Rachel is the best!!!

First and foremost, Rachel was absolutely instrumental in helping me get into my dream school, Stanford. When I first started the process at the beginning of the year, Fortuna’s director suggested that I had a 12-15% chance of getting into the GSB, an estimate that I felt was fair. Stanford was a reach given my background.
I was fortunate to be able to start the process early, about eight months before the deadline. At the beginning, Rachel took the time to really understand my story, my motives, my strengths and weaknesses, and helped me strategize which attributes I needed to highlight, and through which stories I could best share my strengths. Rachel was one part MBA coach, one part therapist, as she dug deep into my motivations and helped me find meaningful answers to questions about purpose. Rachel is an incredibly kind and caring person, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to develop a strong relationship with her.
Rachel worked with me on the Stanford essay for 26 drafts, continually sending feedback paragraph by paragraph, then sentence by sentence, then finally word by word. By draft 20, I was ready to throw in the towel and hit submit, but Rachel insisted we could make the ending stronger, really pushing me to the next level. In the end, I had a much better final product than I expected, and I felt at peace because I knew I put in my best possible work. I am so appreciative of the amount of effort Rachel put into my application. She sent me ideas and edits way past a normal bedtime, and always had a quick turnaround time on any new material.
When it came to the interview stage, Rachel helped me tremendously by teaching me how to frame my stories to highlight the attributes Stanford was looking for. She drew upon her decades of experience interviewing candidates, and it made the interview seem much less scary and opaque.
This whole process has made me a much more confident person, as I now understand myself much better. It’s also helped me define and refine my vision and what I want to do in the next decade. I felt that even if I hadn’t gotten into any MBA programs, I still would have found this experience to be valuable for these internal gains. It was so valuable in fact, that I would still want to repeat this process in ten or twenty years (even without applying to schools), when I’m at the next fork in my career, because it gave me so much clarity in my life.
I honestly don’t think I would have gotten in without Rachel’s help, and for that I will be grateful for a lifetime.