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Tuesday, August 4, 2015

What are UCLA's magic words?

Admission used to be easier
From:  USE THESE TWO WORDS ON YOUR COLLEGE ESSAY TO GET INTO HARVARD

...WHAT DO YOU CALL YOUR PARENTS?
The terms "father" and "mother" appeared more frequently in successful Harvard essays, while the term "mom" and "dad" appeared more frequently in successful Stanford essays.

HARVARD LIKES DOWNER ESSAYS
AdmitSee found that negative words tended to show up more on essays accepted to Harvard than essays accepted to Stanford. For example, ..."cancer," "difficult," "hard," and "tough" appeared more frequently on Harvard essays, while "happy," "passion," "better," and "improve" appeared more frequently in Stanford essays.

STUDENTS WHO TAKE RISKS WITH THE CONTENT AND THE STRUCTURE OF THEIR COLLEGE ESSAYS TEND TO BE MORE SUCCESSFUL ACROSS THE BOARD.
This also had to do with the content of the essays. At Harvard, admitted students tended to write about challenges they had overcome in their life or academic career, while Stanford tended to prefer creative personal stories, or essays about family background or issues that the student cares about. "Extrapolating from this qualitative data, it seems like Stanford is more interested in the student's personality, while Harvard appears to be more interested in the student's track record of accomplishment" ...

With further linguistic analysis, AdmitSee found that the most common words on Harvard essays were "experience," "society," "world," "success," "opportunity." At Stanford, they were "research," "community," "knowledge," "future" and "skill."

WHAT THE OTHER IVIES CARE ABOUT
It turns out, Brown favors essays about volunteer and public interest work, while these topics rank low among successful Yale essays. In addition to Harvard, successful Princeton essays often tackle experiences with failure. Meanwhile, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania tend to accept students who write about their career aspirations. Essays about diversity—race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation—tend to be more popular at Stanford, Yale, and Brown...

Full story at http://www.fastcompany.com/3049289/most-creative-people/use-these-two-words-on-your-college-essay-to-get-into-harvard

Words don't come easy when you're trying to express your love for a university:


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