Fantastic consultant to work with. Delighted with how everything went.

I worked with Alice from Oct 16 – Mar 17 on 4 round 2 applications to US schools. The schools were Wharton, Harvard, Stanford and Booth. I am originally from the UK and had been working in New York for a year. I want to state up front that all the words below are mine and I did not share this review with Alice before posting. The reason I am doing this is that when I was choosing a consultant a year ago and came across Alice’s reviews they were so unbelievably positive that I was nervous they weren’t fully independent (I ended up speaking to a few of the reviewers who assured me that they were all their own words). I have tried to be as balanced as possible below and to not just be universally positive in order to be as helpful as possible to the reader. Apologies for the length of review but this is an important decision and so I have tried to give a many details as possible. As background context I initially really did not want to use a consultant due to the cost. I was confident that if I really worked hard I would be able to produce good essays. I ended up deciding to use a consultant for four main reasons: i) I was applying for difficult schools and was going to need all the help I could get; ii) I knew that a lot of applicants were using consultants and I did not want to be at a disadvantage to them straight off the bat; iii) being from the UK, I thought I might benefit more from the guidance on applications to US schools than someone from the US would; and iv) reading Alice’s reviews and speaking to her convinced me that she would really add value to my application. I spoke to four other consultants and finally narrowed it down to Alice and one other. It can be very hard to make that decision as there are a lot of strong consultants with impressive resumes, reviews and track records. One reservation that I had with Alice was that she had not worked within admissions while a lot of other consultants had. I ended up going with Alice due primarily to: i) the personal connection that I felt we had from the introductory phone calls; ii) I got comfortable that it was no secret what admissions people were looking for and so it wasn’t a real disadvantage that Alice had not worked on the inside (it could even be an advantage that she brings a different angle having worked in business and consulting); and iii) the fact that she was pretty much a one-person company rather than from one of the larger firms. More on these below. In summary, I was delighted with my experience working with Alice. I got into top schools, one with a good scholarship offer, and the overall process was a lot easier and less stressful that it would have been if I had gone on my own. I have already personally recommended Alice to colleagues and friends but I do always caution on the cost. There’s no denying that the application consulting service is expensive and it’s really a personal decision on whether you are happy to pay that money. Depending on the strength of your application it may or not be the difference between you getting into a top school – it’s very hard to weigh this up before you have really started the process so my recommendation is to peak to lots of consultants / friends etc. in order to really understand how much help you need and in what areas. See below for more detailed thoughts on specific areas of working with Alice. Personal connection: Alice is a really lovely person and I think it is a real differentiator that she seems to develop a strong personal connection with all of her applicants. The application process is long and tough and can be disheartening at times and therefore it is so vitally important to like the person you are working with. I would look forward to the phone calls, which says a lot given they were at 7am and often after late nights at work and given that she was often telling me that I needed to work harder on a certain essay (i.e. I would need to cancel my Saturday plans). I can imagine that if you do not get along well with your consultant you would really resent these calls and the free time that you are asked to give up. Although I believe that you really cannot go wrong with Alice I think it is still worthwhile to do your research and speak to a number of consultants before deciding who to go with. The personal connection is so important. Alice is consulting for the right reasons: Another huge positive about Alice is that you get the impression that she really cares about your application. Of course it’s in her interest for you to do well in your applications (and so will be more likely to recommend her) but I always felt that she really enjoyed helping people and was genuinely doing it for the right reasons. It is easy to be cynical about the industry (charging high rates to people who are often already well off on the promise that with a top offer they will be able to get even richer) but Alice is one of the “good guys” in the industry. For Alice it is about more than just the application and paycheck and she wants you to make the right decision – for example we are still in touch about post-MBA career goals and she is always offering to give advice. There were a number of situations where Alice gave me advice that was not in her monetary interest. These really gave me trust in her and gave me confidence that she would never rack up unnecessary hours. A few examples: – When I was weighing up choosing between Alice and another consultant she did not attempt to oversell herself. Rather she laid out her particular approach to the process and advised me to only choose to work with her if I thought our approaches aligned. – Once we’d started working together I was verging towards Columbia being my first choice. Alice told me that I should apply “early decision” there and would get in with minimal guidance from Alice. I was someone who was willing to apply to 4-5 schools with the full suite of services and she was basically advising me to only use ~5 hours of her time. (I ended up not even applying to Columbia, for personal reasons); – Later on in the process and I was considering doing a last minute application to Stanford. I asked Alice what my chances were, i.e. was this really worth the time and cost. A less scrupulous person may have tried to encourage me to apply, thereby increasing my hours, but Alice was very clear on how long a shot it was and did not make any attempt to push me towards an application; and – When we had a recent discussion on applying for consulting jobs post-MBA she mentioned that she offered a service to help with the applications. I would have thought that she would be well positioned to help on this given her experience with applications in general and that she worked for Bain (as well as getting offers from BCG and Mckinsey) but she advised me to use a different company that she thought would be able to help me more. There were a few times when Alice and I went off topic and started chatting generally on our calls. When we did this she always stopped the clock. There are pros and cons to an hourly versus package pricing model but I believe that overall the incentives are better aligned with Alice’s hourly method. With hourly pricing it means she has to be continuously adding value or risk the applicant reducing the hours used. I probably ended up paying a similar amount to if I had bought a package from one of the bigger companies but it was important to me to retain the option to turn the tap off at any moment and was not committed to a certain amount. I have also heard from other applicants who went down the package route that they did not feel very valued – rather they had been sold hard by the company initially but once they’d paid the fees they no longer felt they were a priority. The other side of the coin is that I was very aware of always being on the clock and there were a few situations when I would have loved to discuss something further but I kept quiet so as to not to incur more costs. Although there are surely many excellent consultants, they are definitely not all created equal. Of three good friends who used consultants, one had a great experience and two did not. One of these two said that she did not get along well with the consultant and actually stopped using him halfway through. The other person got along fine with her consultant but felt that she did not add that much. This shows how important it is to get the decision right. Essays: Most applicants can probably write a good essay without the help of a consultant but few would be able to write a very good essay. The strength of your background and experience helps for sure but even with a very interesting story you may not be that effective at turning it into a compelling essay. If I go back and re-read my first drafts of each essay and compare them to the final versions, it is pretty incredible how much they improved. I obviously cannot comment on how much other consultants help your essays but can just say that Alice added huge value to mine both in giving her thoughts on what the content / theme of each essay should be (the “story”) and also in editing so that it reads well. The first thing you will do with Alice is have a 1-2 hour kick off call where she will ask you lots of questions about your background and experience (it is characteristic of Alice’s personal approach that this is all done on skype rather than through questionnaires that some of the larger companies use to save their time) . This allows her to get to know your strengths and weaknesses and ultimately is what she will use direct the content of the essays. I think that Alice helped all of my essays hugely but it was probably on the more open-ended ones that she really came into her own. For example, most people would be able to make a good attempt at the two Wharton essays and Stanford’s “Why Stanford” (i.e. the more structured ones) but would struggle with HBS’s “Tell us what else we don’t know about you” and Stanford’s “What matters most to you and why”. This is primarily because it is very hard to look at oneself objectively and know what it is interesting about your background. The things that I thought were interesting about myself were apparently not that interesting, rather it was things I would never have thought of. For example, if you had asked me to think of ten ideas for the topic for the HBS essay I would not have listed the one that Alice thought the strongest (and which we went with). But by the time that essay was written I could see how strong the story was. Alice has helped so many people through the process that she is so good at identifying the characteristics that set you apart from other applicants. Another example is the Booth application, where they give you the option to write a traditional essay or submit a photo presentation. I would never have had the confidence to submit a photo presentation without Alice’s encouragement that she believed it to be the more compelling approach in my case. I ended up with a scholarship offer. Another area where Alice really influenced the content of my essays was my career goals (important for Wharton’s “Why MBA at Wharton”, Stanford’s “Why Stanford” and interviews). I started off thinking that I should be as ambitious as possible with career goals on the basis that schools would be interested in someone who aimed high. I then toned my goals down to private equity, which again Alice said was not suitable as it showed I hadn’t really done my research (very few MBAs leave for a job in private equity who hadn’t done it before, and even less without banking experience). The career goal we went with (banking) was not my real career goal but it made so much more sense given my background as well as being very achievable (which is important for the schools’ rankings as these are partly based on how quickly their students gets employed). This advice drastically altered my application and I am so relieved that I had Alice to explain all this to me. Alice also really improved the flow of the essays. This is less important than content and for sure the admissions teams are not expecting everyone to be great writers but it can only help to submit an essay that is well structured and reads nicely. Alice has great experience at cutting unnecessary words / sentences and I always enjoyed receiving each draft back from her because I knew she would have really improved it. Comments on other areas where Alice helped Managing the process – if you are really busy, e.g. at work, it is such a bonus to be able to effectively outsource the project management of your application. Alice gives you timing goals / deadlines and makes sure you are always on track. There were times when I was nervous that I was falling behind but Alice was able to reassure me that I was still on track. The application is stressful enough wand so being able to rely on Alice for managing everything made life a lot easier than it could have been. Resume – it took a few drafts but Alice helped me to write a really strong resume. I had not written a resume since being at university and it is an added bonus that I now have a great starting point for when I apply for my next jobs. Online application forms – it is easy to ignore these until the last minute and to rush them but they are important and include some difficult questions which Alice guided me through. Alice’s partner – a potential advantage of the larger consulting companies is that they have large teams of consultants and so your essays get passed around and commented on from different sets of eyes. I wanted to point out that, although Alice doesn’t have a large team, her founding partner David is also very useful in that respect. I do not know how much Alice consults with David but I got the impression that she runs a lot by him and I was aware of certain situations where he had a direct input (for example in formulating my career goals). He also gave me interview practice, more on which below. Interview prep – this was incredibly helpful and I will definitely take what I learnt with me on to job interviews. I had not had an interview in five years and definitely needed guidance on style and content of answering questions. It is both a pro and a con to have Alice give you interview practice. On the one hand she knows you well by now and so knows where you may be under-selling yourself or if you have better answers in your locker for certain questions; on the other hand, you perhaps know each other too well and it is hard to completely detach yourself from this. Luckily, Alice’s partner David can step in here – this was the first time we had spoken and so David could be completely impartial. I ended up having mock interviews with both David and Alice and so had the best of both worlds. I probably used two hours of their time on interview prep but this really was money well spent. Wharton TBD prep – this is also interview prep but a very specific type as Wharton’s interview is centered on a team exercise with other applicants. Luckily, Alice had other applicants who also had Wharton interviews and so was ale to organize a practice for 5 of us. She helped with the whole process, starting with guidance on our opening pitch and ending with detailed overall and individual feedback on our performances in the practice. She also got a current Wharton student to speak to us about her experience a year earlier. I cannot over-state how helpful this practice was. The Wharton interview is a very unnatural experience and you only have 30 mins to make a good impression. In the practice we all made obvious mistakes which we learnt from and it was also useful to see how other applicants approached it and I definitely brought some of these with me. I was able to have a list of do’s and don’ts for the real interview and I felt so much more confident for it now that I knew what to expect. Other companies also offer practice for the Wharton interview but I decided to stick with Alice because: i) everything else had gone so well with her so far; and ii) I felt that she would be able to give me better advice than a different consultant given that she knew my strengths and weaknesses. Areas for improvement In the interests of giving a balanced review I have thought hard about negatives. It speaks for itself that I don’t have much to say here, especially given what I have heard friends complain about with their consultants. The obvious negative is the cost. However this is really question about whether or not you want to use a consultant as Alice’s rates are comparable. Given how conscious I was over costs there were definitely situations where I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to keep costs down. At the start there were some inefficiencies where, for example, I hadn’t completely understood Alice’s directions and so there required an extra turn or two of an essay than was completely necessary (and therefore more costs). I definitely do not absolve myself of responsibility here given it was really on me to flag if I didn’t fully understand something. I also think that it is normal when two people start working together to take some time to sync with each other’s approaches. After a few weeks it became a lot more seamless and efficient. I also think it could be useful for Alice to direct applicants towards external scholarships. The majority of MBA scholarships are internal (and you are entered automatically through your application) but there are many external ones that you may not be aware of. I did not realize that these existed and ended up missing deadlines for a few scholarships that I would have had a good chance at. There are too many different scholarships (and varying by country / background / school applied to) for Alice to tell you which ones to apply to but she has agreed that it would be helpful to tell applicants early on that they should research this so as to not miss out. Conclusion The first thing to decide is whether you want to use a consultant at all and I hope that the details above will help you in this decision. A good consultant will improve your chances, and the extent of this improvement depends on the applicant (how good at applications in general, how busy, how challenging the school choices are). In terms of choosing between consultants, you need to: – Decide between big company or smaller place; – Decide whether you prefer package or hourly rates (some places offer both); – Find someone who is well reviewed and that you can imagine working with for six months. I would highly recommend Alice. I had a great experience with her and it was more positive than my three other friends that used different consultants. She has universally positive reviews online so it seems that everyone loves working with her. Alice is great to work with, is a lovely person and made huge improvements to all aspects of my application, in particular the essays and interviews. Alice gets fully booked quickly so I’d recommend getting in touch with her early.