Tuesday Tip: Know Your Weaknesses
It’s important to understand your weaknesses; trust us, whoever is reviewing your application is highly skilled at finding all of your application holes!
Most candidates have some, if not multiple, weaknesses in their application profile. The key to graduate school application success is to understand those weaknesses and proactively address them. The first step is to have the self-awareness and humility to be able to actively identify areas where you may be comparatively weaker than the average candidate for that school. Use the tools you have at your discretion to make the apparent weaknesses less of a concern to the school.
Full Tip:
Hello, Eric Allen here founder of Admit Advantage with today’s Tuesday Tip. Today’s tip is to know your weaknesses. That’s right your weaknesses. Everyone has weaknesses and that’s OK. Admissions committees look at this and it shows humility. It shows self-awareness. It shows that you know what’s going on and you’re able to proactively mitigate those weaknesses. The one important thing about knowing your weaknesses is it’s important for you to know them because schools will find them. As a former member of the admissions committee, I look for weaknesses. There were so many good candidates I was looking for those areas of weakness and how the candidate would actually talk about those weaknesses or may be able to mitigate those for me. So know your weaknesses because schools know your weaknesses.
Last and most important thing is proactively mitigate those weaknesses. So it’s OK to have weaknesses, even better if you’re able to proactively mitigate those weaknesses. For example, if you have a weakness with a low GPA, maybe you can take some courses. If you know that you’re not a great test taker, obviously work as hard as you can to improve your test scores, but have your recommenders talk about your analytical skills your communication skills or what have you. Maybe you can also take some courses. You know there are a lot of different areas of potential weakness and we go into these in great detail in some of our videos so check those out as well, but proactively mitigate them. It shows the admissions committee that you have the awareness and that you’re actively working to improve your profile.
Next Week’s Tip: Take Inventory of your Assets
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Eric Allen is the President and Founder of Admit Advantage, the leading admissions consulting company in the world. He earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and worked on the admissions staff at the University of Pennsylvania. Eric has personally worked with thousands of clients over his 12 years working in the admissions advising space.