I have a dual perspective on helicopter parenting. I have been working in graduate admissions as a private consultant for the last fifteen years, and I also am the mother of five children ranging in age from 21-28. As the article reports my baby-boomer peers, the mothers and fathers of millenials, are playing more and more of a role in the application process.

As a consultant I have no problem with parents calling for information, footing the bill for Accepted's services, and providing advice and input to their adult children when the children request it.

As a parent, however, I cringe when parents insert themselves into the admissions process and attempt to control it in a misguided attempt to protect their children from possible disappointment or perhaps even perceived failure. While the desire to shield children from experiencing disappointment is understandable, it would be so much more constructive for their children, if the parents selectively support their children's goals and help them deal with disappointment when it inevitably comes their  way. Parents will neither always be able to prevent their children from feeling pain nor around to kiss the boo-boo and make it better. Kids need to learn how to handle setbacks.

Furthermore, parents who take over the application process are sending multiple negative messages.

1. To the school they are saying, "We don't have enough confidence in our children to let them manage the application process (or their affairs) on their own."
2. To the child they are saying "We don't have enough confidence in your ability to handle your affairs so we are going to take over this critical part of your life."

Regarding #1, if parents don't have the confidence that their adults children can manage their own affairs, why should school have confidence that they will be the leaders of tomorrow?

More concretely, I spoke today to an admissions officer at a top business school. She told me of parents and other older relatives coming to pre-application information sessions and to post-acceptance admit weekends. The older relatives were asking more questions than the accepted student.

That makes a bad impression.

If you are an applicant reading this post, then just as the NY Times says, set limits for your parents and older members of your extended family.

• All communication with the school should be between you -- not your parents, aunts, uncles, or grandparents -- and the school.
• Consider carefully your parents' advice on school and professional options. They want what's best for you. However, parents are human too, and they are not infallible. You are going to live your life, work in the profession you choose, and attend the school you go to. Not your parents. The decision is yours and you will bear the consequences -- good or bad.
• Never take your parents to an admissions interview.  

Parents, if you are reading this post:

• Your child is an adult. Demonstrate confidence by letting your child run his or her life.
• Offer advice when sought and occasionally even when not, but respect your adult children's ability to make decisions. It doesn't reflect well on your parenting skills when you don't.
• Help you child deal with disappointment -- be it a rejection or poor score -- by helping them to explore alternatives and examine the factors they can change to improve the outcome in the future. Don't play the blame game.

For more on these themes, please see:

• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Dr. Carol S. Dweck
• Raising Resilient Children by Dr. Robert Brooks and Dr. Sam Goldstein (More for parents of younger children, but the principles still apply.)

By Linda Abraham, founder and president of Accepted.

Here’s the answer: it depends.

I know that’s a cop out, but it’s true. It really depends on you, your circumstances, and your goals. I’ve seen too many people—clients, friends, and others—target degrees that ultimately don’t make sense for them. And with today’s unprecedented (in our lifetimes) economic challenges, making the right decision about how to spend the next one to eight (PhD’s can take that long) years of your life is even more crucial.

As someone on his fourth career—counting at-home dad—I should know. My full bio’s elsewhere on this site, but I went straight from undergrad to a PhD program in clinical psychology. It took six years to complete the degree and less than six months for me to leave the field, afterward. Do I regret doing my PhD? Not really: it helped me secure a management consulting position and writing work in academia; and those three letters do look nice on business cards. Do I wish I’d thought more about my strengths and interests and gotten more professional experience before taking that six-year plunge? Absolutely.

In that spirit, let me offer some thoughts on each major graduate degree, and what to think about as you consider applying.

PhD: Having earned one, I think the best reason to pursue a PhD is to secure a career in academia. For professorships at big-name research institutes, it’s the only way in. Sure, people go into industry after becoming this “other kind” of doctor, but I would argue that they don’t need the degree to get there, and even that their time would be better spent gaining real-world experience. Beyond that goal issue, this is the right degree for you if you live and breathe research—using data of all kinds to build on existing theories, generate new ones, and explain phenomena. You should love all things research, including debating theory and methodology with others, to be a serious PhD candidate. As you can imagine, earning a PhD also takes tremendous discipline—for that matter, so does being a professor. It’s not for those who need a lot of structure and guidance.

MBA: The vast majority of my clients are MBA applicants. I help most write very specific goals into their essays. My guess is that post-MBA very few end up doing exactly what they say they will. That tells you several things, one of which is that this is a strong all-purpose degree, and not just for the business world. What other degree turns out so many bankers, consultants, non-profit heads, marketers, operations consultants, policymakers, and so on? None. So there are many good reasons to get the degree, which takes the least time of any advanced degree (one to two years) and generates a lot of job opportunities. Even today. Beyond recruiting, MBA programs endow students with fantastic networks—some debate this point, but I’ve seen how much my friends, colleagues, and even my wife (Kellogg MBA) have benefited from b-school contacts. Any reasons not to go? If business or related fields aren’t really your thing—as I discovered as a strategy consultant—don’t go. If you hate structure and data-based problem-solving and team projects, don’t go.

MD: My brother, both brothers-in-law, and many, many friends are doctors—not med students, not residents, not fellows, but practicing doctors. Most hate how long it took for them to get to this point: they watched friends make “real money” for years while they worked impossibly long hours for little monetary reward. Now, most love what they do, and are thrilled to be in such a stable field that allows them to truly help people while making a reasonable living. But is it for you? I think it comes down to enjoying solving the problems that doctors solve. That sounds self-evident, but I think people forget, especially after all the TV shows that highlight the profession’s highest and lowest moments, that in the end it’s often you in a room with patients and/or other doctors, trying figure out how to diagnose and treat a given set of symptoms. Are you good at that kind of pattern-matching-based problem-solving? Are you okay with the idea of dissecting a cadaver (you have to, in med school)? Do you mind dealing with people often at their worst (other than pathology, radiology, and maybe some other specialties, you’ll have to)? Ask yourself these questions to understand if you’d be happy as a physician.

JD: I know the least about this grad degree. But I do know that a very large number of trained lawyers do not work as attorneys—many are in the business world and elsewhere. That tells me at least a couple things: one, that getting a job as an attorney may be difficult, given supply and demand (it’s definitely a bad job market for lawyers right now); two, that many people rush into law school without really knowing if they want to be lawyers. So think hard about it. Maybe it makes sense to work in the field before committing to grad school. Research what attorneys do, day to day. Again, TV has glamorized litigation (i.e., trial work), but many lawyers rarely set foot in the courtroom. If you find a path that seems to match your skills and interests well, it’s a good sign.

The bottom line: think hard about your grad-school decision. Don’t get a degree because you feel you “should” or you don’t have a lot of other options. If and when you decide a graduate degree is the way to go, my fellow editors and I would be happy to help you make it happen.

By Dr. Sachin Waikar, formerly a McKinsey consultant and now an author and advisor to business and grad school applicants.

In Financing Your Future, an instantly downloadable ebook, you’ll learn about:

• Different types of scholarships.
• When to apply for financial aid.
• How to assemble a strong application.
• Applying for high-prestige scholarships.
• Specific program tips and interview advice.

Check out Financing Your Future: Winning Fellowships, Scholarships and Awards for Grad School.

So her search began to Choose the Right College. Alex wondered- “Does it matter which college you choose?”  Then she read Lynn Mattoon's article What Are You Really Going to College For? posted at myUsearch blog which suggests it is more about what you do than where you go.  She realized before you choose, you need to first figure out why are you going to college.  So Alex’s combustion engineer goal kind of exploded. Or imploded. 

But where should Alex actually go? While looking to find a review of a particular college, she found some tips to use in Tom Tessin’s  Student Reviews of Colleges - Finding Them posted at FCC Student Blog.  She also read up on Great College Advice's article by Katherine Price, the Top 5 Reasons to Go to College Out-of-State,
where Katherine noted that you may have an easier time being admitted to great universities outside your home state.  And tuition may not be any more expensive than attending college down the road. 

Speaking of tuition, Alex realized she had better enter the long road of applying for Scholarships.  She started with admissions expert Julie Manhan best tips to secure a scholarship for those high tuition bills in How to Begin Your Scholarship Search posted at myUsearch blog.  After securing as many scholarships as she could, Alex realized that the funds, together with her little piggy bank, just wouldn’t cut it to cover tuition. 

She needed to find out about Financial Aid options. Knowing that college can be a very financially challenging time, but also a time of great discovery, she read up on Jim Wang’s 40 Money Tips for College Students posted at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. So now she was a bit more economically savvy, but Alex wasn’t sure she was maximizing her student loan eligibility.  After reading Sophie's seven frequently asked questions and the answers needed to ensure she was not missing any money she may have been eligible for at 7 FAFSA Myths-Don't Lose this Money posted at Sophie's Blog, she felt more relieved, and secured enough funds to pursue her dreams. Almost...

She still had to work on Getting Admitted.
She began working on her application to Dream Business School, conveniently located in Big Creek, North Dakota. She was almost done and thought her application was exactly what the adcom wants to read.  Suddenly, she felt ill. She realized she was suffering from Generic Itis. After a quick search online, she found out the symptoms and prevented it from ruining her application with Linda Abraham's Application Essay Tip: Generic-Itis Prevention posted on the Accepted Admissions Almanac. She also checked out Sophie’s Crucial tips about College Accreditation, learn how it will affect your wallet posted at Sophie's Blog while deciding which courses to take.

Finally, Alex crossed the application bridge and made it to College Life! Amazingly, she received more mail regarding credit card options than from her Dream College (she got in- by the way), so she read MBB’s College Students and Use Of Credit Cards posted at Money Blue Book Blog and made sure to get the best card for her. And yeah, not give away her SSN.

Comfortably ensconced in college life, Alex decided to explore some Other Cool Stuff on the Horizon.

She met students who went directly to graduate business school and insisted they get a lot out of their studies without working first. But many business-school officials didn't agree. She found out the real deal with Khan's Full-time Job After Graduation or Start Work on an M.B.A posted at Higher Education and Career Blog. Alex really wanted to keep everyone updated, but didn’t realize just how difficult is it to blog and attend school as an undergraduate. It seemed that most student blogs were not current, or they have long spaces of inactivity as these students attend to life as they know it. She checked out the ones who stayed on top in Frederick Yarmy's Top 50 Blogs By Undergrad Students posted at Undergraduate Degree and began her own blog called In Alex’s Outer Space. 

Then she posted this carnival detailing her exciting journey to this point in her life. 3….2…1….Time to take off on your own college journey! Good Luck!

On behalf of Accepted.com, Alex thanks Mark Montgomery of Great College Advice for organizing this carnival. For future carnivals, please submit your articles here.

*Photos Courtesy of Accepted.com 2009 Beautiful B-School Photo Contest. 2010 Contest Starting Soon.

The new requirements will rely on the MCAT to assess candidate competency and will encourage skills pertaining more to modern research, weighing biochemistry and statistics more than organic chemistry. A panel from the AAMC will review the MCAT over the next four years, as it may need to be rewritten to reflect these new changes. Universities, as well, are considering changes to their undergraduate curriculums in light of these revisions.

The authors researched and identified the factors that cause communications to succeed or fail. They boiled their research down to "six principles of stickiness."  

1. Simplicity.
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotions
6. Stories

Over the next several weeks I am going to explore these SUCCES principles and apply them to personal statements and application essays. For today let's talk about Simplicity.

Your personal statement or application essay needs a core idea. That essence or central point becomes the driver of all content for that essay. When responding to specific questions, your core must directly and elegantly answer the question. When writing a less-directed personal statement, you still need a driving concept; you just have more choice as to what that concept should be. Everything else in the essay should support that concept.

If writing multiple essays for one application, each essay has to have a core. Those concepts should mesh and complement each other, but not duplicate.

The remaining principles of Making It Stick are means of effectively relating your core idea, but first you need to have a core. Unfortunately, many applicants treat their essays like many teenagers treat their bedroom closets -- as a place to put all kinds of "stuff" that may be useful or perhaps once was useful. There is no logic or organizing principle, no driving force. These messy closet essays then read like the mishmash they are.

Essays that are resumes in prose or that attempt to tell your entire life story descend into the mishmash category. Personal statements replete with irrelevant detail stray from their central mission.  They are not engaging or persuasive. In fact they bore.

When you write your essay, start with a central idea and then make sure that everything else supports it. That elegant simplicity is not simplistic. It is not even easy. It is highly effective. 

In fact, physician assistant ranks second and nurse practitioner fourth.  The study rated jobs on flexibility, benefit to society, satisfaction and stress, and PA and NP received identical scores in three of the four categories:  “B” for flexibility, “A” for benefit to society and satisfaction. 

The low grades (“C” for PA, “D” for NP), not surprisingly, were in the stress category. (Don’t let this scare you -- only six occupations received “B’s” in this category, and there were no “A’s.”)  The article also provides salary information, and the news there is encouraging. The median salary for PA’s is $90,900, with a top salary of $124,000.  NP’s come in slightly lower with a median of $85,000 and a top of $113,000. 

The best news of all, given today’s employment market, is that both professions are considered recession-proof.  The shortage of primary care physicians and the advent of stand-alone urgent care centers and clinics in retail establishments have created many new opportunities; in addition, both PA’s and NP’s are attractive to medical facilities looking to keep costs down.  A Winston-Salem PA quoted in the article considers flexibility the best part of his job.  To date, he has worked in family practice, public health and emergency medicine.  A New York City NP most enjoys teaching her patients about the small lifestyle changes which can lead to significant improvements in health.     

If you’re on the fence about medical school, or you know you want to work in health care but haven’t zeroed in on a specific occupation, these are solid choices to consider carefully.

By Joan Davis, who had 18 years of experience as a pre-medical adviser at the University of Rochester before joining Accepted in 2006.

Not only is there a need for an increase in med school admissions, but for an increase in positions post-graduation as well. Although the number of Medicare-financed positions is frozen, there is costly legislation that could increase this number by 15 percent, or about 15,000 slots.

Nevertheless, application numbers could very well be up next year—nearly three percent more people took the Medical College Admission Test this year than in the same period last year.

The moment I found the lump, I suspected my life was about to change—in a big way. It was mid-May 2001. I was a busy consultant in McKinsey’s Chicago office, the proud father of a boy about to turn one, and a generally happy guy in his early 30s.

It was tempting to wish the lump would just go away, and for a few days that was my strategy. I didn’t even tell my wife. But soon I recognized that knowledge is power, and made an appointment with my doctor. Within a week I had a diagnosis: cancer.

Those seven lines contained important story elements including a killer opening (more literally than usual, in this case), context (early 30’s consultant, Chicago, 2001), stakes (life and death), character (my fear and determination), and obstacles (cancer). You should include these key elements in all your story-based essays.

So what happened next? (incidentally, a well-told story uses these elements to make readers ask that question again and again, pulling them through the story)

Once I got past the initial shock, I discovered an unexpected challenge: choosing among major surgery, two rounds of chemotherapy, and “surveillance” (i.e., regular testing to see if the cancer was spreading). The options had the exact same survival rate (very high), but very different side-effect profiles. For example, the surgery was associated with potential nerve damage, while the chemo could have resulted in lower lung capacity.

This part of my story includes a twist and further obstacles. Twists, or surprise turns in stories—in this case, the challenge of choosing treatment—are not essential for grad school essays, but they can certainly make them more engaging: a teammate with a secret, a client’s abrupt shift in expectations, and the like. My unexpected challenge also represented an obstacle, in that I had to choose among three very different treatments with similar levels of effectiveness.

It was time for some deep research: with my wife’s help and inputs from my oncologist and other doctors, I pored over journal articles and other materials to understand my treatment options and their risks. For example, we learned that the surveillance course could take over five years before one could consider themselves cancer-free.

Here we have more evidence of character (how I took a methodical approach, rather than just picking a treatment impulsively or based on one doctor’s opinion), along with what I’ll call process, or how exactly I approached the obstacle. Too many of my clients leave out their process, skipping from “My team faced several major hurdles” to “The client loved our solution, and I got a raise.” Tell us what you did, how you did it, and ideally how you engaged others to overcome the challenge. Even my cancer story includes a team element (my wife and my doctors).

After weeks of research and deliberation, I opted for two rounds of outpatient chemotherapy. I said goodbye to my hair and hello to needles and nausea. The first week went well. But as I neared the second, my doctor called: the chemo had pushed my white blood cell count too low, compromising my immune system. I would have to wait. For two weeks I avoided raw fruit and vegetables and stayed inside as much as possible. My white blood cell count rose, and I completed the second week of chemo.

Now, over eight years later, I’m considered cured, a survivor. The only physical residue of my treatment is slightly wavier hair. But the experience reinforced the importance of a proactive approach (I found out most men wait over six months to get lumps checked), of careful due diligence in health and other matters, and of never giving up. I carry those lessons into everything I do. So I was right: the lump changed my life in a big way; but I never could have guessed how positive those changes would be.

The last part of my story brings more process (how I made a decision) and another twist (my low white blood cell count), along with the outcome and lessons learned. These last two elements typically tie together: my outcome (surviving cancer) reinforced multiple lessons, as noted above. It’s easy to spend too little (i.e., none) or too much (i.e., paragraphs) time on lessons learned; I’ve found that a line or three usually gets the job done. And I wrapped it all up by returning to my opening—I usually try to end (a killer ending) with a broader theme or key realization or glimpse of the future.

My story is just over 400 words, but it has all the important elements. My fellow editors and I would be happy to ensure that yours do too.

By Dr. Sachin Waikar, formerly a McKinsey consultant and now an author and advisor to business and grad school applicants.

A partnership between Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic, VTC was launched two years ago. Its small inaugural class will begin in August a four-year program with a focus on medical research.