I would like to start my review by indicating that please do not consider much but start to work quickly. If I summarize my personal experience:

- Last year, I was a Fulbright scholar and tried to apply to some top business schools including Chicago Booth and HBS on my own. The results were dings. I got interview invitation for Chicago Booth but a total ding from HBS and offers from some top 30 business schools.

- This year I recognized that I need professional help. However while searching I lost time and I was somewhat late to find a good consultant. I tried to make 30 minute free consultation with almost all of the consulting companies but in the end I chose mbamission which I talked to first. This process was really stressful so my recommendation is that: please trust the reviews and go ahead quickly.

During my overall MBA experience, my consultant, Erin Schumacher was the person who gave me the greatest support. In my perspective she is an amazing professional and consultant. Actually she is more than a consultant but a good friend who always shows her honesty. Some key points regarding her work:

- Erin does not say what you want to hear instead she clearly finds out the weakest points in your story, resume and essays after very effective brainstorming session. Personally, I wrote about 15 pages for the brainstorming session without knowing which stories I should use for effective MBA essays. At that point Erin’s assistance is perfectly helpful.

- In my opinion Erin is very quick and smart. When we do not have much time till the application deadline, Erin quickly revised my essays and highlighted the potential pitfalls. Actually even if we do not have much time, Erin did not hesitate to turn my essays back to me for another revision. That’s why I trust her work very much.

- For the interview preparation, Erin helped me by sending the real interview questions asked to other applicants in the previous years. Also, Erin asked me new ones during our mock interview session and then gave constructive feedback. These mock interviews are really important to feel more confident before the real interview.

- Apart from that, during the application process, I felt that Erin was a good friend who tried to do whatever she could do and never left you on your own. This part was extremely important since you would feel stressful during that process and you would absolutely need to feel a sincere person would be working with you.

Overall, I highly recommend Erin both in personal and professional settings. I appreciate her efforts and work. In the end, I got offers from my dream schools, MIT and GSB MBA programs. I want to thank Erin once again!!

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This was my situation: My gmat was below expectation + it was the end of November + all the round 2 applications were due on January 5th = low self-confidence. As a result, all the schools I was planning to apply to were ranked somewhere between 10-20, it was crunch time, and there was no time to waste. I spoke with a friend attending a "top 5" MBA program and he suggested I give mbaMission a shot and that he believed I was not targeting the right set of schools.

I went forward with the free consultation and Jeremy (founder of MBAmission) was very straightforward and helpful. He encouraged me to apply to better ranked schools. At a time when my confidence was low, it felt good to hear someone support me and believe in me! He had more confidence in my candidacy that I did myself! I decided to give mbaMission a shot. After all, whats a few thousand dollars relative to a 200k total expense ?! I decided to take a leap of faith. As per Jeremy's recommendation, I switched all my schools to top 10 schools and I hired MBAmission.

Jeremy put me in touch with Erin Schuhmacher who was a great consultant. She was straightforward, she kept me on task and helped me shine on throughout my essays. I really enjoyed working with her because she was always honest with me. When I was loosing focus or "over-crafting" my essays, she warned me and helped me stay on track.

Erin and MBAmission made it possible for me to complete my applications to four top 10 schools within FOUR weeks ! I do not think I would have been able to get it done without the help.

Result? Interviewed at all 4 schools and was granted admissions at 3 out of the 4!

In conclusion, with MBAmission's guidance I applied to much better programs and was granted admissions to 3 schools that were all a "dream" to me prior to my free consultation. Great investment and highly recommended!!

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Through this long but hopefully useful review, I would like to acknowledge that perhaps the greatest contribution towards a successful culmination of my MBA applications journey was made by mbaMission’s consultant Erin Foley Schuhmacher. Thank you, Erin!! =) I am super excited at being admitted to Chicago Booth’s Class of 2016!

I have no qualms in admitting that without Erin’s help, I would have probably given up my MBA dream! Coming from an overrepresented applicant pool and being an international from an admissions standpoint, I knew I stood a slim chance at making it to the top schools! I had already spent a futile year applying to schools by myself and ended up with no returns to show for my efforts. The whole process had left me demoralized and mentally broken!

That’s when I found Erin! After acing the GMAT in a second successful attempt, I was really looking to work with a professional consultant who could understand my personal and professional experiences and help me build a compelling story. In mbaMission, I found a company that I felt truly justified the amount of investment prospective students make in taking up admissions consulting services: their consultants have top notch MBAs themselves, bring in years of experience in this business, and most importantly work full-time towards this profession, which is important when deadlines are approaching and their workload is high.

As I was a bit late in approaching mbaMission, I consider myself lucky that I got to work with Erin: she is herself an HBS graduate and is one of the senior-most consultants at mbaMission who only takes a specific number of clients each season so that she can focus on quality over quantity! When I scheduled an introductory call with Erin to discuss the nature of help I was looking for, I could immediately appreciate her professional demeanor and her candor: unlike other consultants from other companies, she did not spend an inordinate amount of time telling me how deserving a candidate I was! She meant business right away and that kept me grounded and focused from the get-go. By this time, I had decided to take 4 Start-to-Finish school packages working with Erin, and had started to put in the hard yards: I dedicated one full week to the brainstorming document that she had provided to uncover all my personal and professional stories and experiences from even the remotest corners of my mind! At the beginning of our engagement, Erin gave me hours at stretch to go over my stories and build a framework for my Personal Statement that would come to define the backbone of my goals essays. She listened intently to all my viewpoints and always tried to steer my thinking towards logical connections that seemingly never occurred to me before. When we started working on various schools’ essays, she took immense effort in improving the quality of my essay drafts over several iterations through insightful comments that allowed me to bring a unique balance in the flow of the narrative and helped connect all elements in a very coherent way. She was extremely efficient in turning around my essay drafts with her comments inside 48 hours per the company policy, with several times much sooner than that. Throughout this process, I had the luxury to setup any number of conference calls with her as we discussed the essay changes and improvements, or even simply to tell her whether I felt happy or frustrated, buoyant or dejected at my progress. In a period when I was balancing a professionally demanding work situation with hours of endless effort writing and rewriting my essays, she was my go-to person for anything and everything related to this process, including preparing over Skype for the dreaded video component of some of my applications! Before submitting, I could myself feel that the quality of my application as a finished product was much superior to what I could have ever managed myself.

When I started getting interview calls, I knew that the job was only half done and that I had to get over the finishing line by brushing up on my interview skills. Here again, Erin’s experience was invaluable: she was extremely resourceful at providing targeted question banks specific to each school and held mock interviews (sometimes multiple for a school) with me in which she gauged my level of preparedness, flow of thoughts, and the enthusiasm in my responses, while providing vital feedback.

And the results speak for themselves: I got into two excellent schools with named merit scholarships and have decided to go to Chicago Booth! I can now soak in the sweetness of this feeling when you know that your hard work has finally paid off! While my MBA applications journey spreading over almost two years has made me more mature and resilient, in Erin I found a mentor and now a friend who has made me more self-aware!

Hereby, I unequivocally recommend Erin Foley Schuhmacher and mbaMission to any prospective applicant striving for success with admission to a top business school!

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