<p>When the Wall Street Journal interviewed Dee Leopold, head of admissions at Harvard Business School, they asked her about recommendations. One insight she shared was,
[quote]
The best recommendations have a lot of verbs. They say, "She did this," versus adjectives that simply describe you.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This advice applies far beyond HBS - it's true for every recommendation letter that undergrad applicants submit. I think it applies to self-descriptions in most cases, too.</p>
<p>Think about it: which tells a school more about an applicant:</p>
<p>"Katy is dedicated, hard-working, team-oriented, helpful, and highly creative."
or
"Katy organized a team of fellow students, worked the entire Thanksgiving weekend, created a website, and printed flyers for a band fundraising project. This raised enough money to pay for ten new drums."</p>
<p>Obviously, not every recommendation can feature some phenomenal accomplishment. But if your recommender can't come up with a concrete example or two of why you are smart, hard-working, creative, brilliant, dogged, cooperative, etc., maybe you have the wrong recommender.</p>
<p>In these days of high student loads and lots of time demands on counselors and teachers, be sure to help your recommender recall specific examples of your accomplishments so that he/she doesn't have to fall back on generic praise, however delightful that may be.</p>