"Best" admission consulting companies?

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I did not work with them because my interest evaporated after a free evaluation. I wrote them a mail and received A VERY generic answer. Of course, free consultations are meant to be high-level. But in that case it was not a 30-50.000 feet level answer, but rather the answer from the orbit

Another issue - they quote a way tooooo much for a one-school package, even if you compare their price with that offered by one-man guru companies.

Just wanted to provide my two cents in this forum thread as well. I had a great experience with Tyler Cormney, who heads MBA Prep School. Prior to starting my b-school apps, I knew I could benefit greatly from an admissions consultant and was especially interested in MBA Prep School. I had a few friends (current HBS students) who previously worked with Tyler and recommended him because of his ability to help clients deeply reflect on their abilities and accomplishments to synthesize a unique and strongly branded candidate profile. During my 30-minute info interview with Tyler, I was impressed with the highly structured process he created for clients to develop their best applications. He also had detailed knowledge of what each of my target schools looked for in candidates. I decided to go with MBA Prep School and was not disappointed.

Tyler’s strategy for clients is to use MBA Prep School’s online lessons to initiate a self-reflection and organization process prior to tackling the actual essays. When you get to your essays, you’ll be prepped with the stories and themes that will make you unique and memorable. Tyler provided very candid feedback on which of my stories/strengths best fit each essay, including recommending me to scrap a number of first drafts and starting over with stronger ideas. Once I picked the right topics to write about, he helped me tighten my writing by refining sentence structure and grammar. Finally, after receiving interview invitations, we conducted mock interviews to prep for the real deal.

The b-school application process was probably the most challenging experience I’ve had since college. I had a relatively generic candidate profile (3.5 GPA from a top undergrad school, five years management experience for a telecom company, little quant background), but was able to leverage my strengths into successful applications for two of my top b-school choices. Because of MBA Prep School and Tyler’s help, I got into Haas and Ross. I’ll be attending Ross this fall and have my admissions consultant to thank. I definitely recommend Tyler and MBA Prep School to anyone going applying to b-school!

HI everyone, thanks for the great feedbacks.

For people who have worked with Precision Essay, with with consultant did you work with? Anyone you would recommend in particular?

Thanks !

Hi All,
I am new to GMAT club. It's a great effort and the information here is amazing. I see lot of information about Sandy, Amaresia and other consultancies but no word about Accepted.con, Clear Admit and Stacy Blackman Consultancy.

Would really appreciate if people can share their experiences with these consultants.

If there is any other thread then please share the link.

Thanks in advance and Best of Luck!!

Does anyone know the "internal cap" for number of essay revisions the major mba admission consultants will do for you? Amerasia? Veritas? MBAapply? MBAmission?

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Huh... very interesting! Paul used to be the lead MBA consultant for Veritas, so chances are good you may get 2 interviews with the same person!
Will be interesting - please report back after the interview if you don't mind. I am very curious.
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Dear GMAT Club members,

Has anyone used the services of Veritas Prep for admissions consulting? Would you please comment on your feedback--whether you found it useful in terms of
1) whether your objectives of hiring a consultant were met?
2) helped you prepare the great application packet (essays, resume etc.) that you wouldn't were capable of otherwise?
3) overall truthfulness of the claims made during a sales pitch.

I am told by Veritas Prep that most b-schools look for Quant score only, My Q is 50 and V 34 (Total 690). How much of that is true?

Thanks a lot.

Hi Simmy818,

I have some questions for you regarding veritasprep as I would be joining it too. Can you please answer the following questions:
Dear GMAT Club members,

Would you please comment on your feedback--whether you found it useful in terms of
1) whether your objectives of hiring a consultant were met?
2) helped you prepare the great application packet (essays, resume etc.)
3) overall truthfulness of the claims made during a sales pitch.

I am told by Veritas Prep that most b-schools look for Quant score only, My Q is 50 and V 34 (Total 690) and I'm not sure whether i should re-take the GMAt. THey told me that if I do and get a higher score, it will surely help, but not required. How much of it is true that b-schools look for Q score more than V?
Any other positive/negative experiences with VeritasPrep?

Thanks,
reach2bhush.

I'm looking for a recommendation on which consulting company to use. I spoke with a few of them already and bottom line is this: I want to work with someone who graduated from the school to which I'm applying. (For me, that'd be HBS.) Just makes sense to me.

I'm considering using Sandy but a friend told me he can be bit offensive though she put up with him. Has anyone used HBS Admissions Consulting? or Admissions Consultants (super generic name)? or Vince Prep (specializes in Japanese students but my non-Japanese friend referred me)? I'm leaning towards one of those but want to hear other people's experience...

Thanks!

***For other people's benefit, I was able to get a free review from some of them which gave me another data point to evaluate them on...

Hi, MbaMission seems to have almost all consultants who graduated from Harvard BS. Check their web site.
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[quote="reach2bhush"]

I am told by Veritas Prep that most b-schools look for Quant score only, My Q is 50 and V 34 (Total 690) and I'm not sure whether i should re-take the GMAt.
quote]

That's bs...I had a 41 Q, 690 total, B avg in undergrad math, and no quantitative work experience. It obviously won't hurt you to get a higher score, but i think people place way too much emphasis on it. Everyone's app is different but looking back I wouldv'e much rather spent that extra 4 months working on essays than studying for a re-take for which I ended up getting 10 points less anyways

To say that only the quant score is looked at by most schools is to say that the Verbal section is there on the exam for no reason at all. Each school looks at the Quant score in a different light and its relevance may be different for different applicants. If you're from an over-represented applicant pool in which a lot of applicants score more than 700, you might give it another shot and see how things go. But to draw a general conclusion that schools only look at the quant score seems a little off.

If I had to generalize, I believe that schools look at your overall GMAT score, with heightened interest in your quant score. A 690 with a Q50 is a great score, but it's only one component of your application. If you can present a strong and unique personal brand in your application essays to complement your 690, you should have no problem being admitted (even with a scholarship).

Achieving the highest GMAT score you can and delivering powerful essays can be a difficult balance. For me, I had plenty of time and felt that a re-take was a worthwhile investment (I still believe it was). Your score is definitely adequate, so only re-take if you believe it will help you balance your application (or if it's intrinsically important to you).

I got a question about why I chose not to hire a consultant in the end, so I'll answer here (sorry if it's off-topic).

In brief: I got pretty far on my own the first time around. I got an interview and was waitlisted before eventually being rejected. I had three friends review an early draft of my app and didn't give my recommendation writers any guidance. I feel better prepared this time, have a decent idea of why I didn't make it this cycle and (apologies in advance to everyone who chose differently) ultimately decided it didn't *feel right*.

At the end of the day, it's a personal choice. No judgment. (For context: nobody else looked at my undergraduate applications... my friends, parents and high school counselor/teachers really wanted to and I said no to all of them. To have three friends look at my MBA app was already a big step.)

690 is more than adequate. Every admission consultant I spoke with has agreed that anything in the middle 50% is adequate. Harvard's 50% scores 700 and above but that's an exception. 690 is basically 700.

Your GMAT score, at the end of the day, is only 3 characters long. It can only have so much of an impact. It is important if you had a low GPA and / or went to a no-name undergraduate university.

Aside from those cases, you should spend your time on your application. Write something that will blow away the AdCom. I'm using one admissions consultant now that has been really helpful:

https://www.hbsadmissionsconsulting.com

I can't see anything on Clear Admit so I'll add my experience.

I never actually engaged with an admissions consultant per say but I did purchase both the school guides and interview guides for Yale, Dartmouth, and HBS.

The information in the guides can be found all over the web but I thought that Clear Admit did a great job of collating and presenting the information in an easy to read, logical format, and I would definitely recommend that you purchase these documents as the cornerstone of your research into b-school as they will save you hours of trawling the web. Throughout the documents Clear Admit adds their own thoughts and ideas regarding the info, and while these sections are good I thought that they could expand them and perhaps include several perspectives (I guess they have to keep something back for the actual consultant services).

The interview guides are good also but I would recommend that you only purchase them once you are awarded an interview as they are of limited use before that. Also, each of the interview guides includes a generic section that is recycled from one to the next. I would have preferred to see those sections as a separate document rather that mixed into each guide.

My experience with Clear Admit was good overall and while I can't offer any advice regarding the quality of the higher priced consulting services I can certainly say that their research is solid and as a company they put out high quality material.

Hello. This post is from Tyler Cormney of MBA Prep School, and I wanted to join the thread to thank my clients for the positive reviews about me and the admissions consulting services we provide at MBA Prep School. Having read all the posts, I am so happy to see that many have benefitted from working with admissions consultants. There are many talented consultants in this field, and I encourage you to meet and talk with the ones that make it on your short list to determine who fits best with your needs and your personality.

As a consultant, I get to know my clients better than just about anyone else in their lives. It's so rewarding when they earn an acceptance letter from their dream school. That's why I love this job! I've been a consultant for six years now, and what I have learned is that the candidates who seriously engage with the process and are relentless in building a an outstanding application realize the best results. Make no mistake, this is a demanding process even with a coach to help you, perhaps more so.

At MBA Prep School, our mission is to make the applicants that engage with us more competitive. While there is certainly a marketing/strategy element to the admission consulting process, the intensive strengths discovery, career goals setting, and school research steps we guide our clients through make them stronger candidates than they were when they started the process and that shines through in the applications they create.

There have been a number of questions on this thread about more affordable admissions consulting options. MBA Prep School has created on-demand admissions consulting videos and published an eBook to put the principles and practices that admissions consultants use within reach for more applicants. In addition to our on-demand videos and web-based tools, we also offer editing services and hourly consultations for more targeted help for those on a budget. There is no way to perfectly emulate the experience of working one-on-one with an admissions consultant, but we have taken advantage of the latest online learning tools to create more affordable options.

I would be happy to answer any questions GMAT Club members have about how the admissions consulting process works and how MBA Prep School can help. You can PM me or reach me via our website: (https://mbaprepschool.com).
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Hi,
I wanted to contribute something to this discussion and share my experiences working on my MBA application with Aringo.com:

I had a great (and successful ) experience working with my Aringo.com consultant -- and I can honestly say I wouldn't have gotten in if it wasn't for the help I got with the package.

The key thing is making sure you have a chemistry with the consultant -- that's why I think Aringo is better than the freelancers out there; if you're unhappy (or if the consultant is sick / swamped / on holidays and you got a deadline...) you have the flexibility to change. I also like the fact they got the widest variety of MBA alums - so if you're applying to a few programs, you can have an alum of each school check your application package, and you get a chance to speak with alums of all the top programs.

My 2 cents...

Hi All,

I would like to share with you my personal experience with Ivy MBA consulting https://ivymbaconsulting.com/
Let's start from the results: accepted at both school I applied to, with this background: male, 33 y.o., 8 years experience in IT, GMAT 700.

Clearly I recognized the challenge of being one of the many techy guys that looked at the MBA to increase the opportunities for a career and industry switch.
But being one of the many, doesn't make you unique enough to get into the top MBA programs I was targeting.

I was very close to the application deadline and an MBA Alumnus who reviewed my essays recommended me to get some help to strengthen them and recommended me the Ivy team.
It is well known that MBA admission councils want to read real stories, and are very good at recognizing fakes, so the trick is not to invent but to find the unique points of your background. Sometimes though, they are quite well hidden in your memory, or not recognized as key points to mention.

Time was not playing in our favor, with less than 4 weeks to review the entire application. The Ivy group put together a very dedicated team, that worked day and night (literally) with me and helped me to discover those points that made my application successful.

Some tips for applicants:
- Don't make my mistake to contact the MBA consultants when it's late: although it is never too late to do it, but if you give them more time you will be able to sleep more at night . Moreover the strategy starts at the very beginning of your application process, I got tangled in my GMAT for months, and I'm sure they would have recommended better way to overcome this hurdle.
- Don't get scared if they are not located in your own country: I worked with this guy remotely for weeks and only met one of their consultant for the interview preparation process. Needless to say, I never felt left alone, and we were able to build up a very efficient way of working remotely.
- Good luck to all of you!