Highly recommend Liza Weale at mbaMission

The only justice I can do for the incredible service I received from Liza Weale over our eight months working together is to write this review and let others know how great she is and how worthwhile it is to hire her.

I was introduced to mbaMission via Manhattan GMAT (which I also highly recommend), so decided to check them out with their free 30 minute consultation. Based on her bio on the website, I decided to meet Liza Weale (in person, which I recommend) to judge for myself whether the lofty price tag seemed worth it. During our brief initial meeting I was instantly impressed by her ability to identify what I wanted and needed out of our process working together and walked away challenged with how to tell my story successfully.

I initially purchased the two school start-to-finish package, which was a great decision. It allowed me to work with Liza through every step of the process – from school selection to brainstorming; essay writing to resume drafting; and even through the interview process. I highly recommend the complete package because it allows you to develop a relationship and working style with your consultant, while not being worried about the cost through every essay draft and phone call. I also used Liza on an hourly basis for a third school, which was sufficient because we were able to build off the work we had done for the two school package.

Working with Liza was worth every penny (and it was a lot of pennies). She provided me with all of the “must-haves” of an admissions consultant, including: keeping me on a schedule, being readily available and reliable and proof reading my work to 100% grammatical correctness. In addition, mbaMission's general process and how Liza guided me through it was critical to my success in the process. First, they provide strong overall process and school specific guides to get you started up the seemingly unsurmountable mountain of work that is applying to business school. Second, from my experience with Liza and reading through the bios on the website, mbaMission really does hire extremely qualified people who are impressive from both an academic and professional standpoint. This provides credibility to their insight and recommendations. Also, I found it extremely useful to get an unbiased reaction to my application from a credible source that you cannot get from friends, coworkers or family. Third, the process is structured and offers a critical brainstorming and self-assessment framework to lay the foundation for a strong application. I found this part of the process to be the most critical in discovering for myself what I want to do and how I communicate that to others, both for the business school application process as well as in the future. Finally, mbaMission really does work as a team and Liza was able to share insights from other clients and consultants on a variety of important topics from essay question strategy to interview focus.

However, most important were Liza’s personal attributes, style and hard work that lead me to recommend her so strongly. Liza was a pleasure to work with as she is both a good listener as well as an idea and thought partner and genuinely personally invested in your success. She helped me through every step of the process to craft a consistent and convincing story that I could be proud to submit and confident I put my best foot forward. Best of all, Liza is just a generally nice and cool person. I can’t wait to grab a cup of coffee with her and continue our great working relationship on a personal basis. Specifically though, the top three reasons I enjoyed working with Liza and would recommend working with her are:
1) She guides you in the right direction, while still allowing your point of view and voice to shine through
• I’ve heard that other consultants will “rip you a new one” and completely change your ideas and direction. However, Liza was very constructive with me – focusing on my cool, unique attributes and not a cookie cutter application format
• By helping you to come to the conclusions yourself you can develop the most conviction behind your application and create something really genuine
2) She spends the time to get to know you and your story so she can genuinely help you brainstorm and discover your best ideas
• There were many instances where Liza would recall an experience I told her about that was worth highlighting or an angle of an experience that wasn’t as obvious to me being someone who lived it. Her attention to detail, hard work and dedication in this aspect were vital to me
3) All of her edits / revisions are timely, thoughtful, analytical and never just a check the box / check for grammar exercise (no superficial editing)
• One of my biggest writing weaknesses is being precise and knowing where I can cut. She provided a huge value add to me here by giving me concrete opinions and suggestions while still allowing my full store to come through

In the end, I was admitted to HBS and Wharton so I really couldn’t have hoped for a better result! Overall, I highly recommend working with a consultant to make sure you put your best foot forward in your application. I was extremely happy with mbaMission and Liza Weale specifically, and would recommend her to anyone serious about applying to a top MBA program.