The statement of purpose is an extremely important part of your application packet (click here for an explanation). A well-written SOP that brings out the most important facts about you as a candidate for higher studies, can open the doors of opportunity for you. On the other hand an SOP that tries to impress but focuses on facts that the admissions committees consider irrelevant can lose you the opportunity that you have dreamed of.
In the extract below Dr. Harchol-Balter, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University points out two common mistakes that many applicants make:
Related Blogs on Application Documents
Related
- Dr. Harchol-Balter on the Recommendation Letter
- Dr. Harchol-Balter on Applying for a PhD
- Dr. Harchol-Balter on how she decided to do a PhD
Our first post in this series on the free application tools available on online.dilipoakacademy.com was on the University Info feature. This is a great tool that simplifies the admission process for you by making available one website key facts about the top 220 universities – most importantly, the departments and courses available there. One of the other important things that the University Info feature makes available, however, is a standard university checklist.
What are University Checklists and Where Can I Get Them?
The university checklists we are talking about here, are lists of the standard documents required by all universities. Our University Info feature provides the standard checklists for each of the top 220 American universities that it covers. When you select a university from our University Info feature, you can access the standard checklist for the university by clicking the checklist button (see screenshot below – right-click it to enlarge it).
Why is the University Checklist Feature Important?
The reason we have the University Checklist feature is to make sure that you do not forget to send any of the required documents. Sending your documents and application packet before the deadline is crucial for the following reasons:
- Forgetting to send even a single document can cause long and inconvenient delays in your application process.
- You may also end up spending a lot of money to send the additional documents by courier
- In fact, you may even lose out on getting admission to a good college or university.
Premium Checklists Feature
While the standard checklists are great, since they give you a comprehensive idea of what documents are required by universities in general, remember that each university has its own specific requirements. Students who join the admissions counseling at the academy (a paid service of the Academy) can also access our premium checklists. The premium checklists are detailed, university specific lists of documents required for every university that you apply to. They will cover the following:
- whether the university requires one packet or two
- which address the packets should be sent to (graduate school, department or both)
- whether the university requires:
- a bank statement or solvency certificate
- university transcripts, college transcripts or university attested mark sheets
- documents required apart from the usual ones as per the special requirements of the university
We are sure that you will find these tools extremely useful. Please remember that you don’t need to pay anything to use the university info feature or the standard checklists. So, go ahead register and simplify the application process for yourself! Also, remember to share this link with friends who are planning to apply for MS/PhD – it will help them too.
If you have feedback, we would love to hear from you. Please email any comments, suggestions etc. to support@dilipoakacademy.com
We wish you every success in your admissions endeavour!
According to LinkedIn about 200,000 college students join every month. As a result, companies are realizing that it makes sense to use the site to recruit interns and entry-level employees. Thus, when you join LinkedIn you become part of a network that Human Resource professionals in various organizations regularly scan for potential employees. The advantage is that companies search for recruits on LinkedIn even when recruits are not searching for them. (This is what is called ‘passively’ searching for a job.)
But keep in mind that people are more likely to check you out as a prospective employee if your profile is complete. (Recommendations are a key part of a complete profile, so make sure that you ask your professors and others whom you have worked with to endorse you.) Having a complete LinkedIn profile may get you a much coveted internship. So, make it your goal to have an updated LinkedIn profile even during your master’s studies. It will help bring you to the notice of potential employers.
But, the great news is that LinkedIn has a student portal which will help you in a number of other ways:
- LinkedIn has company pages which will tell you what the companies do, what profiles their employees have (or are expected to have), and what people say about them. Through the portal you can therefore, find interesting companies to join, research companies that you are interested in and find out whether you are interested in joining them. This can help you to zero in on good avenues of employment and make decisions about whether or not to join companies that give you employment offers.
- Based on your education and interests, the portal will also recommend jobs: email alerts and notifications for this purpose are displayed on your LinkedIn home page.
- With the portal’s help, you can make use of LinkedIn’s network in several ways:
- You can add connections via LinkedIn and make them work for you in two cool ways:
- Import your email lists and see who is available on LinkedIn. When you do this, first locate alumni: they might be hiring! Then check out your friends and family.
- You can grow your own network! If you don’t know many people on LinkedIn, that’s not a problem: get friends to join, connect with them and watch your network expand. Networks that are started this way can grow surprisingly quickly.
- You also can connect to other students and find out how they got their jobs.
- Finally, since the portal is available in all the languages supported by LinkedIn, it opens up a network that is truly global. This makes it possible to find jobs in other international locations apart from those in the States.
So, even if you are a student, LinkedIn is an invaluable help. No other network attracts as many companies or allows you to connect with so many professionals. Join and get a head start in building your career!
The application season is on, December is just round the corner …and the deadlines for spring 2014 are drawing to a close. So here are the deadlines for spring that are falling due in this month.
Important Question: “Do you know which university you should apply to?”
A deadline is of use only if you know what university you should apply to. For those of you who are not too clear, here is how to decide:
1. Talk to seniors and decide which specialization you should apply for (examples: Networking, Data Bases etc. for Computer Engineers; Digital Signal Processing, VLSI etc. for Electronics and Telecommunications Engineers; MEMS, Robotics etc. for Mechanical Engineers)
2. To find out which universities or colleges offer the specialization you want, go to online.dilipoakacademy.com and look up your college or university in the University Information feature. All you have to do is select a university from the list of the top 220 provided (these have been selected by Mr. Dilip Oak) and you will get a list of departments and courses available. Click here to see. Registration is free and is open to all! (For more details on how to select a university see our ‘Selecting the Right American University for Your MS in the US’ blog)
3. To plan your application process, check the general deadlines given in this blog. This will give you an idea of how much time you have and how to go about applying.
4. For the exact departmental deadline click the URL at the bottom of the University Information page for that university in online.dilipoakacademy.com. This will give you a more precise idea of how to plan your application process (see our Timeline Application Timeline for Spring 2014 blog to see more specifically how you should go about applying)
Good luck and if your university is not in the list provided, keep looking for it. We will be updating this blog.
Related blogs:
Deadlines in October
- California State University, Sacramento – 1 Oct
- Case Western Reserve University – 1 Oct
- Eastern Michigan University – 1 Oct
- Illinois State University, Normal – 1 Oct
- Minnesota State University, Mankato – 1 Oct
- Northern Illinois University, DeKalb – 1 Oct
- Oklahoma State University, Still Water – 1 Oct
- Old Dominion University, Norfolk – 1 Oct
- Oregon State University, Corvallis – 1 Oct
- Pennsylvania State University, University Park – 1 Oct
- Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville – 1 Oct
- State University of New York, Stony Brook – 1 Oct
- Stevens Institute of Technology – 1 Oct
- Tennessee Technological University – 1 Oct
- University of Arkansas, Little Rock – 1 Oct
- University of Colorado, Denver – 1 Oct
- University of Detroit, Mercy – 1 Oct
- University of Houston, University Park – 1 Oct
- University of Idaho, Moscow – 1 Oct
- University of Iowa, Iowa City – 1 Oct
- University of Louisiana, Lafayette – 1 Oct
- University of Massachusetts, Amherst – 1 Oct
- University of Nevada, Las Vegas – 1 Oct
- University of New Mexico, Albuquerque – 1 Oct
- University of North Carolina, Charlotte – 1 Oct
- University of Texas, Arlington – 1 Oct
- University of Virginia, Charlottesville – 1 Oct
- West Virginia University, Morgan Town – 1 Oct
- Worcester Polytechnic Institute – 1 Oct
- California State University, Long Beach – 15 Oct
- California State University, Los Angeles – 15 Oct
- Duke University –15 Oct
- Marquette University – 15 Oct
- Texas State University – 15 Oct
- University of Georgia – 15 Oct
- University of South Florida, Tampa – 15 Oct
- Villanova University – 15 Oct
- California State University, Fullerton – 17 Oct
If you are reading this blog the chances are that you are a net savvy user, you have accounts on Facebook and Twitter and you are a student going to America for higher education. But have you ever thought of signing up for a LinkedIn account? Probably not: LinkedIn is supposed to be meant for professionals, and none or few of your friends are on it, so what good would it do a student to have a LinkedIn account?
When you don’t know many people on LinkedIn, it is easy to think that it doesn’t matter. Actually however, there are 5 reasons why having a LinkedIn account is very useful if you are heading for higher education in the States.
- LinkedIn offers several tools to help get information and ideas from experts in your field viz.:
- LinkedIn Groups
- LinkedIn Answers
- LinkedIn Today
For college students these tools offer a great way of learning the professional language of your field, keeping up with the latest trends and topics in the field and becoming a well-informed ‘insider’. With more than 120 million users worldwide, LinkedIn offers a lot of potential avenues for learning.
- Companies use LinkedIn to find potential candidates, so you should use LinkedIn to attract them. After you have finished your course, you will be looking for a job. But companies also search for good candidates and recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates. So, pay attention to key words in your profiles. Spread them throughout the following sections of your LinkedIn profile:
- Summary
- Specialties
- Skills
- Recommendations
- Keeping the point above in mind, also think of this: LinkedIn is just the right place for you to build a professional brand for yourself. Remember that what recruiters or business contacts find about you online is usually the source of their first impressions of you. If you are a prospective candidate, recruiters will Google you; and LinkedIn profiles typically rank high in Google searches. So, use this fact to your advantage by making sure that what they find out on LinkedIn builds up a strong positive image of you.
- To add to that strong positive profile, use LinkedIn’s tool for gathering and displaying recommendations from other users who you have worked with either during your studies or professionally. So, as you go through your Master’s or doctoral programs in your American university and work with professors there or, in internships in American companies build your credibility by collecting recommendations from them. According to Lindsey Pollak, author of Getting from College to Career (and global spokesperson for LinkedIn) LinkedIn is “an online resume on steroids”.
- While Facebook is an amazing tool for keeping track of (and even rediscovering) friends, it may not be the most appropriate forum for keeping in touch with your professors or project guides at your university or, specialists whom you have worked with in industry or have consulted while writing research papers. For these you need a different kind of forum which is exactly what LinkedIn provides. LinkedIn offers a platform for maintaining your professional network while keeping it separate from your personal life.
- Finally, if you join early, get to know how LinkedIn works and keep connecting with professionals in the field throughout your Master’s or Doctoral program, you will reap the benefits when you make a start on your professional career: your LinkedIn contacts helps might let you know of opportunities or provide references for you.
So, whether you want to keep in touch with the trends in your field as you study, or whether you want to build up a great professional profile or whether you want to stay in touch with your professors or professional contacts, LinkedIn is a great way to do it.