But he quickly realized he was in the minority. “My first week at Harvard Business School, I got a call from one of the second-year students who said he wanted to work at Brentwood Associates and was asking me if I could help him,” he recalls. Five minutes into the conversation, the student asked him: “Why the hell did you leave, anyway? Everyone here wants to leave and go to work there.”
Small wonder, then, that GMAT tutors like Berry can charge $10,000 a pop to help applicants land at a school like Wharton or Harvard, schools that regularly attract 7,000 or more applicants and admit fewer than 20 percent.
With dozens of clients each year, Berry said, “I’m as busy as I can be.”
So are the at least 25 MBA graduate admissions consultancies around the world that coach students on other parts of their applications, such as essays, interviews and letters of recommendation. With names like Clear Admit, AdmissionsConsultants and Stacy Blackman Consulting, many of them help applicants rethink how they market themselves to business schools. Their guidance can often make the difference between an admission slip and a rejection letter.
Graham Richmond, founder of Clear Admit, helped one client get into Wharton by persuading her to scrap her essay about an energy deal she worked on and focus on something else: shooting guns. The Texas-based private-equity firm she worked at was a male-dominated environment where the senior executives liked to talk business at the shooting range. So the Asian American learned to fit in by joining them for target shooting.
“I was all about getting her to understand who’s reading the file,” Richmond said. “The people reading the file are more like your high school English teacher than the colleague sitting next to you at an investment bank,” he said; they’re more interested in getting a good sense of who you are than your business experience.
Kathryn Bezella, senior associate director of admissions at the Wharton School in Philadelphia, declines to pass judgment on whether hiring a consultant or a $10,000 test prep tutor is a worthwhile investment.
“Students are grown-ups,” she says. “We rely on them to make a whole host of decisions on their own.”
The intangibles
An excellent GMAT score, usually in the 700-to-800 range, is not enough to get into a top program. Applicants must also demonstrate “intangible” qualities, such as managerial, entrepreneurial or social skills that make them stand out from the crowd.
“The intangibles are incredibly important,” says George Andrews, associate dean at University of Chicago’s Booth School, because they help separate the high-scoring GMAT candidates from each other and build a diverse class.
Loading...
Comments