Getting ready to submit to Harvard

I'm waiting for my brother to finish a final read through of my essays now that I have them in the final form. I have this incredible urge to submit, submit, submit. The last few days have been a total frenzy trying to get everything completed and ready to go. Recommenders....I really wish I had followed Mark's advice and told them a week before the actual deadline. Actually, I did do that, but I didn't treat it like a real deadline so it passed by silently. Seriously the last thing you want to be worrying about the night before the deadline is if your recommender is going to come through for you. Thankfully all of them got their recommendations completed and submitted yesterday.

Something I didn't realize and wasn't prepared for was the detail information the application system asks for once you start you application. I spent so long working on my essays, and I didn't even think about actually logging into the system. I was in for a mega surprise though when I did. They want to know *everything* about you. I'm surprised they didn't ask the name of my first born child, and what I'm doing next tuesday night. It was a good thing I logged in a few days early to check things out. I highly encourage you to get into the application system early and start filling out the required information well ahead of time.

I thought I would log into the Business Week forums and see if anyone else was stressed out about the Harvard R1 deadline. I saw one thread with four posts in it, three of them from the same guy. It makes me wonder how many of the people applying really take this whole process seriously (not to even remotely hint that posting on Business Week makes you serious, hah!). I spent a very significant amount time working on this process, and I really think it shows in my essays. I have received very good feedback from some pretty tough readers. Let's just hope the essays are good enough.

I found that in order to really bring out my best writing, I had to dig down deep and really analyze why I want to do things. I had to look into the root of my soul and see what makes me tick deep down. After that I had to find some way to put it on paper, get it ripped on by other people, edit it, get it ripped on some more, rinse and repeat. I tracked all of the revisions to my documents and I'm sitting at about revision 10 for every essay. I don't remember who at this point, but one of the bloggers was suggesting that 10 revisions was the magic number. It looks like that may well be true.

I have to apologize for the poor structure and grammar in this post. Not because it's any worse than my usual posts, but because after I have spent so much time really tightening up my writing, editing, revising, re-wording, and re-working my prose, this writing looks pretty sloppy and loosely structured to me.

Well, maybe I'll go run around the building and try to burn off some of this energy. I had trouble sleeping last night as well, after about three hours of sleep and an hour of laying there doing nothing, I finally got up. I finished the last of the job history information that needed to be entered, and made a few last minute revisions to my essays.

A note of caution when you find editors for your essays. When people make editing changes, often times they will re-write something because the word you used was not a word they would have used. Be very careful of this, when they make that type of suggestion, they are injecting their own personality into your writing. It's a difficult temptation that even the best of my editors have fallen into. Be very diligent to ensure any wording changes, and sometimes even grammar change, don't change the tone and spirit of your writing. If they do, make sure they reflect you, and not your editor.