Masterful Storyteller

It’s a difficult task to be able to summarize an entire business school application process into a single testimonial; it’s an even more challenging task to distill a person’s entire breadth of personal and professional experiences into a series of compelling essays and short answer questions that sneak in just under a restrictive word limit. Katy was able to masterfully do just that, and then some.

On paper, I come from a very traditional and overrepresented professional background when it comes to business school applicants (investment banking / private equity). But I also had a lot of unique and seemingly unrelated interests and experiences that I, at least, hoped could differentiate me if I could figure out how to actually tell them. That was always my biggest anxiety when setting out to begin my application process: I had a complicated story that risked being “all over the place” and incoherent if told incorrectly. I was also on the fence about working with an admissions consultant having never worked with one before. I did introductory meetings with around 10 consultants across a number of firms and none were quite able to see the “real me” behind the traditional background quite like Katy was. I met with Katy twice, but I knew after our first 30-minute intro call that I wanted to work with her. I felt like she was really able to “see” me and my story, which was an immediate weight off of my shoulders.

I won’t shortchange the difficulty of the application process, but Katy really did a wonderful job segmenting it into “digestible” bites to tackle, and she staged it in a way such that I never felt overwhelmed or behind schedule, even with an extremely demanding job. Pretty quickly, Katy was able to masterfully weave a series of disparate an unrelated experiences into a single, cohesive narrative, plucking the right threads from each in a way that I know I would have struggled to do on my own. This, alone, made the whole experience of working with her worth it for me. But it didn’t stop there; Katy was always available to answer my one-off questions and pull form her experience having sat on the “other side of the table” at Stanford. I very much valued her opinion and guidance when it came to the process-related questions and with how to best position my application.

When it was all said and done, I applied to Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton, I was invited to interview at all three, and I was admitted to 2 of the schools and waitlisted at the third. While I am obviously ecstatic with the outcome, before hearing back from the schools I was actually quite calm. I knew that, regardless of what the outcome would be, that I had put my best foot forward. And I knew that, with Katy’s help, I was able to put together an application that I was really happy with and confident in submitting. I am fairly certain that I would have had neither the smooth application process nor the outcome that I did without Katy’s help. For that, I will be forever grateful.