Re: "Best" Admissions Consulting Companies - 2016 Season
[#permalink]
04 Jan 2016, 09:54
My business school admissions journey was not easy. In fact, it was two years of hard work, disappointment, and uncertainty. However, it was also an incredible learning experience and tremendously rewarding. Looking back, I only have one real regret, which is that I did not work with Critical Square from the beginning.
Growing up, I had been a competitive tennis player -- I played through the juniors and in college and professional events. After attending a top 25 public university, I spent two years working in equity research and consulting and then left the finance world to pursue professional tennis aspirations. I discovered a real passion for coaching and worked with competitive junior players for the next couple years. From coaching, I transitioned to entrepreneurship, starting my own sports consulting, sponsorship sales and activation, and athlete/event marketing business. Nearing the end of my twenties, I decided to pursue bigger challenges and greater intellectual fulfillment outside of sports and joined the business development team at a rapidly growing, late-stage startup in the digital marketing space. Though I had been successful in a number of disciplines, translating my disjointed work history into a compelling business school application proved no easy task. I focused all of my attention on the GMAT, upon which I did well, and I hired a number of consultants as the round 2 deadline approached, thinking that I could circumvent some of my uncertainty by throwing money at the problem -- big mistake. My high-priced, well-known consultants had no idea how to synthesize my story effectively. They hastily inserted a few facts and metrics into my essays and helped me churn out some mediocre-at-best applications, resulting in two wait lists and ultimately zero acceptances.
I was disappointed and momentarily considered giving up, or at least targeting part-time programs exclusively. Having been close to getting into some great programs, I decided to give it another go and had the incredible good fortune of discovering Critical-Square through a blog post. From my initial conversation, the experience with Critical Square was head and shoulders better than with any previous consultant I had worked with.
The differences were obvious. Most of the consultants I had worked with or spoken to focused on the weaknesses of my application: my age (now 30), non-linear work history, and difficult to attain/justify career goals. I always left our consultations/initial conversations feeling like my chances of getting into good schools were grim and without any sense of direction or of a cohesive strategy that highlighted my strengths. While my case manager at Critical Square acknowledged that there would be challenges associated with my story, he was positive and focused on the aspects of my story he liked. More importantly, he immediately pointed out elements of my background that he felt had been underutilized and fit well into a larger narrative. I chose Critical Square based on their enthusiasm, confidence, and ability to articulate what they thought they could do with the "raw material" I provided.
The fact that my case manager was knowledgeable, experienced, and confident enough to immediately begin to synthesize a strategy that we both believed in did not mean our collaboration was easy. In fact, I found that I had to work much harder with the staff at Critical Square than with any of the previous consultants -- I would say the thing that they did best was to tolerate mediocrity less than I did, which was no small feat. In having me download from memory all of the relevant details from my professional and academic background onto paper, they were relentless, pushing me farther than I would have thought possible. We explored every stretch at an academic institution, every extra-curricular activity, and every job with an extraordinary attention to detail, something profoundly more extensive than anything I had encountered, but it was their insistence on getting everything out that would set the stage for our future success.
My case manager maintained this commitment to excellence at every stage, overcoming push-back and frustration from me on numerous occasions. He pushed me to select better recommenders, conduct more informational interviews with students, student body leaders, and alumni, and participate in more campus and class visits. The MBA admissions process is arduous, and it is only because of Critical Square that I now understand what a great application looks like -- the payoff of the partnership with my case manager became evident as I completed my first essay drafts. By motivating me to dig deep into my past and approach researching schools and collecting experiences/talking points with the same tenacity that I had approached the GMAT, I began to see the mountain of raw data refined into concise, compelling, and effective writing. I had done all of the work myself, but what I saw in front of me could never have been achieved without the collective expertise of the staff at Critical Square to show me how to allocate my time and efforts.
Armed with all of this information, the essay writing process was far easier. My previous consultants had advised me to stay away from using too many words to describe things and encouraged me to insert facts and metrics wherever possible, but this is only part of the truth. Without spending time really considering every step of one’s life and career journey, conducting career/goal research, talking to people, and visiting schools the metrics and specifics are just clutter and do little to make the essays more persuasive and forceful. I cannot emphasize the importance of this enough and how regrettable it was to have wasted time alone and with other consultants without this in mind. Moreover, my case manager displayed incredible patience in reworking all of my essays until I felt we had assimilated all of the facts and metrics into my writing in a way that did not compromise the flow of the narrative.
When I finally submitted my applications, I can honestly say that I was at peace with the fact that I had done everything I could do to further my candidacy.
Even after all of the hard work, I was not particularly optimistic. The disappointment of the previous year was still fresh in my mind, and I just wanted to get into one of the six schools I applied to. In fact, I only applied to two top ten schools. My top two choices were Columbia and Wharton, and I received word that Columbia wanted to interview me only a few weeks after I submitted the application. I have always been fairly confident in interviews, and I did not expect to get too much out of the practice sessions with my case managers. I could not have been more wrong. Their process of having me tell my story a few times and getting me more comfortable with the transitions on my resume was incredibly valuable, and every time we went through a prep session something new came to light – the logic behind a decision, wording that I wanted to stay away from, a subtle tie in to something from my past. By the time we had finished, I had mapped out a story that replaced disjointed clutter with a linear, well-thought-through career progression that led to my targeted roles with a gap just large enough for an MBA degree to bridge.
I selected an interviewer through Columbia’s web portal and completed the interview a few days later. About thirty-six hours later, I got the call -- I was accepted into the class of 2018 of my dream school and am moving to NYC in a few months. I received interview invites from Yale and Michigan and a ding from Wharton, and I withdrew the rest of my applications. I can honestly say that I would not be going to Columbia next Fall if it were not for my case manager and the staff at Critical Square. Had I gone with Critical Square from day one, I would have saved myself thousands of dollars, tremendous disappointment, and a great deal of time. More importantly, our collaboration and the guidance of the staff gave me an opportunity to really evaluate my goals and ambitions, understand myself better as a professional, and learn life-long resume writing, interviewing, and business skills.
close
