Laura had an impressive resume but a very complex personal background. An MBA from a top school would allow her to bring her academic credentials in alignment with her professional achievements and promise to propel her to new heights in her industry.
Laura showed up to Menlo with already strong writing skills, but her personal background was of a complexity that required careful calibration as to what to include in the essays, and where to draw that dividing line. Menlo front-loads the process by spending the necessary face to face time to help clients introspect. In Laura’s case this was as much a case of her learning how her story would be interpreted by the ADCOMs as it was for her coach to assimilate the content. Ultimately the key to her writing fantastic essays was the bond of trust between her and her coach, allowing to freely experiment with different approaches until the right one stuck.
In order to maximize the odds of a positive outcome, it was important to complement her story with equally remarkable career goals. There, Laura faced the difficulty of narrowing her short term goal down to a plan both realistic and specific. Because there was time, her coach encouraged her to conduct very specific professional networking, taking a break from essay writing for as much as a full month and leveraging LinkedIn and the “100 Women in Finance” network. The outcome was not only clear, ambitious yet achievable career goals, but also a wealth of contacts she will rely on during her actual summer internship and full-time job searches.
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