My Christmas tree is finally up...

and my Stanford essay A and B are almost done.The Stanford essays were the hard hitting ones for me. I started these essays the week before thanksgiving, and they finally seem like they are "cooked". I tried to be as introspective as possible and that led to a couple of re-writes. I took the advantage of being in the bay area and visited Stanford for three separate events - class visit, information session, lunch with students. The events were really helpful because I felt that I had developed a better understanding of Stanford. My Stanford visits stirred up more thoughts and that led to some more rewrites. Feedback from my boyfriend also resulted in some more changes. I plan not to look at the essays for a couple of days. I hope that I will be able to wrap them up by Christmas.

The experience of attending informational events has really worked for me and I hope to continue this practice for the Tepper and Wharton applications. I have really found it hard to distinguish schools on the basis on the written material at the website or the booklets. Most of them seem to talk about the same set of things - good networking, good faculty, team oriented environment- however each of my selected schools are different in various ways. I hope that I have atriculated my understanding and my fit appropriately in the essays.

The essays have kept me totally occupied, and of course any free brain cycles were spent checking emails for any response from Haas and Fuqua.Finally, my boyfriend got the tree and we now have it decorated. I am so thrilled because it looks like the holidays have finally arrived.