Resources to Help You With Graduate Applications
In this post, I decided to share with you my favorite resources about graduate applications.
You'll see that most of them target specific subsets of applicants, such as applicants to American law schools, MBA applicants, PhD applicants, and the like.
Still, I found all of them incredibly helpful when I myself applied for a master of laws (LLM) and later for the PhD.
I hope you will find them useful as well.
1. Application Strategy: MBA Admissions by A.V. Gordon
The MBA Admissions Strategy by A.V. Gordon is one of my favorites, even though it primarily targets a very particular type of master's applicants - MBA applicants.
Useful advice that's applicable to pretty much any graduate application:
- the admissions committee - your audience and their expectations
- how to market yourself to the admissions committee
- brainstorming your essays, writing your first drafts and revising them until they are ready for submission
- various techniques and advice on how to improve your written English
For MBA applicants it's a must.
2. Personal Statements: Chicago Samples
The title of this resource speaks for itself: In Their Own Words: Admissions Essays That Worked. These are examples of personal statements by people who applied to Chicago Law School and got in.
Useful for building vocabulary in English to think about your life, your achievements, and values.
3. Letters of Recommendation: Through the Looking Glass
Exploring the Color of Glass by American researchers Frances Trix and Carolyn Psenka is absolutely crucial if your recommender asked you to write a draft of the letter for their review. Equally valuable if your recommender showed you a draft of the letter and asked you to comment on it.
This is a study of language used in letters of recommendation for medical school faculty, in particular the analysis of the differences in letters written for female vs male applicants.
It was truly eye-opening for me. The study talks not only about the gender schemas that are often reinforced by letters of recommendation (for instance, male applicants are often described as 'leaders doing groundbreaking research', while female applicants as 'diligent and hard-working students'), but generally about vocabulary that weakens your application. This includes mentions of irrelevant facts, faint praise, negative language, unexplained comments, words related to ability and training, and the like.
If you want to write a powerful letter of recommendation, this article is an incredibly useful resource regardless of your gender identification.
A tip for writing letters of recommendation: Reverse the pronouns in your draft, eg female to male and male to female. If the letter sounds strange, you probably need to rewrite it.
4. Vocabulary: The Gates Cambridge Scholars
I am talking about the profiles of the Gates Cambridge Scholarship recipients.
This one might seem unusual.
When I was writing my very first personal statement, I did not have the English vocabulary to think about myself, let alone write a coherent piece of narrative. And so I hunted the web for samples of personal statements, motivations letters, and biographies of current students.
That's how I found short bios of current scholars on the Gates Cambridge Scholarship website. You'll need to go to the website, find the directory of scholars, and read the profiles. You can filter them by country, year, and discipline.
They are usually quite short, so you'll be able to read a lot of them, and they will help you understand how to present yourself in English. It's going to be very helpful when you are writing your personal statements, motivation letters, and other essays.
5. Personal Statements: Top-law-schools Guide
This Guide to Personal Statements is tailored for American law school applicants (for the JD program, rather than LLM) but a lot of its advice is applicable across disciplines.
What I loved about it is that they not only give you examples of personal statements, but they also analyze them. They rate each personal statement on a scale from 1 to 10 and explain what works, what doesn't, and why.
This guide contains tons of writing advice as well.