Imagine standing at the threshold of a journey that could shape the rest of your professional life.

You’re ready to answer the call for ambitious, determined individuals seeking to make their mark through an MBA program.

However, navigating the labyrinthine process of business school admissions can be overwhelming, even for the most organized among us.

There’s the GMAT, crafting the perfect statement of purpose, choosing the right schools, acing the admissions interview… not to mention, competing with industry stalwarts across the globe. 

That’s where personalized MBA admissions consulting comes into play!

Yes, we get it. There’s a lot of advice on the web. As soon as you start to consider an MBA, you start being exposed to a lot of do’s and don’ts as well as contradicting information. 

It takes phenomenal effort and time to sift through this information and adjust it to your specific case. 

And even if you do spend many hours trying to figure this out on your own, there still we be nuances that are harder to catch such as shifting trends resulting from different social economic scenarios and policies, unique B-school cultures and interest groups, specific traits that admissions committees are pushing for each application round, and other intangibles. 

The collective knowledge around admissions consulting will allow you to learn, very fast that for top B-Schools:  

1. High Test Scores are a must;  
2. An above average GPA is expected; 
3. A certain range of work experience is ideal; 
4. Extra-curricular activities are important; 
5. You need good recommendations.      
    

Given these foundational prerequisites, you might wonder, “Isn’t that clear enough? Couldn’t I simply follow these steps to create a successful application on my own?” You’re not wrong, but here’s the catch – the MBA admissions game is not just about checking off boxes. 

What really differentiates one candidate from the next is not necessarily their GPA, work experience, or test scores; it’s the distinctive, unique elements that make you, well, you. It’s about how you present your story, how well you articulate your goals, your drive and your passion, and how all of these factors come together in your admission application. 

And it’s not just about what you’ve done – it’s also about why it matters to you, and why it should matter to the admission committee. It’s the narrative that your application paints of you as a potential MBA candidate and as a person, that truly impacts the decision of a business school’s admission panel. 

So how do you craft this compelling narrative?

A good consultant doesn’t just look at you as another admission statistic; they take the time to understand your unique perspectives and experiences. They partner with you to identify your strengths and areas for improvement, and help you articulate them into a cohesive and strong application. 

Making use of skilled and experienced admissions consultants at top MBA admission consulting firms, such as MBA House, significantly increases your chances of acceptance. For proof, just look at the numbers: 88% of MBA House’s prospective MBA students gained entrance to a Top Ten program, and 81% of clients gained admission to a Top-Five school in the class of 2024. 

We achieved a 100% acceptance rate for our students.

And, it’s not just about the numbers. A consultant can provide valuable insights into how different schools, like HBS and GSB, may view your application. For instance, consultants’ comments on GSB applicants looking more like Harvard can give you a heads up on possible university preferences.

Knowing such specifics can be an invaluable tool in your application process, further personalizing your application to different schools’ priorities. 

Ultimately, in MBA admissions as in all things, the devil lies in the details. With personalized MBA Admissions Consulting, you gain the knowledge and expertise necessary to navigate these murky waters, armed with a strategy tailored to your particular strengths and goals.

And while such information seems pretty straight forward, it typically generates a bunch of questions: 

1. What is considered a “good” GMAT Score? 
2. Should I take the GMAT or the GRE? 
3. What if I have an average GPA, or even a low GPA? Does that rule me out? 
4. What if I have little to no work experience? 
5. What if I have too much work experience? 
6. What extra-curriculars to highlight? 
7. Who should my recommenders be?    
   
   

Getting the right answers to these questions is where personalized MBA admissions consulting truly shines. The consultants have a deep understanding of what precisely top business schools are searching for in their applicants. This finely-tuned insight feeds into their ability to tailor your application precisely to those expectations, thus increasing your chances of being admitted into your desired business school. 

For instance, you may be wondering about whether a GMAT or GRE score is more favourable in your application. With expert MBA admissions consulting, you’ll learn that some business schools are entirely indifferent about these scores, while others might favour one over another. Armed with this knowledge, you can strategically direct your efforts towards hitting the targeted scores. 

Concerning work experience, personalized MBA admissions consulting helps you to precisely curate your application to highlight its strengths and downplay any potential weaknesses. With consultants, you’ll learn how to leverage ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ work experience, and how to frame your narrative in such a way that your considered ‘average’ or ‘low’ GPAdoes not detract from your application’s overall impression. 

Apart from assisting with your application, MBA admissions consultants are also adept at advising on the perfect recommenders who can advocate convincingly for your application. 

Such expertise does not come cheaply, but at MBA House, you will receive the highest number of consulting meetings and review hours with an Ivy League consultant at the lowest price, according to a comparison table from Gmatclub.

Overall, availing personalized MBA admissions consulting may indeed be a worthy investment considering the competitive nature of business school applications. It surely fosters access to invaluable insights and guidance, enhancing your chance of success dramatically.

Vivianne Wright – MBA House admissions expert

And that is just based out of the “basic” best-practices. 

I like to compare your MBA Admissions process to landscaping. Say you want to build a garden. One of the first things you’re going to do is look for inspiration online to find the gardens you like – will it be a Zen garden, an English garden, a contemporary garden? Also, that garden can have different, even multiple functions: 

Are you trying to integrate a pool area for entertaining or do you want to have a homestead? 

Very much like the different reasons why you want a garden and the styles you prefer, we have MBAs. And like each garden will have a specific distribution of plant types and formatting, B-Schools are also like that. Some gardens are more cohesive in their distribution – fewer types of plants, specific settings. Others, such as English gardens thrive in an organic distribution of many different types of plants and organization. Yet regardless of the style, plants are well adjusted to the climate of each type of garden and are able to thrive. 

Sometimes, you want a tropical garden in Chicago. Does that mean it’s impossible? Of course not. It just takes expertise.  

It takes experience with what has worked and failed in the past, and how each plant reacts in a particular setting. It takes a meticulous eye of somebody that is not doing this as either a side job or for the first time in order to make the most of what you have to achieve an excellent result. 

Can it be done on your own or by relying on advice from friends and peers (some which may have a similar garden even)? One can possibly obtain a positive outcome with a DIY approach, but it will usually be on a trial and error basis, which can make the whole process more expensive than you’d like. 

Working with an experienced landscaping artist….ok, I’ll stop with the metaphor. 

Working with an experienced MBA Consultant you will not only remove many of the common pitfalls that a candidate will face down the road to an MBA, but also it will save you A LOT of money because it does not only allow your application to stand out from other DIY-ers who are unaware of how “naive” or commonplace their message actually sounds to the AdComs, but it also positions your candidacy at a greater chance of receiving scholarship awards – sometimes even a full ride.

And if working with an admissions consultant can allow you to increase your chances of going to a top-5 B-School instead of a top-15 B-School by doing the process by yourself, even without any scholarship award being granted the average difference in annual salaries post-MBA alone is far greater than the cost of working with a consultant.    

At MBA House you receive a truly personalized approach

Some MBA Consulting firms work like factory lines – they’ll have a meeting to onboard you, set a project calendar and send a ton of (great) materials for you to study and then wait for you to send the essays so they can comment on them.

The truth is that MBA Consulting is a rather seasonal business – with application rounds in September and January being the high season and then the rest of the year is low season until R1 applications open again.

And because of competition, MBA Consulting firms have to devote a lot of money to market their services. In order for the model to work, MBA Consulting firms have to onboard many clients during particular times a year, and in order to do this they work with freelance consultants, paid by the hour.

Some firms will randomly assign a consultant and others will try to match the industry (such as finance) or target school of the candidate.

While that all seems fine, it usually results in working with consultants that have limited experience or rapport outside of their field of expertise, and what is even worse, these consultants have other full-time jobs, so they are engaging with the candidate during their time off work. 

A Particular Point of View About MBA Admissions

Every year I work with candidates that come from these application mills unfortunately. When I ask them to show their essays and the comments made by consultants, these tend to be general, best-practice comments that while they do improve readability, they often result in essays that miss out on really assisting the candidate at standing out.  

MBA House works with an in-house team of full-time MBA consultants, providing a hand-on-pulse approach that is not focused on essay edits but rather building an engaging application strategy that is unique to each client. 

So there you have it. Welcome to your garden – tailored exclusively to you, and beautiful in every way.