Top Tier AdmissionsA former Admissions and Financial Aid Officer for Harvard University, Kristen brings over 20 years of experience working in higher education. Kristen has a PhD in Education with a concentration in Higher Education, an M.S. in Business Management, and a B.A. in English. Her PhD dissertation won the International Susan B. Anthony Institute Dissertation Award. In her role at Harvard, Kristen oversaw admissions for 17 departments and was also responsible for distributing funding from the National Science Foundation Fellowships Program and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Student Research Fellowship Program. Kristen previously worked as a substitute K-12 teacher, as adjunct faculty at three universities in MA and NY, and as an educational researcher. Kristen recently published a book (Information Age Publishing) on faculty and tenure in academia which Stanford University Libraries featured on their recommended "Gender and Education Books" list. Kristen has written for Entrepreneur Magazine and published in journals such as the Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs and the American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences Journal. Kristen has also been featured in and interviewed for publications such as U.S. News & World Report, the Washington Examiner, Yahoo News, and Business Insider.
I’ve worked with students for almost two decades who hate the GRE. It’s long, they haven’t taken a math class in several years (so the quant section is overwhelming), the registration fee ($220 in most U.S. cities) is pricey, it’s anxiety-producing to sit in a test center for four hours, standardized testing is fraught with […]
February is prime time for graduate school application submissions. It’s also when many college students are thinking about next steps. If you are researching graduate programs, you might be understandably confused when it comes to the testing requirements. I want to help clear up some of the confusion and give you straight answers about “score […]
In August 2020, I wrote a post called “Grad School Admissions Changes Due to Covid-19.” Since then, graduate school admissions has changed dramatically. Given the admissions and enrollment trends we track here at Top Tier Admissions, we’re able to gauge how things are changing year over year in admissions. As with many things, Covid threw […]
This could be the best possible year to apply to top MBA programs in the past decade. As the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) confirmed in their annual report in late October, MBA and graduate business program applications are down 3.4% overall from last year and down 2.2% for full time MBA programs. What does […]
Grad school faculty are finishing their research projects and soaking up the last rays of summer sun before heading back to campus. Soon they’ll be diving back into lab work, polishing up old syllabi that have been through the ringer (from on-campus courses to virtual and back again), taking on new advisees and working to […]
The Senior Year Roadmap
Every deadline from August to May – test dates, applications. decisions – in one place. Signup to download the full 9-page Senior Year Roadmap (PDF)