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Product Menlo Coaching
Consultant Yaron Dahan
I had the pleasure of working with Yaron on Round 2 applications to Harvard, Wharton and Stanford. The process couldn’t have been a better experience. Yaron supported me in every aspect of the application, and was instrumental in helping me think through my strengths and weaknesses and how to highlight these in the application. If you are unsure about which admissions consultant to go with, I highly recommend you have an initial 30-minute consultation with Yaron. You will quickly learn that he is as experienced as it gets, fun to work with, supportive, and 150% committed to helping you achieve the best results.
Yaron helped me work through my applications within a stressful two-month timeframe. We started off with an initial chat about school choices. He was very helpful in this regard: he has a wealth of knowledge about the different programs and offered constructive arguments to help me decide where to apply.
This was followed by a conversation during which we discussed every aspect of my personal and career history, as well as my future objectives. With this information in hand, Yaron suggested a strategic outline for my applications: essentially a detailed document with his recommendation on how to pitch my best “story” in my essays. He helped me to dig deep and to introspect, identifying parts of my story that I had undervalued, and sharing observations about my profile and my character that I hadn’t thought of before, but made perfect sense nonetheless. He truly helped me learn about myself through the process; I sometimes even forgot that we were actually working on business school applications.
With Yaron's outline of my “business school story” in hand, we began work on my essays and applications. This is where the real heavy-lifting began during which Yaron brought immense value to the table. I submitted around 5 or 6 drafts for each essay to Yaron, until we reached the point when we both agreed that they were ready. When I sent him drafts, he was extremely responsive and usually turned it around within a day. The feedback I got from Yaron was consistently constructive, and, importantly, he kept me focused on my story and on telling it the right way (it can be tempting to get creative or go on tangent stories). Fitting the essay-writing around my work schedule turned out to be exhausting, and on many occasions I would have been happy to put down the pen, satisfied that my essay was good enough. However Yaron was relentless and pushed me very, very hard to improve the weaker aspects of my essays. His comments frequently challenged me to the point that I felt like I hit a wall and had total writer’s block. However, in these difficult moments, whenever I invested the time to really absorb his comments, it became obvious that the feedback was spot-on and that Yaron really is an expert at keeping a “macro-view” of my essays, whereas I frequently fell into the trap of getting too bogged down. Overall, Yaron’s relentlessness helped me achieve numerous breakthroughs in my essays which I would not have achieved without his excellent feedback.
Yaron was also instrumental in all the other parts of the application, including in deciding my recommenders, in reviewing and marking up my resume, and in drafting the various short-answer questions (which can end up taking a significant amount of time), and in preparing myself for the interview. In all of these areas he did added immense value.
With Yaron’s help I was able to secure admission from Wharton, as well as an interview with HBS, both of which were reach schools to begin with. For both schools Yaron was also available to discuss interview strategies and to do mock interviews.
All in all, I write this review with great pleasure as I owe Yaron huge thanks for his advice and support. Working with him will be the best investment of your MBA voyage.