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Comparing Admission Consultants: Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Coach


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Support for MBA Podcaster comes from Veritas Prep, one of the world’s leading GMAT test preparation and admissions consulting providers. Everything about the Veritas Prep GMAT course has been designed to enable students to confidently approach the exam with a deep understanding of the material—not with tricks or devices for merely surviving the GMAT. And Veritas Prep’s thorough curriculum is just the beginning. Only people who have scored in the 99th percentile on an actual GMAT exam are even considered for an instructor position with the company, and every new instructor must complete over 100 hours of training before leading a class. Veritas Prep’s MBA admissions consulting services feature Head Consultants who have formerly served as admissions officers, application readers, and interviewers at the world’s top MBA programs. MBA Podcaster listeners receive a $150 discount on any Veritas Prep GMAT course, private tutoring, or admissions consulting school package by registering with the code "pod150". Learn more at veritasprep.com

Transcription:

MBA admissions consultants have been given some flak for what they do. The concern for business schools is that some provide unethical services like writing essays for applicants. None of the four consultants that we have on our show offer to write your essays, instead they claim to provide high quality, personalized advice to help you get admitted to the school of your choice. Based on feedback from our listeners and research on the market place, we choose to review these four consulting companies. Each one is part of the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants, a recently formed organization that promotes high ethical standards among its members. There are many other admissions consultants and by listening to our show we hope you can get a sense of the kinds of questions you should be asking if you’re considering using their services. Stay with us and here from Veritas Prep, Accepted.com, Clear Admit, and Stacy Blackman Consulting. They’ll discuss their services, costs and why they think they’re different from the rest. If you’ve had a good experience with consultants please let us know at info@mbapodcaster.com.

“Most of our sort of top level, sort of what I consider legitimate admissions consultants do excellent work. They really do. If you have questions about the other competitors about why,” Chad Troutwine is cofounder of Veritas Prep. Veritas provides GMAT preparatory classes as well as MBA admissions consulting. At their Los Angeles location. Troutwine is giving a free seminar on how to get into a top MBA program. Let’s listen to a portion of this talk, “What we all have in common with the top companies or at least with the kind of reputable, good companies there’s several different principles, we don’t write anything for anyone. You’re not hiring a writer, it’s not a ghost writer, we’re not going to write your essays for you, if someone would do that for you: run. Even if you’re willing to do that, if you didn’t think it was unethical, it’s bad strategically because admissions officers can usually see right through it and it’s an automatic ding, automatically they won’t consider you. If they think it was ghost written by someone else you’re gone. Here’s what good consultants do, we help you present the best version of you. I really feel like it’s like a coach more than anything else. You can almost pick the sport, but the coaching analogy is a good one. What we don’t do is, if it’s track: I’m not going to run the race for you. I’m also not going to inject you with steroids. What I’m going to do is I’m going to put you through the training and the regimen to help you on race day to put up your best time possible. That’s what we do. We don’t want to obfuscate the process, we don’t want to try to trick the committee to get someone in that doesn’t belong. One thing, you might get washed out if you can’t handle it academically. It’s just bad all the way around. What we want to try and do is help everyone give their best possible case. You know if you’re like a hidden diamond, you don’t know this process, I didn’t know too many people who went to a lead MBA programs when I was applying. You know I just didn’t know how the process worked. So I kind of went in clueless. What we offer you is veteran advice, we also hold up a mirror. You may not be the best at judging yourself, you may not know how you come across. We might say hey, look you come across flakey. We can work on that. Or you’re not addressing this area and this is a glaring, glaring weakness that’s going to be exposed. The other thing that we do that’s kind of cool is we offer really tailored advice. So it’s not just we think you look flakey, it’s MIT really, really likes people doing community service because I know because I served as an admission officer for Sloan, I know what we like, I was reviewing essays, this is the kind of thing we like. We have this team of 36 people, 37 now that have that insider knowledge and insider experience full of value. Let’s keep rolling.”

After his seminar, I had a chance to sit down with Chad Troutwine, a Yale MBA graduate to talk about Veritas Prep. I first asked how much they charge and what’s covered in the costs, “We offer two different kinds of packages. We offer the traditional, hourly package where clients pay by the hour. It starts at $200 an hour but it can go down to $155 and hour if a client orders more hours. We also offer school packages, it’s not based by the hour, it’s based on the individual MBA program that a student is applying to. We start with a three school package that’s completely comprehensive for a flat fee of $2,900 the student gets to work with a head consultant who served as an admissions officer at a top MBA program and a specialist from each of three top MBA programs the client selects. So for example, if the client selects Harvard, Stanford and Wharton she would receive work with not only the head consultant but specialists from those individual schools. We think it makes for a more customized and tailored application strategy.”

What’s the background of your consultants and maybe you can talk about your background first and also your consultants. How many years experience they have? “I’m the founder of the program but in some ways have less admissions experience than any of our top consultants. We have a team of more than three dozen head consultants and MBA admissions specialists. The typical profile is someone who’s served as an assistant director of MBA admissions at a top school. We have people on our current faculty that served at great schools like Tuck and Stanford and Columbia. We also have people that served in more of a student admissions capacity at other great schools like Yale, MIT, Harvard. There is no one single background that is unique to everyone besides admissions experience and a commitment to helping our clients present the most compelling and persuasive case possible to their school of choice. Most of our consultants have extensive writing backgrounds, critical writing backgrounds, often they have experience not only in helping people get into graduate business school but maybe they worked professionally or in a volunteer basis helping people get into undergraduate programs. Most of our consultants have been in the industry for a number of years before they came to us at Veritas.”

Does the client work with the same consultant or different ones through the process? “For clients that sign up for hourly packages they can work with a single consultant for all of the hours that they utilize or they can select several consultants. For people who go through our school packages, the three school packages, the minimum, it’s also the most popular clients work with four different experts. Their head consultant that helps them to navigate the entire process from start to finish and then a specialist for each of the three schools that the client chooses. The specialist works only on the essays for that school and helps conduct a mock interview with the client. Our service is completely comprehensive, we help people develop a marketing strategy, get a better sense of themselves before they even sit down to write their essays, we offer essay evaluations, critiquing someone’s essay, we offer some essay editing in terms of grammatical mistakes, typographical errors, the very basic sort of flawed kind of essays. We offer resume evaluations, we offer mock interviews, we help with rejection letters, we help clients that have been put on a waitlist that have an opportunity to write a follow-up waitlist letter.”

How do you help someone with a rejection letter? “A lot of time candidates have to assess if their rejection was for this admission season or would likely be a rejection for many admission seasons. Some candidates are very close to being admitted and with a renewed look at their essays, taking on a new job or improving their GMAT score might gain acceptance at a school that rejected them the year before. Each year that we’ve been in business we’ve helped students get into a top five MBA program that had previously rejected them.”

Now how do your consultants communicate with your clients? Is it through e-mail, the phone? “The initial consultation is almost always done over the phone but occasionally is done in person. We think it’s more important to match the best consultant with the client. Very often it’s not a geographic match. For example, if the client is in San Diego but the best consultant for that client lives in New York we think it’s better to match them than try to find someone in Southern California. After that the essay and resume evaluation is done almost exclusively over email. Again the client has to make the case in writing to the admissions committee anyway so it’s really not that different. The mock interview is conducted over the phone or in person.”

How can applicants make the most of your services? “We find the applicants that get the best results take the process seriously from the very beginning, set realistic expectations, work in a timely fashion in terms of meeting the Veritas deadlines for submitting essays and are contentious about the process in terms of the deadlines for the individual schools in which they apply. We found there is a distinct advantage to applying the first round. There are some myths that abound that applicants that wait until a third or fourth round for schools that offer a fourth round have little to no chance for admission. We think that’s over stated. We have seen a real correlation, higher number of successful applicants applying in the first or second round.”

Finally, what distinguishes Veritas from the other consultants? “We take a customized approach to the application process and we can offer insider advice more than any other admissions consultancy. Our faculty of consultants numbers more than three dozen now, all graduates and admissions representatives from the top MBA programs worldwide. We boast a larger faculty than any other admissions company in the world and so we can offer tailored insider advice for students interested in any of the top MBA programs.

Stacy Blackman founded Stacy Blackman Consulting in 2001. Blackman studied marketing at Wharton for undergrad, then went on the Kellogg for her MBA. “Because I had attended both Wharton and Kellogg, I had a lot of people asking me for advice on their applications and it was something that I was doing on the side. I found that there were a lot of similarities between the work that I was doing in marketing, marketing products and services out in the business world and actually helping people market themselves to business schools.”

So how much do you charge and can you talk about what’s covered in the cost? “Okay, I do have an edit service which is a small part of my business and we do one round of edits for any written materials that are sent to us online and those charge just based on word count. I also have some hourly services and that’s basically when people want very specific help with a certain part of their application, they’ll generally sign up for anywhere from two to five hours, it’s $250 an hour. By far the biggest part of the business, the majority of what we do is our comprehensive packages. Thos packages are priced at $3,250 for one school for the first school and then after that we start to see volume discounts on schools. So a three school package is $5500, a four school package is $6,250 so we do have discounts for multiple schools. Those packages, we call them comprehensive, they truly are comprehensive. We help with every aspect of the process with the exception of the GMAT. We’ll refer you to someone else to teach you the GMAT. We work with our clients up front on school selection and strategy, school selection if they need it. Everyone needs help with strategy and marketing themselves. We’ll work with them on executing their strategy, we help on essays, resumes, data forms, a lot of work on interviews, recommendations, we will help with things like school visits, kind of run off questions, thank you notes, we really partner closely with our clients and help with every aspect of the process and there is not limit as long as client is working hard and pulling their weight. Our goal is not to cap it off at a certain number of hours, it’s to help them to submit the very best application that they can.”

Can you talk about the background of your consultants? “All of my consultants, it’s a pretty phenomenal team. The consultants have all either gone to a top five business school and top five you know everyone has their different list but it’s pretty much Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Kellogg, Columbia. That’s pretty much the team. So they’ve gone to really top schools or they’ve worked on multiple admissions committees and some of them have done both. So someone worked as a full-time career as a member of an admissions committee for a MBA program and then went on to business school at a different school. So really, really strong credentials for this type of work. A lot of them have also credentials such as Harvard MBA plus a degree in Journalism, MBA plus published a book so very good writers, very good marketers, a lot of them have strong marketing backgrounds because that’s a key component to how we approach the process. Several of them have recruiting and head hunting expertise so they know about interviews and resumes and really how to present yourself. And all of them share a real passion for what we do. They love learning about and meeting really interesting people and helping them succeed. So I do think that passion and love for the work is really important to be good at this.”

How do you match the applicants with your consultants? “So when a client signs on with us we start gathering a lot of information on them. They send us their resume and their essay work that they may or may not have done. If they are a reapplicant they may have a full set of essays to send us. They fill out a pretty comprehensive survey about their background, I consider that kind of the second half of the application so that resume is just sort of the base and the survey is sort of all the other personal stuff that we need to do. They’ll do a self supported transcript. So I gather all this information and then I’ll look at it and think about a couple of consultants that I think would be a good match for them, for their needs. Both personal needs and also more real needs in their application. And then I’ll send out their information to a couple of consultants, talk with them about the client, get their thoughts on kind of the client’s prospects and strategy on how they would approach it and see if they’re really excited about working with this client and then I’ll make a final recommendation to the client and send the client a bio and the client also has the opportunity to speak to the consultant on the phone and get to know them and then so if both the consultant and the client agree that it’s a good fit then they’re matched. So it really is kind of a mutual agreement that it’s a good fit and they want to work together and I sort of facilitate that agreement.”

Does the client work with the same consultant throughout the whole process? “Yes, so every client has one primary consultant and I think that’s actually one important aspect of how we approach the process. Each consultant takes on a limited number of clients and they really are very dedicated to their client. It’s a very personal relationship and they really do partner with them throughout the whole thing. But we also have this pretty extensive team as back up so it’s not at all uncommon for either a consultant or a client to contact me and say I’d love someone else to take a second look at an essay or I’d love a second opinion, can you sit in on this call, we’re kind of debating about an issue. So they really do have the benefit of the dedicated consultant plus sort of this back up team that has you know a full range of experience.”

How can applicants make the most of your services? “I was on the phone with a client last week and he said to me ‘What’s your opinion? Do you think I can benefit from your services?’ and that’s actually a not so obvious, there’s not an obvious answer to that. I think yes, I mean we definitely have the expertise, we have the knowledge, we have the resources, I have seven years worth of accumulated resources from all of my clients there’s a ton that we can offer but I can kind of turn that question back to a client and say you know are you ready to work really hard? Because we are not a company that you sign up with and kind of kick back because you hired the best and we’ll do that work for you. We are a coach and just like if you’re training for the Olympics and you have a coach that coach is going to make you work harder. So I think for someone to benefit from our services they have to be really willing to work hard, put their heart and soul into it, be receptive to our feedback, our advice, our constructive criticism and work really hard.”

What do you think makes Stacy Blackman unique? “You know I always go back to the quality of our team. I do think we have a phenomenal team. I’m really proud of the team. Both just the excellence of each individual and the dedication that each individual brings to their process as well as sort of the breadth of the team. So we really cover a lot of different schools, admissions committees, student alums, all different people on our team. On top of that we really invest in the team, so we’ve developed an approach that we’ve put a lot of time and thinking into. I have a whole online center for my consultants that has tools, information and resources for them to draw upon so really investing and kind of hiring the best and then continuing to develop them. Then we also have an online resource center for our clients for all of these seven years of experience that we’ve accumulated we make available to them and it’s client access to sample essays, interview transcripts, sample resumes, templates for recommender packages, I mean everything they would need in the process that a lot of people are kind of scouring the web and buying books and borrowing from friends trying to gather that information, we kind of just make available to them. Then finally I just think it’s what I founded the company on which is sort of our emphasis on marketing and really approaching it as a marketing process. I have clients who contact me and say, I have a low number on this, can I get in? It’s about so much more and we really understand that and so we’ve been able to help people who are phenomenal candidates but have a few things wrong with them.”

Graham Richmond is Co-Founder of Clear Admit, a provider of MBA admissions counseling. Clear Admit was launched in the 2001-2002 admissions season. “I had worked as an admissions officer for the Wharton school following my graduation from the program and noticed that there was this gap in terms of what the admissions committee was looking for and what the average applicant seemed to know when they entered the process. I had seen that first hand when I had personally gone through the process.” Clear Admit’s main offices are in Philadelphia but they also have a satellite office in Paris, France. I had a chance to connect with Richmond over the phone at his Paris office.

Alright, so can you talk about how much you charge and what’s covered in the cost? “So our services are billed by the hour and the hourly rates are actually vary depending on how many hours somebody commits to with Clear Admit and so it’s sort of an ala cart system. What we like about it is it allows our clients to sort of maintain total control over which services they’re signing up for and how many drafts of the essay they want reviewed, etc. So the rate, the flat rate is 240 US dollars per hour. We have various bulk rates if you will so there’s a four hour rate which is 220 per hour and then there’s a 10 hour rate and that’s 200 US dollars per hour. So in terms of the services we provide we do everything from kind of initial strategy and positioning reports which involves a lot of discussion and work with the client to sort of help them understand their background and sort of what elements of their background might be most appealing and to get them thinking about things like career goals and school selection, things like that. The services also range over to things like resume editing, essay editing, brainstorming session via telephone, mock interviews so if someone is going to go into their Harvard interview we’ll often run through sort of a dry run with them and make sure that they’re doing a good job and ready to depict questions they might see in that sort of a situation. We also review application forms, and in many cases we see more and more instances where recommenders are coming to us and sending up the recommendation letters, asking us if they’re doing a good job of you know presenting anecdotes about the candidate, things like that. So really the services are kind of all over the map, that’s sort of what makes it kind of ideal for an ala cart service where people can sign up for the hours and then spend them as they see fit.”

How many consultants do you have there and what’s the background of your consultancy? So our consulting staff, there’s five people who are on our team and the background is actually we’re very strict about this and I think it’s one of the things that differentiates Clear Admit from some of the competition but all of the consultants we hire have direct experience working on an admissions committee at a top program. This means that they’ve had direct exposure to every aspect of the admissions process as a member of the admissions team. It doesn’t mean that they interviewed applicants as an alum or that they served as a student admissions ambassador while they were enrolled in school or something. The other thing is that beyond the kind of admissions experience requirement, nearly all of our counselors have MBAs as well and that kind of ensures that our clients are working with someone who has been through the process too which I think is worthwhile. So we’re trying to provide our clients with multiple perspectives from the kind of applicant perspective, the student perspective from what we’ve been through a program, but then also most importantly the admissions perspective, someone who’s read files and made these decisions. Another criteria is that our counselors have kind of liberal arts backgrounds on the undergraduate side of thing and solid editing experience so they’re able to work with candidates and help them to polish their materials.”

How do you match the applicants or your clients with the consultants? “It’s largely based on availability so we sort of are constantly monitoring how many clients each of our counselors has and you know who has capacity to work with someone. The other thing is that anyone who contacts Clear Admit can do sort of a free initial resume review via phone and often the way that we try to set it up is that the person that you do your initial call with, who kind of talks with you about your background and gives you a sense of sort of where you stand in the pool is the person that becomes your counselor. Because in many respects we kind of view that initial discussion as your interviewing of the Clear Admit counselor to figure out if there’s a nice relationship and if there is a good possibility for strong work together. There’s no formula though, I mean there have been cases where if someone comes to Clear Admit and requests a specific counselor we try to accommodate that. If someone says I absolutely have to go to Colombia Business School we might pair them with Ian Marowitz on our team who happens to be a former Colombia admissions officer so we sometimes try to match in that regard but generally speaking it’s availability and again the person that does your initial call.”

How can applicants make the most of your services? “I think the first thing is to start early and I just mean you know starting early in the process allows the candidate to really have the time to reflect rather than coming to Clear Admit the last week of September where they just have a set of essays that they want us to review. I think when they come to us in July or even June or something you can really take the time to think through your candidacy, make the right choices in terms of school selection, in terms of how you’re presenting your goals and really think strategically about this because I always find that you get to work with someone who’s at that stage of the process as opposed to someone who’s showing up at the last minute who has already made a number of strategic choices that are sort of irreversible. Whether it’s the fact that they already got their recommendation writers on board and they may not have been the right choices, any number of things that can go wrong when you start very late. But in starting with us in the beginning allows you to really get the full sort of tailored approach that we provide.”

What distinguishes you from other consultants? What makes Clear Admit unique? “So I think that there are a number of things but the first that most people probably see when they visit our website is just the wealth of the knowledge that we have and the amount of experience and so we run an admissions blog that’s based around the business school admissions process. It’s actually one of, if not the most popular hub in the States. And there’s a lot of great information there that should give candidates an idea as to the level of experience that our counselors have. I think another thing that people like about our service and makes us different from the competition is that it’s ala cart, as I said earlier it really allows you to kind of select the services that are best suited to you and it allows us to adopt those services through a learning curve. Our main goal is to teach you to apply to business school so if you need less and less help from us as you move from one application to the next that’s perfectly fine and that’s ideally how that should be. The final thing I think is that we have a lot of on the scheme of sort of the knowledge that we have a lot of that stems from the relationships that we have with the MBA program. So actually Clear Admit has been invited, two years running to present at the GMAC conference which is a conference of leading MBA programs. Their admissions teams all present and so we have great access to the schools and a good sort of back and forth in terms of being able to ask the admissions teams questions and make sure that we’re providing the best sort of up-to-date advice for our clients. Again I think that links back to the fact that our admissions team, that our team of counselors has kind of an admissions background. So in many cases when we reach out to ask for advice from a Wharton or a Harvard, we’re actually reaching out to a former colleague or you know there’s this connection that is there in place. Then finally I guess one other thing that I should just mention is that we have a number of publications that we sell on our website and those are quite popular and again I think someone who downloads our Clear Admit school guide to a given program instantly gets a sense for the amount of in house knowledge that we have. Then I think again because we’re only focused on MBA admissions and we don’t do GMAT courses or anything else it just gives us this level of expertise that is hard to rival.”

Linda Abraham is President of Accepted.com. Accepted is an admissions consulting and essay editing service not only for MBA applicants but also those applying to medical, law and graduate programs. Abraham is a UCLA Anderson MBA Alumist and she said she founded her company in 1994. At the time I had started an editing service, I was working almost exclusively with students at UCLA and USC and I kept being asked to edit personal statements, not just academic papers. So I decided to focus on personal statement writing.”

Abraham has grown her business since then to include a variety of services and options. I asked her what Accepted offers and how much they charge, “Accepted.com has an extremely flexible pricing structure so the simple question, how much do you charge, our basic fee is $200 per hour. But the flexibility means the answer is really more complex than that. And if anyone wants to view the full array of options, they’d be really best off going to the website. But our services and our pricing is flexible both in terms of the comprehensiveness of the services that we offer and in terms of the commitment required of the applicants. Or in terms of fixed price versus hourly. Applicants can order our services tailored to particular schools, for specific essays, or on hourly fee basis. So they can in the course of working with us, in the course of applying to multiple schools they can choose to work on some schools on a school basis, on some of a mixture of hourly in essay basis. There really is enormous flexibility. They can try us out for an hour or they can select comprehensive assistance that requires a greater commitment on their part. They can choose something comprehensive to start with and then they can cut back as they become more knowledgeable about the admissions process.”

Who are the consultants at Accepted? “We have about nine consultants who work with MBA applicants and their bios by the way are all online so somebody can look at both their background, where their clients have been accepted and also client feedback for that specific editor. In terms of some of their backgrounds, our consultants are first of all enormously experienced, they’ve most of them have worked with Accepted.com for anywhere from 5-10 years at this point. They range from people who have worked at major publishing houses, have written books, have been admissions directors, one is a former McKenzie consultant and a PhD so they’re highly experienced, very well trained and they have a diverse background.”

How do you match the applicants to the consultants? Do they have a choice? Or is that something you do yourself? “If the clients requested a particular consultant, as long as that consultant is available that’s the person they work with. If they’re referred by a previous client and we know who the previous client is then we do our best to match them to that consultant, that editor. If they don’t express any preference then we’ll match them based on their background, their goals and geographic location because we have editors around the world.” So do you like to have your consultants close to your clients? “At least in the same time zone.”

If once you match the client to the consultant so that’s the consultant throughout the whole process? “Yes, yes. Barring unforeseen circumstances and occasionally we have had clients who were really short on time and they wanted to work with more than one consultant just to get through the amount that they want to go through and then we accommodate.”

Now can you talk about how applicants can make the most of your services and what distinguishes Accepted from the other consultants? “In terms of making the most of our service, the first thing I would say is take advantage of the flexibility that we offer. Start if you can afford the more comprehensive services, start with the more comprehensive services and then as you become more knowledgeable of the admissions process, as you become more comfortable and confident in yourself, you can move to more independent work and some of our less expensive services. The second advice that I would give is be actively involved in the process. Don’t think oh I’m using a consultant, they know more than I do, I’m going to be passive. The wrong approach, be active. If you have an idea discuss it with your consultant. We’re here to advise you, to mentor you, but there’s no way that we know even with all of the interviews that we do and the information that we seek and all the information that we get, there’s no way that we can know you as well as you know you. So be active in the process and if you have an idea, you have a thought, share it and evaluate our work.

In terms of how Accepted.com is distinguished, what are Accepted.com’s distinguishing characteristics, I think I would first of all put them in three main headings. One is our writing ability, two is our personal service combined with a very impressive team backing up the individuals, and three is the level of experience that we have. And let me go through that. The first is in terms of writing ability, I can train just like any graduate school can train for admissions ability, for admissions inside. I can’t train for writing ability and fundamentally what we are called upon to do in most cases is because we are dealing with the essays is helping the applicant write. And if we don’t know how to write, we can’t help them. It’s just that simple.

The second aspect of Accepted.com that I think is truly distinctive is the combination of personal service combined with a really, really strong team. So what do I mean by personal service? Our consultants are available nights and weekends. Most of our, a large part of our business comes from word of mouth and referrals which is a reflection of the kind of personal service that we give our editors are frequently working with friends, cousins, brothers, sisters of previous clients. Then you have this team as a consultant you have this team behind you that the applicant isn’t even aware of that is also working to help the applicant get accepted. So the editors have access to me, and I’m of the more senior consultants in the professor, I’ve got the grey hairs to prove it. That applicants have the talents of the staff behind them. Alright we have journalists on the staff, we have marketing professionals, we have a former McKenzie consultant, we have former editors with publishing houses, I mentioned this before, we have ad com members, we have published authors, you know Paul Bodine’s book Great Application Essays for Business School, is one of the best ones out there. This is the kind of staff that any individual consultant can turn to with a question and they do because we do work as a team. We have an editor’s mailing list where if questions come up an individual consultant can turn to the group no matter where they are and get input and advice and that makes their individual service so much stronger. We also have peer review which means that a certain percentage of essays are reviewed by other editors who critique them, give them input and that means that in addition to quality control, and I review a certain percentage of that in addition to having constant quality control you have a sharing of best practices and ideas throughout our little ecosystem. That, I think is that combination, that balance of sort of personalness and the strong team behind the consultant is truly unique. The last aspect, I said experience, I already mentioned that most of our editors have at least five years of experience, 5-10 years of experience with Accepted. We have extraordinarily low turnover and I personally train all of the editors who have been here for the five or 15 years and any new editors coming on so there is a consistent standard combined with a richness of experience.”

MBA Podcaster is launching a new series called, A Day in the Life. We’re going in-depth at business schools across the country and around the world to shadow current students and meet with deans, admissions directors and others to bring you a full profile and perspective of life on-campus. Schools include UCLA Anderson, Wharton, University of Chicago, Insead and many others. Visit mbapodcaster.com and listen for this month’s day in the life show next time.

For more information, advice and to register for your weekly MBA podcast, visit mbapodcaster.com. I’m Janet Nakano for MBA Podcaster, thanks for listening.