Maureen (SBC) Reviews

I cannot express how grateful I am for Maureen and Stacy Blackman. With the help, support, and resources of Maureen and Stacy Blackman, I found great success in my MBA applications. I was accepted to Tuck, Ross, and Fuqua, my top choices!

From my initial consultation with Sarah Tsai, I received customized and tailored advice from Stacy Blackman. Sarah matched me with Maureen based on my background and goals, and it was a great fit! Maureen took the time to really get to know my background, experiences, and goals, and worked with me to create a schedule and application plan. When I fell behind schedule due to disappointing GMAT scores, she helped and motivated me to stay on track and ensure that I ultimately met my round one deadlines. From the beginning, she set clear expectations and made me aware of my weaknesses. This allowed me to acknowledge and address these weaknesses in my application. Most significantly, I had a low GMAT quant score. While I felt discouraged, Maureen pushed me to retake the test multiple times, and even consider the GRE. She encouraged me to take advantage of all possible opportunities to ensure I submitted my best possible application.

Maureen and I worked on countless resume, essay, and email drafts. Because she really understood my experiences and goals, she helped me to create unique and personalized essays. She consistently emailed me back drafts the same day with strong edits and ideas. I emailed her daily with questions and concerns and she never failed to respond in a timely and thorough manner. Maureen was invested in my success throughout the whole process. She provided insight into the particular programs that I was applying to and helped me to differentiate my applications. She followed up with me after each interview and event that I attended. I am so incredibly grateful for Maureen and Stacy Blackman.

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After an introductory call with Esther at SBC, I was matched with Maureen based on her experience working with my target program. The matching process in itself felt very personalized, unlike other companies with which I spoke (and worked) where I was randomly assigned to a consultant.

Maureen began our conversation helping me to set very realistic expectations. She forced me to think through my story and challenged a lot of my assumptions about the admissions process. Maureen was both kind and firm – the sign of a great coach – and rather than micro-editing my essays, she asked pointed questions to drive me to dig deeper and expose more of my personality.

While no one likes to be told that their initial ideas need work, or that they need to work harder, her efforts and emphasis on pushing me helped me earn admission to my target program. Maureen was always quick to respond and answered many one-off questions throughout the process (she even calmed my nerves after I realized I had a typo in one of my essays after I submitted the application).

Overall, I found my interactions with SBC to be professional, personalized, and effective start to finish. Like I said, I worked with another consultant on a different application and, though admitted to that program as well, Maureen’s ability to help me carve out my story, rather than just edit essays, was critical to my admission. Thanks SBC!

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I had a fantastic experience working with Maureen from SBC. I honestly believe that I put my best foot forward in my applications and, in large part, I have her to thank. She helped me with everything imaginable: decisions like whether to retake the GMAT, essay and short answer editing, recommender management, and interview prep. Maureen is also just generally a good human and was an incredible sounding board for my reservations, fears, and anxieties throughout the process.
One of the best parts of working with Maureen was her incredible essay editing skills: she made me work harder and probed me to dig deeper. She also really understands the lens through which admissions committees view essays and the entire application. I found my interview prep with Maureen to be especially helpful. My practice interview for HBS was nearly identical, in style, pace, and types of questions, to the real HBS interview.
And in the end there's proof that Maureen is awesome: I was accepted to all the schools I applied to including HBS, Columbia, and Kellogg. The b-school admissions process is long and hard but having Maureen by my side made it not so bad.

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Stacy Blackman Consulting exceeded my expectations and more than lived up to its excellent reputation. I worked with Maureen, who guided me through the entire application process, from crafting my story, to writing essays, and finally conducting mock interviews with me.

I was focused on a very small group of schools, all in the M7. Maureen helped me to tailor my story and application for each school, showing me how to emphasize specific aspects about myself that made me a fit for each program, allowing me to differentiate my candidacy. Maureen was extremely organized, laying out an aggressive but achievable schedule for submitting all of my applications before the Round 1 deadline. She was also incredibly responsive, typically turning around drafts of my essays within a day, and responding to all of my emailed questions within a few hours. I was accepted to both Columbia and to Kellogg with a large scholarship. I feel very strongly that without Maureen's guidance I would not have been admitted to any of the schools I applied to.

In addition to Maureen's exceptional guidance, Stacy Blackman Consulting has an outstanding set of resources that helped me throughout the process. The application flight test helped me to identify and fix weak spots in my application, and the wealth of information available on the Stacy Blackman Wiki was invaluable to me as I wrote my essays.

The MBA application process is far more competitive than I first realized, and I learned that a strong GMAT, GPA, and career path is not enough. Candidates must find ways to differentiate themselves, and Maureen and the team at Stacy Blackman Consulting showed me how to do so. If you are serious about pursuing an MBA at a top program, then I highly recommend that you consider working with Stacy Blackman Consulting.

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