MBA Admissions Consulting by Menlo Coaching

In order to support you and your consultant, we’ve invested heavily in digital tools that eliminate some of the “busy work” that goes into MBA applications.

Once you sign-up to work with Menlo Coaching, you’ll have instant access to our Applications Platform—your hub for the entire MBA workflow. 

The Menlo Coaching Applications Platform includes:

• A 15-module educational course covering application basics, with 50+ HD videos and PDF handouts
• A to-do list of core action items, which serves as a staging ground for the most important elements of your application
• Built-in tagging capabilities, ensuring that you, your coach, and your associate are always up-to-date
• Our database of MBA program deadlines, essay prompts, recommender questions, and decision dates, which keeps you organized as you begin to work on school-specific content
• A custom-built progress tracking dashboard that presents the entire MBA workflow in one overview

The MBA journey is a long and lonely road…

But not for you.

Early in the on-boarding process, you’ll meet your Associate: a supporting team-member dedicated to your success.

Associates wear many hats: project managers, copyeditors, researchers, and troubleshooters. They’ll send you weekly messages to keep your priorities up-to-date and check-ins messages to make sure you’re sticking to deadlines. They’ll assist with everything from planning to record keeping to admin. And they’ll help ensure that every piece of your application is polished and ready for submission.

But the extra support doesn’t end there. 

Depending on your needs, your consultant may call in another consultant to weigh in on application strategy; to lend a hand in brainstorming; or to provide expert insight into a particular career path.

And when it comes time to prep for your MBA interviews, you’ll complete a mock session with at least one other Menlo Coaching staff member who is not your consultant.

While you will typically decide on a preliminary school list before signing up for our comprehensive service, your consultant will make sure that you’ve fully considered the academic strengths, location and culture, and overall ROI of all your potential targets before finalizing your list.

You’ll also read candid campus visit reports from former Menlo Coaching clients, not available to anyone but Menlo Coaching clients.

Once your school selection is finalized, your consultant will help you develop an application strategy for each school, adjusted specifically to match your goals and unique profile strengths.

Whether pivoting to a new career or advancing in your industry, talking through your career goals is another crucial first discussion you’ll have with your coach.

Articulating your post-MBA goals at the beginning of the process will help form a strong foundation for school research, networking, essay writing, and even interviewing.

As part of this early brainstorming work, you’ll generate a Career Goals Master Document, which will serve as important reference material during the essay writing stage.

An upfront investment in networking will pay off in ways you would never expect.

For example, when it comes time to write your essays, you’ll be able to cite specific people, classes, and qualities that explain how you came to form your post-MBA goals and your interest in each MBA program. 

That’s why, in the early stages, your consultant will help you optimize jam-packed networking schedules and teach you to make the most out of every event. You’ll have instant answers to all of the numerous questions that come up about networking etiquette, and you’ll learn best practices for cold outreach to current students.

In fact, we think networking is so important that we’ve built an in-house database of MBA profiles across the T25 for our clients. With some 70,000+ entries, our database is a handy tool for finding potential networking contacts. 

Your resume needs to be “MBA” ready—not “job seeking” ready. After all, it’s likely to be the very first document seen by the AdCom.

Draft after draft, your consultant will work with you to ensure that you convey your achievements in concrete, jargon-free terms.

In the process, you’ll start to see your resume from the point of view of an Admissions Officer, a crucial perspective for admission success. You’ll also gain a better understanding of the skills and experiences that most business schools value—and how to present them in every bullet.

MBA admissions is a marathon, not a sprint. 

That means, in addition to the major school deadlines at the end of the round, you’ll have lots of smaller deadlines throughout the process.

Breaking the process into manageable steps makes the experience less stressful overall, and it helps to prevent any last-minute rush right before deadlines.

Working in Private Equity, I was used to being in situations where you were pulling a couple of all-nighters to meet a deadline. I did not want any of that to touch my MBA process.

I worked with my consultant as early as possible and just chipped away at it in small bits. I actually finalized my application a week ahead of the submission deadline—that was a new experience for me. When you start early and chip away little by little—the returns compound.

Megan Roberts

Admitted to HBS + GSB + Wharton. HBS Class of 2022
New York

Our service comes to a head during your personal story call.

The personal story call is a deep dive into your past. During a 1:1 session lasting two hours on average, you and your consultant will explore everything from your childhood to your time in college all the way through to your current job.

As you lead your consultant on a tour through your life, they will take copious notes and ask poignant questions that draw out deeper reflection.

The stories and personal qualities uncovered during your call will feed directly into your Master Story Document, a roadmap to the overarching narrative that you will draw on throughout your application.

If you asked MBA applicants “what is the most challenging aspect of the application?,” the vast majority would say:

Essay writing.

There’s no denying that writing MBA essays can be a daunting task.

But by building on the foundation set in your Master Story Document, your consultant will take you through the writing process one essay at a time, providing valuable, timely feedback with every draft.

And because MBA essays tend to fall into one of 4 categories, your consultant will be able to break down the workflow into logical segments—for example, if you’re applying to Harvard Business School, you would always start with the core HBS essay; from here, the rest of the personal essays become incrementally easier to complete.

The importance of recommendation letters is sometimes underestimated by applicants.

But these letters are an external perspective on your candidacy, written by someone who knows you in a professional capacity and can speak to your skills and abilities from firsthand experience—a crucial point of view for MBA Admissions Officers.

Depending on your relationship with each proposed recommender, your consultant will help you select the two people who will know your work well and who will be in the best position to highlight your strengths.

Once both recommenders are on-board, you will step away from the process and your consultant will step in.

Not only will your consultant assist with the nuts and bolts of their letter, but because of their deep understanding of your career history and strengths, they will often be able to provide feedback on the content of the recommendation that your recommender might not have included outright.

Despite having strong relationships with my recommenders, discussing the content of the letter was a tricky task at best. Rebecca stepped into this process, skillfully working with my recommenders so that they could write the best letter possible. Afterward, one of my recommenders commented that working with Rebecca helped him deliver the strong letter that he wanted to, avoiding a few pitfalls that he wasn’t aware of.

Class of 2024: Admitted at Stanford and Wharton
New York

An MBA application is the sum of numerous details.

As you prepare to submit, it’s vital to make sure that every element is in its place.

Between your consultant and your associate, you’ll have two pairs of eyes reviewing your application forms, looking for any small errors that might add up to something more significant.

As you head into your MBA interviews, you’ll want to feel confident and calm.

Your interview prep will take a number of forms. First, you’ll go through at least one mock interview with your consultant.

In addition to your consultant, you’ll also give a mock interview with our resident MBA interview expert, Obinna Arizor.

Obinna has conducted over 400 actual and mock MBA interviews. He is keenly familiar with the evaluation process and how one’s interview performance complements their written application.

In addition to Obinna, every client also goes through professional communications training with Fearless Communicators, a firm that specializes in developing confident self-expression. 

Working with one of their trainers—including Broadway actors—you’ll learn to harness the power of your presence in the room to make a stronger impression on your interviewers.

This unique approach to MBA interview prep is not offered by any other firm, and for many clients, it becomes a transformational portion of the service, as the skills learned during this portion of our work together will carry into the rest of your professional life. 

I think one of the most helpful processes from Menlo Coaching is the interview preparation. You go about mock interview from different angles, not just with your consultant, but with other people who might not know you as well, so there’s a fresh perspective.

Then the communications training with professional actors teaches you to approach the interview like a stage performance. For the first time in my life, I felt calm and comfortable going into an interview.

Peter Lu

Harvard Business School, Class of 2023

For an MBA applicant, it’s the best problem to have: choosing between all the schools that accepted you.

Though it’s an enviable position to be in, it can still be difficult to evaluate all your options.

In many ways, your coach is in the best position to help you make a final decision: through the process, your consultant has come to know you as an MBA applicant better than anyone else, and they will be able to help you decide the right fit for your goals and your personal situation.

Once you’ve narrowed your list down, either to a few schools or to just one, there is sometimes room to negotiate scholarship money. 

Your consultant can help you with the proper etiquette for this stage, giving you advice about what’s appropriate to ask for, and how to go about doing it.

If there is room for negotiation at this stage, and you follow the guidance of your consultant, there is a high chance for admission success.

When I think about what I got out of this process—getting into five schools and into my dream school with a scholarship—and how far I went in just two years, I think about Menlo Coaching. I will always look back and know that Menlo was a critical part of me getting to where I am now. And you know, I don’t think you can really put a price on that.

Julia Bevilaqua

Wharton, Class of 2021