UVA And Dartmouth Done

Both apps are complete, though I won't submit them until I've got the recommendations done. See this post for why.

I think they're pretty good applications.

The trickiest one for me is Dartmouth's "How will you contribute to culture at Tuck?" It's hard to know just how widely to write. How can you cover personality, values, background, and life experiences in 500 words without resorting to a bullet list? I am not sure you can, unless you've got some perfect story that happens to encapsulate them all. This means that you have to sacrifice a few.

Same issue with the same essay for Duke, although they say "diversity" instead of "culture." I'm pretty sure they mean the same thing.

I rather liked the UVA essays, but I'm concerned that they don't paint the whole picture. There's no room to talk about my career experiences, for example, except to whatever extend they support my point about leadership experience. Bummer.

So at this point I've got three apps submitted (Berkeley, Harvard, Duke), two apps done (UVA and Dartmouth), and two apps outstanding (Kellogg and Staford).

Unfortunately those last two really are completely outstanding. The only work I've done on them is really work that I've done for other apps that happens to transfer well. There isn't an awful lot of that. Even when I have good raw materials to work with, I'll still have to a lot of reshaping.