me at adammarkus@gmail.com to arrange an initial consultation. Initial consultations are conducted by Skype or telephone. For clients in Tokyo, a free face-to-face consultation is possible after an initial Skype or telephone consultation. I only work with a limited number of clients per year and believe that an initial consultation is the best way to determine whether there is a good fit. Whether you use my service or another, I suggest making certain that the fit feels right to you.

-Adam Markus
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ビジネススクール MBA留学 コロンビアビジネススクール

TO FALL 2009 ADMITTED BLOG READERS

Congratulations!

If I don't have the opportunity to congratulate you in person, at least I can give you a virtual toast.


If the advice on my blog helped you get admitted to an MBA, LL.M., Public Policy, or other type of graduate program, I would love to hear about it. Please feel free to leave comments or email me at adammarkus@gmail.com.

Cheers,
Adam
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Steve Green: Graduate School Blues

In this post, Steve looks at one of the darker sides of graduate school.
-Adam

GRADUATE SCHOOL BLUES

This post addresses a potential and serious bad side-effect of being a graduate student but offers some pointers for applicants to help avoid or minimize it.

Graduate school can make you unhappy. If you already prone to feeling unhappy, then grad school can make you even more unhappy. That’s the main point of an article by Piper Fogg, “Grad School Blues,” in the February 20, 2009 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (available online to subscribers or buyers of a short-term pass.) The author notes that:

Graduate school is gaining a reputation as an incubator for anxiety and depression.

Honestly, having been to grad school I am surprised only at the statement’s implication that it had not already earned this reputation. Happily, the issue raised by this article does not apply to everyone, but I firmly believe that everyone should be aware of the potential impact of grad school on their emotional well-being.

Applying to graduate school? You are probably thinking about the financial costs (i.e. tuition, books, costs of living) and opportunity costs (i.e. the income you would be earning if you were not in graduate school). You should also consider the potential emotional costs. Obviously, these are impossible to quantify and calculate and will vary greatly according to your own emotional resources as well as to the type of students and faculty in any given grad program.

Everyone I knew in graduate school, beginning with myself, felt intimidated, frustrated, lonely, and, in some cases, simply depressed at one time or another.

Fogg notes:

Social isolation, financial burdens, lack of structure, and the pressure to produce groundbreaking work can wear heavily on graduate students, especially those already vulnerable to mental-health disorders.

Graduate students face threats to their self-confidence and basic happiness on multiple fronts including a heavy intellectual workload, having to subject written and verbal analytical skills to the scrutiny of peers and professors several times every week (one of my grad school friends spoke for many of us when she lamented that she felt like she was constantly having to prove she was “smart enough”), the solitary nature of the process (are you prepared to spend almost all of your waking hours outside of class reading and writing?) and probably living on the same shoestring budget that barely kept your head above water as an undergraduate (which is no fun, of course, but especially frustrating when your working professional friends are earning decent salaries and you constantly have to decline their offers to vacation together or even to meet for a nice dinner.) In addition:

"Grad students are in a remarkable position of powerlessness," says Thomas B. Jankowski, an adjunct assistant professor of political science and gerontology at Wayne State University who runs PhinisheD, an online support group to help graduate students finish their dissertations. Often a single thesis adviser seems to control a student's destiny, he notes…

And to make matters worse:

it can take years to finish a dissertation. And even if a student finishes, success on the job market is far from guaranteed; today's poor economy has only worsened job prospects.

In a nutshell, graduate school can challenge even the most confident of personalities.

What can you do now as an applicant? As noted above, determining the potential emotional costs of earning a grad degree is not nearly as clear-cut as figuring out the financial and opportunity costs, but you can minimize them by doing the following:

1. Take the Socratic adage to heart: KNOW THYSELF! Be honest about how happy and self-confident you are in general and, in light of the conditions of grad school described above, assess whether or not you’ll risk deep unhappiness by going to grad school now. Furthermore, ask yourself over and over again if you really want to go to graduate school or are applying because it “seems” like the right thing to do or because you are avoiding something else. These kinds of reasons can put you on the fast track to unhappiness once grad school starts.

2. KNOW THE GRAD STUDENTS: As you gather information about grad programs, contact student representatives of those programs and ask them frank questions about the quality of life in the department and the city or town. Try to find out how cooperative and congenial current students are with each other. Graduate-school work is solitary work, but that does not mean each student is an island unto himself. In the graduate program at the Dept. of Politics of the University of Virginia (UVa.) I was really pleased by how friendly and supportive students were with each other. We formed study groups to meet outside class and often socialized. In grad school I met some of current best friends, people I will be close to for the rest of my life.

3. KNOW THE FACULTY: When you contact grad students you should also try to learn their opinion of faculty. Ask them about the availability of professors for grad students outside of class hours, and about whether and to what degree faculty support grad students in finding internships, funding, and publishing opportunities. Find out if they like most of their professors. On this point I was also highly satisfied with my own grad program. The professors in my department were extremely friendly, supportive and available, even as they were highly demanding and challenging. I have known people at other programs and in various fields who could not say the same thing and they envy the collegial atmosphere of my department.

4. KNOW ACADEMIA: In addition to reading up on academic work in your field of interest, I encourage you to read publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Insider Higher Ed, both of which provide excellent in-depth coverage of news related to higher education from the perspectives of students, professors and administrators. If you read these regularly you will gain a valuable perspective on the business- in both a literal and metaphorical sense of the word- of higher education and graduate school, which can only help you to assess your fit for any grad program in particular and for graduate school in general.

As always, good luck! Please don’t hesitate to make comments on this post if you have any questions, I am always happy to try to answer them.

To learn more about my graduate admissions consulting services, please click here.
- H. Steven ("Steve") Green, グリーン・ハロルド・スティーブン

大学院留学 カリフォルニア大学バークレー校

Steve Green: Start Early! Start Now!

In this post, Steve discusses the importance of starting early for those planning on Fall 2010 admission.

-Adam

START EARLY. START NOW!

Applying to graduate school disproves the old adage that “Good things come to those who wait.” Wait too long to prepare your graduate school application and you risk having a bad thing come to you- failure to enter a school of your choice.

This post presents a list of to-dos for the period between now and when you can actually access schools’ application forms.

It’s only April but I’ve already acquired new clients who are applying for graduate school programs for 2010. Online and paper application forms will not be available until late in the summer so: Isn’t it too early to begin preparing your graduate school application? No!

You should prepare as far ahead of program deadlines as possible. Most US grad school applications are not available until the end of August or beginning of September and most deadlines are somewhere between mid-December and mid-January.

If you wait until you can download them you will have a narrow window of time in which to complete all of your applications. Many people do, in fact, wait until fall to take any action on their application. They seem to treat the actual release of the forms as an official starting line for the application process and become stressed as they race to accomplish so much in so little time.

As an admission consultant it is frustrating to watch highly successful, intelligent people risk handicapping their chances by writing essays in an agitated, worried frame of mind as they struggle mightily to accomplish many things in November and December that they could have done earlier.

If you are a full-time student or professional you will need to budget your time carefully. A great way to do so is to have less to do when application season “formally” commences.

Here are four things to start doing now. I summarize them first and say more about each below.

• Get the test monkey off your back before you start writing essay drafts!

Prepare for any tests required as part of the application. Learn what the test requires, what the minimum accepted scores for each school are, and then aim to reach your highest possible score before this fall, if possible.

• Start researching graduate programs. I provide a useful link below. Plan to know which programs you will apply to by August.

• Decide whom to request as your recommendation letter writers and contact them now.

• Brainstorm and outline possible essay topics.

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. Prepare for the GRE, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT and any other test you may have to take as part of an application Non-native English speaking applicants to North American universities will almost certainly have to take the TOEFL. For more about test preparation, see Adam's earlier posts on the subject.

• First, find out which test you have to take. Applying to graduate school in the arts and sciences? You’ll probably need to take the GRE. Law school? The LSAT. Medical school? The MCAT. Business school? The GMAT (and/or for some schools, the GRE).

• Next, if you are unfamiliar with the contents of the test you will have to take, then visit the website of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which is the sole creator and administrator of most university, graduate- and professional school aptitude exams. For GMAT, which is administered by GMAC, see here. (Disclosure: I am an annual reader for ETS Advanced Placement exams in Comparative Politics. These exams are administered to high school students. My clients do not include high school student applicants to universities. The content of this blog does not in any way, shape or form represent the views of ETS.)

• Go to your favorite bookstore (ADAM'S ONLINE BOOKSTORE IS A GREAT PLACE TO START) or library and get a practice book for the test you will take. These usually contain multiple practice exams and you should simulate actual exam conditions a few times before you take the test “for real.” In addition to official guides published by GMAC and ETS, popular test-prep book publishers include Barron’s, Kaplan, Peterson’s, and The Princeton Review. PLEASE DON'T ASK EITHER ADAM OR I FOR ADVICE ON WHICH OF THESE BOOKS TO USE, WE ARE NOT TEST PREP GURUS! That said, some combination of an official guide and test prep books is the way many applicants start to prepare.
  

• Find out if your local university or community college offers test-prep courses. Many do and enrollment is typically open to anyone.

• Think about taking test-prep class. At the best schoools, the teachers usually are hired only after obtaining a score in the top 1-2 percentile and can introduce you to time saving strategies for answering questions. Way, way back in the pre-Internet age I took the GRE without studying for it. Armed with high self-confidence and the notion that the test would be a glorified version of the ACT(an undergraduate entrance exam) - on which I earned a high score without any preparation - I entered the examination hall sure I’d ace it. I did not. As a Christmas present, my family purchased a space for me in a test prep class, and I earned the score I needed for my target schools. (This was so long ago that I do not remember the actual name of the business. The teachers were good, though.)

• Also consider online courses as they may offer the same value to you as a live course depending on your needs.
  

• If you are taking the time to read this blog, you probably do not possess that fatal combination of ignorance and arrogance that I had. Perhaps you are disciplined enough to study on your own. Perhaps you need the structure of a classroom setting. Do what works best for your own habits and learning style and aim to get the highest possible score. For more about learning style, see Adam's earlier post.
  

A note on why test scores matter: Admissions committees rely on these a) as indicators for potential success and b) as a factor for awarding limited graduate scholarships and awards to incoming students. The higher your score, the more valuable your application becomes on these two points. Furthermore, many schools set a minimum expected test score and will not review essays and recommendation letters from applicants whose test scores do not meet the threshold.

2. If you've chosen your field, then begin researching programs.

• A good combination of databases from which you can start a search are GradSchools.com and US News & World Report’s annual guide to America’s Best Graduate Schools. The former can help you find most any program within a particular field and link you to that program’s homepage. The USN&WR guide tells you which programs in a given field are ranked the highest and why.

• My MPA/MPP posts have links to great databases for finding schools and the details about them. You can fine the first post here.

• Talk to people you know in your chosen field and find out where they went to graduate school and why they entered a particular program.

• Find out where the scholars and experts whose work has most influenced your thinking attended graduate school.

3. Choose whom you will ask to be your recommenders and contact them as soon as you know which field you wish to pursue. It is too soon to obtain the recommendation forms for most schools, but you can never let potential recommenders know early enough that you seek their help. Think about sending them a polite note requesting their recommendation, letting them know your plans and promising to send them the necessary links/forms as soon as you obtain them yourself.

4. Start brainstorming for your resume and Statement of Purpose. Begin thinking about what your different strengths are and which of your accomplishments best illustrate them.

• First, determine your specific career goals. For a fantastic way to identify your career goals see Adam's advice and methods here. I always send this particular post to my clients and they have all found it extremely helpful.

• Prepare your resume or CV. My guide to producing a resume is here,

The following points are copied and condensed from the first of my two posts on writing a statement of purpose (SOP) essay for most graduate school programs (outside of business schools.) For a complete, detailed summary of how to write an SOP I hope you will look both of my posts.

• Choose several accomplishments from your resume/CV to write about in your SOP. Choose accomplishments that illustrate the strengths that will help you to succeed in graduate school. Highlight different skills, i.e. do not use different accomplishments that illustrate the same strength.

• Decide how you can distinguish yourself. Assume that everyone applying to the same programs is as qualified as you. (After all, everyone who is accepted will, as will be many who are not accepted.)

• What makes you unique? Think about this in terms of marketing yourself: Figure out how to stand out in a field of qualified applicants.

SUMMARY & CONCLUSION

Ideally you should have only two things to do this fall: Write essays and complete application forms, including collecting recommendation letters and/or confirming they have been sent directly to schools when necessary. By August you should have obtained a strong test score, selected your target graduate programs, secured commitments for letters of recommendation. Between late summer and mid-December or January you should focus on writing the best possible graduate application essays, free of other application-related worries.

You probably don't need to do work on these things every day between now and this fall, but if you keep them in the back of your mind now then they'll get to the front of your mind, and onto your notebook or computer screen sooner rather than later.

GOOD LUCK!

- H. Steven Green

For questions regarding this post, please contact me at h.steven.green@gmail.com. To learn more about my graduate admissions consulting services, please click here.
- H. Steven ("Steve") Green, グリーン・ハロルド・スティーブン

大学院留学 カリフォルニア大学バークレー校 マクスウェルスクール シラキューズ大学 ハーバード大学ケネディスクール コロンビア大学の国際関係・公共政策大学院（通称SIPA)

Guest Blogger Steve Green is Back

My guest blogger and colleague, Steve Green, is back!
-Adam


Hi, I’m back! After an extended break from guest-blogging, I am glad to be back on the blog, home of the very best MBA admissions information. Due to higher than expected demand, clients kept me busier than I’d anticipated this past application season.

I am pleased to report that all of my graduate clients gained admittance to one or more of their target schools. My clients are highly accomplished and intelligent and were accepted to prestigious schools. My MPP/MPA clients were accepted to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (KSG), the School of International & Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia, and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins, among others.

I was also fortunate to work with a talented professional in the field of urban planning & development who gained admittance to Columbia’s School of Urban Design, among other programs. I truly enjoyed working with my clients this past season and am proud to have helped to play a part in the realization of their dreams.

What were the secrets of their success? In addition to what you might expect- great essays, GPAs, test scores, and references- I believe all of my clients succeeded for two reasons:

First, they started working on their essays well ahead of admissions deadlines (as well as on their entire application package).

Second, they worked diligently on their essays by devoting most of their free time to composing and revising their drafts until they’d created compositions that revealed their most excellent stories in the best-possible style and form.

I’ve already acquired new clients for the next application season. I am impressed at their early start to this process and I am excited to get to know more about their professional and academic dreams.

Whatever your grad school dreams are, I hope you will devote the necessary time and energy to achieving them! Good luck!

- H. Steven Green

For questions regarding this post, please contact me at h.steven.green@gmail.com. To learn more about my graduate admissions consulting services, please click here.
- H. Steven ("Steve") Green, グリーン・ハロルド・スティーブン 大学院留学 カリフォルニア大学バークレー校 マクスウェルスクール シラキューズ大学 ハーバード大学ケネディスクール コロンビア大学の国際関係・公共政策大学院（通称SIPA)