Excel has been a through line of my academic and professional career. It is a skill that, once mastered, helped me in many spheres of my life. I've had to help a lot of people with varying levels of Excel proficiency. In this post, we’ll talk about how to autofill formulas in Excel. If you’d like to learn about additional strategies in Excel, you should read other posts in this series!

Should you take the GMAT or the GRE for MBA applications?

One topic that seemed a bit mysterious and magic to me when I first learned calculus was implicit differentiation. In this post, we’ll start by reviewing some examples of implicit differentiation and then discuss why implicit differentiation works.

What is a cell reference? In Excel, it is when a cell derives its value based on the value of another cell. The below is a simple example of a cell reference. Note that the value in cell A3 is derived from the value in cell A1. How do you create a reference to another cell? In the cell that you want to create a cell reference, press the '=' key on your keyboard and then click on the cell that you want to reference.

So you got your score back, and you’re not thrilled. What now?

The symbol “dx” comes up everywhere in calculus. For example:

I’ve introduced many friends, colleagues, and students to the Goal Seek feature in Excel, and I usually get a similar reply. “Woah!” is a common exclamation; “how cool!” has come up from time to time. No matter the person, most everyone is surprised that they hadn’t heard of the tool before, and lament the fact that they hadn’t known about it sooner.

No genre of writing is simultaneously as fun to read and as taxing to write as is the personal statement. I say that the personal statement is fun to read because a good one gives the reader a sense that he or she has really met and come to know someone else, even (and perhaps especially) a complete stranger. I say that the personal statement is taxing to write for obvious reasons: you must distill yourself, your very essence, into 500 or 750 words, each one a polished gem, and your whole future rides on it. Sure, that assessment might sound hyperbolic, but there’s truth to it. The personal statement is one of the few parts of an application in which the applicant gets to transcend numbers, scores, and grades to appear as what each of us is: a real person, whole and complete.

A very important concept when it comes to thinking about markets in economics is the idea of Pareto efficiency. An allocation of resources is Pareto efficient if it is not possible to make anyone better off without making someone else worse off.

There are no hard and fast rules in writing. But even if an experimental poet or an avant-garde novelist has dispensed with capitalization or written an entire novel without the letter E (yes, a novel like this really exists!), this does not mean that you should follow suit. Your personal statement is not the place to defy the conventions of grammar. Instead, it is the place to display your knowledge of even the most obscure rules—the rules that others often break. If you can keep from making these two common errors, your writing will stand out.