BeMo Lesson on How to Stand Out in a Noisy World: Enlist the Right Mentors | Sponsored
9 min read
Those who have ever pursued post-secondary, graduate, or professional education know that it’s not easy to stand out in your application or impress the admissions committee with a strong interview performance. There are millions of applicants across the United States and Canada each year with perfect stats and extracurricular experiences, so how can you catch the eye of the admissions committees? BeMo Academic Consulting is here to help!
BeMo Academic Consulting is a leader in personalized admissions prep. Whether you are applying to medical school, law school, dentistry school or other graduate programs, BeMo will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to succeed. BeMo focuses on application review, interview practice and test prep, ensuring that you see the results you always dreamed of.
A Holistic Approach
The traditional view of higher education dictates that high grades and test scores are the ultimate yardstick by which you are judged. But as educational institutions move to a more holistic review of applicants, should we still consider GPA and test scores as a sign of success? Can your grades in high school, your SAT or MCAT score, really tell the whole story? While they remain an important indicator of your academic prowess, standardized tests seem to be losing their grip on the admissions committees, because if stats were still the main indicator of ability, students wouldn’t be browsing forums like MCAT Reddit to find out how they can stand out in their applications. So, what else can a student do to prove that they are the right fit for their dream program? BeMo knows the ins and outs of the admissions process and will guide you in a way that will make you stand out.
Myth of “Being Yourself”
There is a common erroneous opinion that prevails among applicants and their school advisors that all you need to succeed is “to be yourself”. While it’s certainly important to be genuine and honest in your application components and interview answers, this rule of “being yourself” is not very clear, is it? What does “being yourself” mean when it comes to writing a strong college essay? Or what does it mean “to be yourself” when you are trying to prepare your answer strategies for college admissions interview questions? And if you are trying to articulate why you want to be a doctor in your medical school personal statement or the interview, how can “being yourself” really help?
Furthermore, how can “being yourself” really help you learn, absorb new knowledge, and prepare for a course, a test, or an exam? Organizing and executing the right learning strategy for you is about knowing your strengths and limits. You must be able to identify your knowledge gaps, implement active learning strategies, and customize them to your preferred learning style. This is why MCAT prep or LSAT prep is a huge undertaking! It takes a lot more than passive review of your textbooks to get ready for such monolithic tests. BeMo provides step-by-step guides to help you prepare for these exams and improve your scores.
The truth is that when it comes to academic admissions and tests, you must be more than yourself — you must be your best self. This does not mean that you can exaggerate your accomplishments or lie about your background. Absolutely not! But you must do a lot of work and reflection to put your best foot forward in your application, interview, and test performance. If you think about it for even a moment, you will realize the simple truth of it: you must do your absolute best to convince the admissions committee that you are the right candidate to admit. In other words, you must be the best and most appropriate “you” for this situation, i.e., a professional. BeMo will help you do just that.
In fact, use the application and interview processes to become your better self. Whether it’s working on your critical thinking skills as you run through your MCAT CARS practice, or honing your written communication skills as you draft and redraft your law school personal statement, MBA personal statement, statement of purpose for graduate school, or building your confidence as you practice answers to some of the most common MBA interview questions — the admissions process is an opportunity to develop skills and qualities that will be useful to you for the rest of your life.
You might be thinking “Is the application process, such a stressful time in my life, really the best time to develop new skills? Can’t I just focus on getting into my program?” Unfortunately, throughout our lives, we are rarely taught skills and behaviors that are necessary for success in the professional realm. Remember your high school years; did you have the chance to learn how to articulate your strengths and weaknesses as a student? Did you learn how to talk about yourself on paper? Did you ever learn how to properly present yourself in a professional interview? Were you taught to compose successful professional or academic applications?
While some of you may have answered yes to some of these questions, most of us were let out of high school, college, or even grad school without any idea of how to successfully present ourselves in professional settings. As soon as we graduate, we must move on to the next step in our career, whether it’s another academic endeavor or a job — but when do we ever have the chance to learn these vital professional skills? Do we need to write a million personal statements to get the hang of it before we are accepted? Do we need to attend a thousand professional interviews to finally develop the necessary interview skills to get our dream job? Luckily, there is another option for acquiring these essential skills — academic admissions consulting.
How BeMo Academic Consulting Can Help
Work with BeMo Academic Consulting to develop these skills! Academic admissions consulting should not be seen as a crutch. Admissions consulting cannot help students who are lazy, uncoachable, and indifferent. There is no miracle crash course that can help a student who does not want to work hard. And while the goal of getting into a program may be the primary reason why you go with an admissions consulting service, it’s more than a way to get in. Consulting is your opportunity to develop life-long skills that are often overlooked by traditional education.
For example, when you are asked “Tell me about yourself” in an essay or an interview, what do you say? Such a simple, and seemingly straight-forward question ends up stunning anyone facing it. Talking about yourself in relevant professional terms is a challenging acquired skill. Writing a compelling narrative relevant to your prompt and discipline is a huge undertaking! How can your story on paper engage the reader enough to make them keep reading until the end? How can your story incite them to invite you to an interview? Just consider how much pressure the writer is under! BeMo Academic Consulting provides you with ample resources that will show you the best way to present yourself.
Talking about yourself in an interview is no easier. Not only are you asked to come up with an answer in real time, but you also cannot clean up your answer as you would be able to do in writing. Furthermore, you cannot memorize an answer to this question because the question “tell me about yourself” is relational. Your answer should highlight and emphasize experiences and skills relevant for the specific program or job you are interviewing with. You cannot simply recycle an answer to this question. All this trouble for just this one question! And there are thousands of medical school interview questions, law school interview questions, or graduate school interview questions you may be asked!
Our goal as admissions consultants is to make sure that when you face a new application, a test, or an interview, you know how to approach them all on your own.
Whether you are writing an application component like the law school diversity statement or crafting your graduate thesis, the skills you develop via consultants are going to stay with you. Not only do our professional consultants help you with brainstorming and editing, but they also improve your creative and narrative abilities. This means that after you finish working with the admissions consultants, your take-away will be more than successful completion of your project — you will acquire writing skills that you can use in any future professional or academic ventures.
And if you think test prep cannot help you become a professional, think again. While the majority of standardized tests evaluate your knowledge, all of them also assess your analytical and reasoning skills. These are also acquired abilities! So honing a great Logical Reasoning strategy for the LSAT or a failproof MCAT CARS strategy is really key not only for the test, but for your future as a professional.
Judgement
Another important skill you develop with the help of academic consultants is good judgment. How many of us have wondered what a good resume is? When you prepare a job application, or an academic application component like medical school resumes or MBA resumes, it is important to discern what kind of experiences and skills you should include. Should your years as a camp counselor be part of it? Or should you replace it with a short management position you held for a few weeks? What kinds of skills should you emphasize and demonstrate? It’s not easy to customize your applications for each program — often, it takes experience to make these judgments. A quality consultant can help you learn to exercise this judgment, so you will be able to apply it in other areas of your life as well.
Good judgment is also tremendously important to doing well on standardized tests. For example, a quality MCAT tutor or MCAT prep course will help you with more than content revision. They should help you with developing skills to tackle the unique, passage-based nature of this exam, which requires good judgment and reasoning. BeMo will offer you the most effective resources for increasing your MCAT reading comprehension,reviewing MCAT CARS passages, and applying your knowledge to passage-based MCAT biology, MCAT chemistry, and MCAT psychology questions.
Interviews
But, probably the most stressful aspect of any admissions process is the interview. While you can craft and perfect your application in the comfort of your home, the interview is immediate, and your performance is what influences admissions committees to make their final decision. This immense pressure means only one thing: your performance must be outstanding. You may know exactly what you want to say in your answers, but there is more to an interview than the content of your responses.
Interview skills are also acquired, which means that you must have interview experience to perform well. This means that the best way to hone your interview skills is by going to dozens of real interviews, or by going through mock interviews. But the former option has two huge shortcomings. One is that it’s unlikely that you will get dozens of interviews to practice. And second, even if you go to dozens and dozens of interviews, you will never learn what you can do to improve your performance. With BeMo Admissions Consulting, not only will your coach point out behaviors that can be improved, but they will also advise on how you can improve them, resulting in life-long interview skills that you can apply in any future academic or professional interviews. As you advance in your career, BeMo can help you develop strong interview skills before you attend them, so you never have to deal with the stress or worry of on-the-spot improvisation.
The real value of admissions consulting at BeMo is truly up to you. Graduate school admissions consultants or medical school advisors can provide you with all the tools in the world to succeed but ultimately, it’s up to you whether you choose to accept them. Nobody can make you work hard on your written communication skills or attention to detail, and no one can make you work on your interpersonal skills. But if you see admissions consulting as a way to invest in yourself and your future, you will be successful.
If you want to be your best self, willing to listen to our coaches, and put in the required work, we want to hear from you. Go to BeMoFreeStrategy.com to schedule a free strategy call with one of our admissions experts and we’ll tell you how we can help you make your applications stand out, prepare for your standardized tests, ace your interviews, and most importantly get in. And that’s not all — if we accept you as a student, you may qualify for our bold guarantees.
The Crimson’s news and opinion teams—including writers, editors, photographers, and designers—were not involved in the production of this article.
