I decided to reach out to an admissions consultant, after having already taken the GMAT 3 times and having put off applying to business school for a year. I knew I was a competitive candidate in all other aspects - I worked at a top management consultant firm and was being sponsored for my MBA, had a 3.75 GPA, and plenty of community involvement - so I decided I was going to accept my 630 score and hope for the best. My targeted schools were Kellogg and Booth, since I was hoping to be in the Chicago area.

I received Jessica Shklar's name from a friend who had only used her for a few hours, but said those few hours made all the difference in her application (she is now at Wharton). When I first had my 30 minute free consultation with Jessica in August 2013, I immediately expressed my concerns regarding my GMAT score. I explained my test taking history and that I was scoring significantly higher on my practice tests, and Jessica recommended I take the test again. The best part was her directness - in her follow-up email after our call she outlined my 3 options: 1. accept your score, 2. give the GMAT another try, 3. apply to a few schools round 1 and take the test again depending on the results. She strongly recommended option #2, which was certainly not what I wanted to hear, but it ended up being the right choice. Even more impressive, was that Jessica went as far as to recommend specific tutors at Manhattan GMAT (since I had already taken their course) that I could do a few sessions with to get back on track.

I decided to take her advice to take the GMAT again, and Jessica promised to save a spot in her Round 2 line-up for me. She even followed-up into the fall to make sure the tutor was working out. I ended up taking the GMAT for the 4th time at the end of November, and scored a 690 - exactly what I needed to get into my targeted schools. Thanks to Jessica's advice, I felt confident in my application and decided to apply to 4 schools during Round 2 - Wharton, Kellogg, Booth and Ross. I went with a 2 school package from MBAMission and after comparing essay questions and discussing it with Jessica, I decided to have her help me with Wharton and Kellogg.

During our initial brainstorming sessions, I already felt that working with Jessica was helpful. She quickly narrowed down my stories that would work for the essays and those that didn't. She talked through the narrative of how exactly to communicate the story to make it appealing from an admissions perspective. By the end of the call I knew exactly what story or narrative I was going to use for each essay and had a good outlines already going in my head. I took very detailed notes during that sessions (literally typed every word) and ended up using a good portion of that original content in the essays I submitted.

During the editing process, Jessica was timely with her feedback and I almost always accepted her changes. I also really appreciated that she knew not all of her changes would be accepted, as some things are just personal style. Overall, her feedback and edits were on-point. At one point in the real heat of the application filling-out process, she sent me a note saying something to the affect of, "I just want you to know you're doing a great job" - it was just the boost I needed and was just so nice to hear.

In the end I was admitted to Kellogg, Booth, and Ross. While Jessica only helped me with Kellogg and Wharton, I was able to leverage a good portion of the materials I developed with her for the other schools. The only one negative I will mention, is that she's hard to get! My boyfriend reached out to her in March 2014 (with my recommendation) and she was already full for Round 1. Jessica is helpful, responsive and really knows her stuff - I highly recommend her to anyone looking for MBA application support.

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When starting my application process, I was conflicted as to whether I should hire a MBA consultant or not.

I was confident in my writing abilities and unsure as to how much value a service like this would actually add.

After speaking to Helen Summers for our free consultation, I definitely felt much more comfortable about moving forward with MBA Mission, and she followed up our conversation with a VERY comprehensive email outlining my strengths, weaknesses, and how I could frame my application to schools. Note that this was before I even hired MBA Mission.

I decided to take the plunge and was overall very happy with MBA Mission and Helen. I opted to take the unlimited package, which I certainly recommend - even for one school, I definitely went over the number of hours that they offer on an ala carte basis. It felt very liberating to keep editing, changing, and not have to worry about using up all my hours.

Helen provided concrete and useful feedback to my essays. She did not unnecessarily revise my essays for the sake of it, and was vocal about telling me whether something "worked" or not.

The numerous revisions to my resume was the most helpful - re-formatting your resume from a professional one to an MBA application version is time consuming and difficult. Helen made it easy and was never short or brief on her explanations of why she wanted something to change.

Helen was also very helpful in my interview preparation for Columbia, which according to my interviewer I "aced."

Most importantly, Helen was supportive and upbeat. She seemed to genuinely care about my application and helping me get in (which I did!).

Having someone to coach, push, and motivate you to get your application together is an excellent tool, and that's exactly what MBA Mission provides. In the end, I would certainly recommend both MBA Mission and Helen - while it's hard to quantify exactly how much a company like this helps, it gives you peace of mind knowing that you're doing everything you can to increase your odds.

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Jessica is very thoughtful, positive and responsive. I felt that she likes what she is doing very much, which is crucial for clients. I am a non-native, aged 31, and did my bachelor`s degree in my country with low GPA. And I have never written a single essay in my life. So, I decided to work with a consultant, otherwise, I knew that I couldn't make it. After carefully reading reviews of different consultants and companies, I decided to try a 30-minute free phone consultation with Jessica Shklar at MBA Mission. That was one of the best decisions I ever made. During that 30 minutes, I was impressed by her ability to give advices with limited information. She gave me advice that I would get from someone who had known me for a long time and knows my strengths and weaknesses very well. So I knew that if I worked with her and shared more about who I am, she could market me very well.

So I stopped my market research and decided to work with Jessica Shklar on four different business schools with full admission packages. Jessica gave me crucial advice on choosing schools and recommenders, did mock interviews, and changed my resume to the world class one I would say (I sent my resume, recently, to a manager of one of the top consulting firms. She said, "Your resume is just brilliant.") Most importantly, without Jessica, I would not be able to write such great essays. We worked on at least five drafts for every single essay. Also, she connected me with her past clients who are alumni or current students at different business schools, and they were extremely happy to share their experiences with me and provide me with a lot of helpful information.

As you imagine, the application process was very stressful and I had lot of ups and downs. Having someone during that time encouraged me a lot to work harder. My interview-hit rate was 100% and I chose to attend my top choice. As soon as I heard news from schools to which I applied, such as interview invitations and admission decisions, the very first person I shared my emotion with was Jessica. After telling Jessica, I told my wife and parents ☺.

If you are serious about getting into a top 10 program, you are going to need some professional help to produce a flawless application. I highly recommend Jessica Shklar at MBA Mission as an admissions consultant.

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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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When I had first planned to apply to business school, I was actually fairly against hiring a consultant - giant waste of money, I thought, I could do it myself with the help of a few friends to read my essays... then I spoke to a good friend of mine who had attended MIT Sloan and also happened to be a Manhattan GMAT instructor, and he informed me that over 50% of HBS admits use consultants. Great. But then I started looking at how much work b-school applications were going to be, incredibly more time-intensive and all-consuming than undergrad, plus at that pt, I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted after b-school/with my life.

So, on the recommendation of my friend, I started looking at the resources provided by mbaMission. I signed up for their Boot Camp to see if I could improve my essay-writing, not expecting too much, but I was completely blown away. The series was incredibly comprehensive and extremely useful, making me realize how much I didn't know about the application process, and the subtleties to writing essays for each particular school. Angela, who led the sessions, was amazing and after hearing her process, I knew I had to have her as my consultant!

This was mid-July at that point, and Angela was already entirely booked for the upcoming application season, but she managed to squeeze me as her last client!

We got right down to business. From the very start, Angela completely picked me apart - my life, my dreams, my ambitions, my entire professional career - and somehow magically brought it all together in this wonderfully comprehensive story that really spoke to who I was. It was amazing how she could understand me so well and so quickly and really drill down and identify what motivated me, what I was good at, and what I wanted out of my life and career. She had an uncanny ability to ask just the right questions – those incredibly powerful probing questions that are hard to answer bc it forces you to dig deep and find those moments in life that shaped who you are and how you think.

It sounds funny, but Angela truly helped me better understand myself. And once you really know yourself and what you want, writing essays about those topics becomes that much easier! Angela helped me brainstorm every single essay before I started writing, setting a game plan for how all the essays for a certain school would flow together. As I started writing, I had quite a bit of trouble staying within the word count limits (usually at double the length in my first draft), and Angela was immensely helpful in teaching me how to be more concise and impactful with my words – she wouldn’t just cut them for me, but forced me to learn how to be more concise and efficient. She taught me how to be a better writer!

In total, I ended up applying to 5 schools. With an average of 3 essays for each school, and at 4-6 drafts apiece, I wrote over 70 drafts – all of which Angela turned around in 48 hours, and helped me refine for each particular business school. That would’ve been an impossible task to ask of any friend or number of friends, and they wouldn’t have had the context or experience that Angela brought to the essay-writing process.

But the essays were just one portion of the application where Angela’s help was invaluable– Angela helped my recommenders with their recommendation letters, she did numerous practice interviews with me, and even after I received my acceptances, she connected me with her old clients to help me in my decision-making process! She was there for me and more throughout the entire process, from start until the very end!

Now looking back, I don’t know where I would’ve been without her. I have absolutely no doubt that my applications were much, much stronger than they ever would’ve been without Angela’s help!

And to give you some context – the five schools I applied to were Stanford, HBS, Wharton, Booth, and Kellogg. In the end, I didn’t get into the first three, but received generous scholarships from the last two. Thanks Angela!!! :)

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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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I highly recommend Jessica Shklar at MBA Mission as a MBA business school admissions consultant. I began the Admissions process as a non-traditional applicant (with a career in the international non-profit development sector) and was an older applicant for full-time MBA programs. Being completely foreign to the MBA admissions process and with no time or years to waste, I decided to hire a consultant to help guide me through the process, keep me on target, and help me tell my story. After reading many reviews, I hired Jessica and she surpassed my expectations at every stage of the admissions process.

Jessica is highly professional and responsive. From our initial consultation, to our brainstorming, and our interview prep – she was always supportive but was unafraid to ask difficult questions to help tease out my story. In my many iterations of essays, she provided constructive feedback which vastly helped me make my essays more concise while also delivering more compelling content. While I had read that my background and age could be hurdles, Jessica helped them become my strongest assets. She was also able to give advice to my recommenders who had never written recommendations for an MBA application. At times I forgot that she was my consultant, as she felt more like my mentor.

With Jessica’s help, I received interview invites from every school I applied to, gained acceptance to 2 schools and was waitlisted at the other 2 schools (Chicago & MIT). I decided to not pursue my waitlisted schools and accept a fully funded fellowship. With Jessica’s help, I will actually be paid to go to business school and pursue my dreams. I never thought that was even possible. Jessica is worth the investment.

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I honestly don't think I would have gotten into Stanford without the help of Debbie. I was hesitant about using a consultant at first just because of the price, but I have to say that it was worth it. For me, it kept me on track with deadlines, forced me to brainstorm and think through my experiences, and in general helped my essays be better than I ever thought that they could be. Everything exceeded all my expectations.

Essay help:
1. The brainstorming that you do is the most important thing. They will help you better present your experiences, but there's nothing that you can make up. You have to put in a great deal of work.
2. I only did one school, but the process in general still requires a great deal of commitment. Debbie is amazing at editing and can help you find concise ways to present yourself, but you have to take a stab at trying to do so yourself first. The misconception with some people is that consultants will do your work for you. This is absolutely not true, as they just give you more suggestions and additional perspective on the school.
3. The 2 day turn around is great, but the issue here is that it is a 9pm deadline, which made it difficult for me personally. I start working at 10pm a lot, so it forced me to do more rushed editing than I would have liked.

Debbie is very efficient, as I had expected there to be much more back and forth and many more drafts. However, I was happy with my essays much earlier than I had expected to be. I would recommend that anyone applying to Stanford GSB at least speak with Debbie, as she is incredibly knowledgeable and understands the culture well (She went there). She's very honest and will give you direct feedback, and there's no time wasting with paragraphs or sentences that don't work.

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I highly recommend Jessica Shklar at MBA Mission as a business school consultant. She was an integral part of my application process this past winter/spring. From our first phone call, she quickly identified what made me unique as an applicant and gave me the confidence to apply to business school this year.
I especially valued Jessica’s feedback on my essays. Together, we took my somewhat rambling brainstorming document and turned into several succinct 250- and 500-word essays. Not only did she help me formulate and articulate my reasons for going to business school, but she also made my writing clearer and more precise. The interview prep was also helpful. We wrote out bullet points, walked through my answers, and went over different interview strategies for each school.
With Jessica’s help, I gained acceptance to 4 out the five schools I applied to - UCLA, Columbia, Kellogg, and Wharton. One final quality that I greatly appreciated was her responsiveness to emails at all times. She answered all my “quick questions” and was the perfect soundboard throughout the entire process.

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Thought I'd give a quick review on my experience with mbaMission to the GC community and in particular, my admission consultant Susan Kaplan.

My background - Auditor, CPA, CFA Level III, 3.8GPA, 720GMAT, and 4 years of work experience. Strong profile from an academic perspective, but definitely lack extracurricular activities.

I would highly recommend Susan and an admission consultant for the following reason:

1) If you are like me and don't have the time to read every post online about how to write your essays, not to mention the difference approaches adopted by different people. With that said, an admission consultant cannot make you someone you are not. They are in the business of highlighting your qualifications and make your application strong and more eye catching. They don't write essays for you (at least not at mbaMission) and they shouldn't. What Susan did for me was that she opened my thought process and challenged me to think differently about myself and not be conservative in highlighting my qualifications and framing my stories.

2) She is very knowledgeable of the entire process and does not bs you or over-promise on anything. She understands where all the land mines are and often times, I would step on them without knowing. She is very honest in her feedback, something I really appreciated as I didn't want to pay for someone to tell me that my essays were great - that would be a huge waste of money.

3) She is very willing to accommodate your schedule and will push you when you are behind. I think that's something we all need given our busy work schedule. We started early in the process (at least I thought), which really helped to manage my time better and not scramble last minute.

I went through the process with a friend of mine and she chose to use Stacy Blackman instead. Since we discussed the process almost daily, I was able to contrast the process and note the differences:

1) Stacy Blackman has a flight test review - this is a neat feature and basically, the admission board at Stacy Blackman will review your application in whole to see how the puzzle pieces integrate with each other.

2) In terms of actual feedback on essays, the services were not nearly comparable. I would often go through 6 or 7 drafts with Susan and even start fresh mid-way through while my friend received minimal feedback. The level of expertise in editing and overall idea generation was clearly lacking when you contrast the two.

3) As mentioned above, Susan is not afraid to ask me to start from scratch even when we are short on time. This is very important to the application process as your initial ideas generally don't work out. On the other hand, my friend felt that she paid a lot of money to have someone tell her that her essays were well written and only made small changes in wording and grammar.

Overall, I would highly recommend Susan Kaplan to anyone who is serious about getting into one of the top schools. As long as you have the right expectations and willing to spend the time and efforts, she can definitely improve your application and help you get into the school you want.

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