<p>Here are my own rules (for all colleges in general with respect to admissions). You can agree or disagree with them as you see fit, but they sure as heck worked for me and I had very good luck (14/15 schools):</p>
<li><p>Be honest to yourself, and don’t try to craft yourself as someone you’re not through your essays and such. Your application will be the strongest when you focus on your strong suits and emphasize those ideas. Everyone who performs “self-inflation” on their application usually does it in the same, predictable way – and I think the admissions officers can spot this instantly.</p></li>
<li><p>Don’t inflate your hours. Odds are you are not keeping a 4.0 GPA while doing 80 hours of extra stuff a week. Yeah, you may be smart, but you’re not an omnipotent robot, here. Even if you are a robot, you’re probably not being true to your passions. </p></li>
<li><p>Spellcheck everything. Even if spellchecker says everything is fine, check it again for grammar and word usage. Your spellchecker will miss something like “He was quite asinine,” when you really meant to say “astute.” We haven’t exactly invented a Carelessnesscheck yet. Have other people read your essays if you’re really unsure about grammar and spelling.</p></li>
<li><p>While people at Penn do call it Penn, don’t freak out if you say UPenn or something. That’s a ridiculous thing to worry about on an application.</p></li>
<li><p>Keeping essays to a page is usually a good idea (but nobody is gonna care if it’s a few words or sentences longer or shorter. The officers just don’t want to be reading a thousand novels a day). Getting to the point is the idea here, but doing so in a way that is presented in an insightful way. Cut out flowery sentences that don’t add anything other than “Look at the cool vocab I can use.” If it doesn’t show anything new, scrap it. Showing is usually stronger than telling… don’t just say “My brother was a complete bunghole” – show them why. Maybe he replaced your toothpaste with Preparation H, or sold your dog for crack, or enjoyed breath-holding contests (only you were the only one underwater). You get the idea. </p></li>
<li><p>Speaking of that, don’t send in sheets upon sheets of extra recs and resume material unless it shows something entirely new or noteworthy. How many recommendations are you gonna have them read that say nothing other than “This student pwns face”… they’ll get the picture. Quality, not quantity here. Would you be less inclined to accept an applicant that made you read twice as much as was requested? Probably.</p></li>
<li><p>The admissions officers know everyone is human. Don’t freak out if you don’t have SAT scores that are all 750+, or if your GPA isn’t perfect. There are plenty of foolish douchebags who have 2350’s and lots of amazing, personable individuals who barely broke 670 on each test. They evaluate you holistically – always keep that in mind. Good essays and recommendations have more weight than you think. Don’t look at statistics and assume you’re already out of the picture. Lots of cool stuff has happened by those who have gone up against the odds.</p></li>
<li><p>Be sure you can actually see yourself attending the school you’re applying to. Passion is strong and natural. If you have to fake an interest in the school you’re going for, chances are it isn’t for you. </p></li>
<li><p>After sending in your application, do NOT look over it again. Do the careful checkovers BEFORE sending it in. After you’ve sent the application, that’s that. No point in overanalying things and freaking out over the comma that should have been a semicolon… no one thing will keep you in or out. Just make sure it’s an overall solid application with few mistakes, and you’ll be fine. You don’t want to be worrying and stressing over a random error for weeks on end. Ignorance is bliss, here. :D</p></li>
<li><p>So let’s say you’ve got great scores. You’re not out of the woods yet… You may <em>think</em> you are… that somehow a high score automatically makes your application golden. I’m not kidding – I’ve seen plenty of high-scorers get rejected from more than 90% of their schools because they got cocky or didn’t spend a lot of time working on their applications. Sometimes people just get bad luck. Don’t rely on just one thing, is my point.</p></li>
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<p>Hope this helps.</p>