Excellent experience with Square One Prep, and Mary

From the get go, my experience with Square One, Kathryn and Mary has been nothing short of amazing. While I was shopping around MBA admissions consultants, the thing that most appealed to me about Square One was how Kathryn displayed time and again that they would tailor their approach to best suit my needs. Kathryn went out of her way to cater to me, getting on multiple calls with me before I even signed on with them. She even allowed me to have conversations with a few advisors to ensure I would be able to find someone who matched my working style – something I didn’t experience with any other consultant that I talked to.

I had attempted to apply by myself, the previous year. The part I struggled most with was setting my career vision and goals. The experience of exploring career options in depth and bouncing ideas off Wendy, my advisor Mary, and Kathryn was eye opening not just from the perspective of MBA applications, but also in actually affecting my desired career path.

After setting my goals, it was onto creating my resume and writing the essays. Being in a full-time, demanding job, I had the habit of regularly getting sucked into work and de-prioritizing my applications. I deeply appreciate two very specific things that Square One did, that helped me keep on track. One, they published a weekly tracker that showed me where I was against where I should be on my applications, and Two, whenever I had something on my plate, Mary wouldn’t go more than a day without checking in on me, to ensure I hadn’t hit any snags or gotten sidetracked. Even though these were small things, it showed me that they were deeply invested.

Speaking of Mary, she was invaluable during the entire application process. Her turnaround times were never more than a day, with it being a matter of hours most of the time. While her exacting standards left me having to re-work entire essays sometimes, the results always made it worthwhile. However, the part that I most appreciated was that Mary did more than just review my essays. She went the extra mile to think of ways to make the essay better, suggesting themes from her understanding of my story, asking me to dig deeper for illustrative anecdotes, and even, the one time, recommending scrapping the essay we had already iterated on because she felt I could do better - and she was right!

Overall, I ended up getting 3 interview invitations of the 5 schools I applied to and got admitted into one of my dream schools. I can whole-heartedly say that I definitely would not have achieved this, without Mary and Square One Prep. I have already recommended them to my friends, and if you are thinking of getting an admissions consultant, I highly recommend you to go with Square One.