"Best" Admissions Consulting Companies - 2016 Season

I worked with Alice van Harten (https://menlocoaching.com/). She is one of the reasons why I got admitted to Booth and thought I should share my experience here.

A bit of background. I’m from an emerging country. I thought I had a competitive background and a compelling story – I had fast track career growth, overachieving in many areas and organized some projects with social impact. I also wanted to go to Columbia and decided to apply to Columbia early decision first. With this in mind, I thought anyone with a decent knowledge of the admission process could help. I therefore decided to work with an admission consultant from a big company (listed in gmatclub admission consulting companies list) and chose to work with a consultant that was a former member of Columbia admissions committee.

Sounds great, right? But no, not really. I was wrong as hell, and the whole experience was terrible. My consultant hardly understood what my profile was. She had her own template for essays and tried to fit everything on the template, and she showed almost zero belief in my application which was demotivating. As a result, my Columbia application was not close anything that I thought of myself. It made me to realize admission consulting is not a commodity and it is very important to work with a right person.

I did not wait for a reply from Columbia and went on looking for someone else to work with. Thanks to reviews on this forum, I decided to contact Alice for a free 30 minute consultation. Although it was just a short call, it was enough for me to decide that I really wanted to work with her. During the call she showed a remarkable understanding of my profile, and offered some genuine advices how to improve my application, instead of advertising her services. I knew straight after the call that I wanted to work with her, and that was one of the best decisions I made in my mba applications.

Here is a brief summary of my working with her:
- She helped to set out the structure for essays. She does not have a fixed template for everyone. Instead, she tried to understand my background and we agreed on a structure that would highlight my strengths.
- Alice likes to micromanage every detail of application. Before submitting my application package, she went through all details of my application to ensure everything was consistent. She also has PhD from Cambridge and worked in Bain which makes it easier for her to understand business terminology.
- Helped to choose recommenders, and advised how to prepare briefings for recommenders.
- Alice really believes in you and does her best for you to succeed. I can’t stress out how important this is. MBA application is quite a stressful and time consuming process. Combined with long working hours, it is very easy to lose track of things. Having someone to keep you motivated is very important.
- We set out deadlines for completing different parts of application packages. Then we would have short Skype calls once or twice a week to briefly discuss her feedbacks and areas for improvement. Alice really pushes you to make that perfect essay.
- When I received interview initiations, Alice helped me to prepare for the interviews in a best possible way. I never thought preparing for interviews would be such a challenging task, and my performance in mock interviews improved significantly after working with her. Almost all questions asked by the interviewers were the ones that we discussed with Alice in our practice. She was also creative with her solutions. For instance, we noted that during interviews, I performed better after first 10 minutes which were “warm-up”. She therefore arranged a phone practice call just before my interview to ensure that I was prepared.

I only applied to 4 mba programs and was admitted to Chicago Booth. In retrospect, I’m very happy to get into Booth and not Columbia. I wholeheartedly advise everyone to work with Alice. Just schedule a 30 minute free call with her and I’m sure it will be more than enough to be convinced she is a good fit for you.