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Updated June 8, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Admitted by Soundarya Balasubramani. Written by an Ivy League graduate from India, this is the proven guide for students worldwide looking to pursue undergraduate or graduate study abroad in the U.S., Canada, or Europe. Purchase for instant access to the guide and other exclusive resources—including sample SOPs, sample resumes, scholarship lists, and a private community with other readers.
Time to open your Dream Tracker again.
In fact, let’s revisit the quadrant once again.
The Quadrant Framework
Three things need to be fixed above:
First, the Requirements quadrant isn’t needed anymore, now that you’ve been selected.
Second, we need to add a few more factors that you can look at now, since your world has been simplified.
Finally, since you saw this for the first time, a lot might have changed in your life. Maybe a university gave you a scholarship, or you obtained one from external sources. Maybe you got a response from a professor in one of the universities who agreed to be your supervisor. Or, something happened in your personal life that needs to be taken into account. Whatever it is, it has to be incorporated here.
The Quadrant Framework
That’s more like it.
When you were choosing the universities to apply to, your mind was primed to think about elimination.
Now, approach this problem from the standpoint of selection.
There is a famous saying when it comes to hiring: look for someone with T-shaped skills.*
The T here is a metaphor that conveys that companies want someone with both breadth-wise and depth-wise skills, indicated by the horizontal and vertical bar of the symbol T. Think of the T-shaped person as a “jack of many trades and master of one (or a few)”. The earliest reference of this goes all the way back to a paper published in 1978.* Since then, it has been referenced in various articles* as a way to encourage people to acquire skills across varied fields.
We will now use this mental model* to help you make the final choice.