24

With less than 20 hours before the Wharton deadline a zen like peace has fallen upon me. I have stopped thinking about the results and actually had a weekend filled with fun and HBS essays. I spent months on my Wharton essays, each of which was a labor of love. While I can see several places where I could have improved the choice of words, siezed opportunities to give the reader a better sense of who I am as a person, it still turned out to be a fine body of work. There is nothing further I can do to change the decision made by the AdCom at Wharton, all that is left is for them is to release the decision and for me to see it. Coming to terms with that fact has allowed me to forget about the importance of the next 20 odd hours. Having said that, I have to admit that the fact I have Cornell lined up does add to the buffer of warmth and security. Thank you Cornell.

Progress on the essays for Chicago, which I was working on all of last week, has come to a grinding halt. I seem to have hit a writer's block and can't seem to make any headway into them. Initially I was pretty happy about the offbeat essays but there are some inherent problems associated with those essays, the key amongst which is that I cannot seem to decide what kind of a tone to use. I tried peppy and funny for one essay and serious and focused for the other. Both did not do justice. At which point I quit trying. Couldn't motivate myself to sit up every night after work to crank the essays out.

Now HBS on the other hand has standard essays, with the only limitation being word count. I have come to the conclusion that the HBS AdCom certainly put considerable thought into the essays and it is a pleasure to write them. The hard word limit forces the applicant to really condense the verbiage and stick to the point with absolutely no rambling allowed. I have set myself a pretty optimistic target for the end of this week. With the amount of introspection that I did for my original set of essays and the interview questions, I know exactly what I want to write for most of the essays. So the drafts that I write now are pretty much as close to the final submissions copy as possible. It certainly needs some tweaking and verbiage correction but on the whole I am satisfied with the effort.

I also spent some time playing around with HTML over the weekend. There is so much I have forgotten on this topic, that it is not funny. Software is something that follows the old adage, "if you don't use, you lose!" So while I was slow starting out, I picked up speed when the "A-HA!" factor kicked in. On the topic of HTML editing, I must say Dreamweaver KICKS ASS! Hard! Like Trump would say it, "It is the BEST editing software in the world".

EDIT (Breaking news):
Just read that CalGrad received an invite from UCLA. Congratulations!