Last week, Paved With Verbs published some valuable advice for aspiring doctors:

Indeed, "interdisciplinary" and "collaboration" are hot words in education right now. But there's one group of scholars I (completely unintentionally) left off my list:

UPDATE: THE PROMPTS HAVE CHANGED!! For the Complete Guide to the Stanford 2017-2018 Short Answer and Supplemental Essays, click here. 

For many students, Stanford is the dream -- but Stanford's application is a nightmare! After filling out eight short-answer questions, you've still got three more 250-word essays to go! 

Take these essays seriously. It may feel ridiculous to write a letter to your future roommate... but the admissions officers will read (and evaluate you on) every word. 

UPDATE: THE PROMPTS HAVE CHANGED!! For the Complete Guide to the Stanford 2017-2018 Short Answer and Supplemental Essays, click here. ​

So you're applying to Stanford. That's great! But, as I explained in this infographic, your odds of acceptance are about 1 in 17. You are competing with top students from around the world -- and about 70% of applicants with a perfect 2400 SAT score will be rejected. 

This means one thing: the only way to stand out to admissions officers (other than submitting AMAZING recommendations) is to take advantage of every possible space on the application to say something only you can​.

The best thing about running Paved With Verbs is how many engaging young people I get to work with every day. For example, last week, I met with a student who was writing his “Why do you want to go to Purdue” essay.
 
We talked about his interests – he loves technology, but he wants to be a doctor. Hearing this, I told him to check out the Purdue Research Park.
 
“You’d be a perfect candidate,” I told him, “Because medical breakthroughs aren’t happening in the field of medicine anymore. If you want to disrupt medicine, you need to take an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach. You’ll need to work with chemists, psychologists, engineers, doctors, and computer scientists.”