Getting through the MBA admissions process may be a bit tricky, but you can get manage to nail it with the right planning and preparation. J.R. Lowry is joined by Jessica Shklar, Executive Director at mbaMission, who shares how they help candidates achieve admissions success and make their educational dreams a reality. Jessica explains why getting into a business school is definitely a great idea and how an MBA consultant can help you in your journey.

She also breaks down the different MBA program types, how business schools screen their candidates, and why there is no one correct way to write your college essay.

Special discount for Career Sessions, Career Lessons listeners: mbaMission offers onTrack, an innovative, on-demand MBA application experience that delivers a personalized curriculum for you and leverages interactive tools and technology to guide you through the process of creating your best possible applications. For 30% off, use code PATHWISE30.

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How To Nail The MBA Admissions Process, With Jessica Shklar

Executive Director At mbaMission, The #1 MBA Admissions Consulting Firm

I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions, Career Lessons, which is brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career like thousands of others already have, join the PathWise community now. It is MBA application season and int this episode, my guest is Jessica Shklar. Jessica is an Executive Director at mbaMission, the number one MBA admissions consulting firm. Jessica is known in the industry, one of the highest ranked MBA admissions consultants in the business, and her testimonials back that up.

In our discussion, we’re going to be cover all things MBA, why you should consider an MBA, the different types of programs, how to choose the schools to which you apply, the application process, and how to successfully navigate, the role of an MBA consultant, and how to get the most out of your MBA experience while a student. Let’s get going.

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Jessica’s Work At mbaMission

Jessica, welcome. It’s good to catch up. You and I have no need each other for a very long time, which will get us here. Give us a brief background on you and on mbaMission.

I was exceptionally well trained in a public high school. I had a junior year English teacher who just believed that these college applications were a whole art. She spent a three-month module of junior year of high school teaching us how to do college essays. By the time I hit May of my junior year, my essay was done. It had been read to twenty classmates and had been vetted by her. It just made me, from a very early age, appreciate the art of what application essays are all about. I found that I’ve always liked writing, but that’s the writing I gravitated to, very memoir style and very personal.

I didn’t think I would do anything with it. It was just like I got into college and that was good. I didn’t think much of it until my career evolved and I ended up in admissions. Before I jumped too far ahead, I grew up in Boston. I did go to Harvard for college and moved to LA. I took a job in admissions simply because I needed a job that moved me out to LA. It was a small school and when I say small school, there were 90 undergraduates in all four years. For me to get publicity, to get marketing for the school, I couldn’t advertise the school. I had to go find other ways to talk about it.

I developed workshops on how you clarify your values when picking a college and how you write a college application essay, where I leveraged my high school experience well. That’s when I started to realize how valuable it was and I basically traveled around. There were only two admissions officers, so my territory was the US. I traveled around the country giving that speech and talking back to school nights to parent’s groups about how you help your kids with their college applications.

At some point in there, I had an epiphany that I needed to go to business school and I don’t know why. My family was all lawyers and educators, but I applied to Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg, Yale, and UCLA, and I got into all five, which I’m not saying as a flex. I just know how to write application essays. As you know, we ended up classmates at HBS and I left the admissions world at that point. I always volunteered in the New York City Public Schools with essays.

I helped a lot of friends on my own with their college and business school application essays, but I went into the corporate track. I ended up as the Senior Vice President for Quality at Chase’s home finance getting my Six Sigma training and helping to launch Six Sigma both at American Express and at JPMorgan Chase, which was exciting. I got laid off in the bank one merger and didn’t know what I wanted to do and stumbled into this job, which is mbaMission.

I’ve now been here for many years. mbaMission is an incredible organization. Not just because the quality of what we do, which is helping applicants from start to finish on their application process, unlimited and everything you can imagine, but because the company has a real ethos of trying to democratize much like PathWise. Democratize the application process by giving a tremendous number of free resources.

MBA Admissions Process: mbaMission is trying to democratize the application process by giving away a tremendous number of free resources.

We know our service expenses are worth it, but we also know that it’s not affordable for everyone. We make a lot of resources available to them, which I’m sure we will talk about later on. That’s where I’ll stop, but now executive director. I’ve been here for many years, spoke with thousands of applicants and helped hundreds of people with their business school journeys.

Breaking Down The Different Types Of MBA Programs

We’re going to dive into a lot of the MBA programs and the application process. Start by describing the different flavors. There’s the traditional MBA that you and I went to, in-person, full-time and a two-year program. There’s part-time, executive MBA, and online MBA. There are more options now and more credible options than there were when you and I were in pops and went to HBS. Describe the different flavors and which ones you tend to get involved with candidates on.

As you said, the most typical MBA that people think of is what you and I did, the two years. You leave your job, move to a city or you start going, if you are already in New York, you go up to Columbia or Downtown to NYU. Most people pick up and move and for two years, they are building community. They’re immersed in classes for the first year. Maybe they have requirements or selectives. They do a summer internship and then the second year, they take more classes and then eventually they find a job. A very good fit for generally 27-ish or 26 or 25 up to 32-ish. They are at both ends but that’s their age range.

Three or four or five years into their careers, generally looking to either be career changers or to enhance their career in leaps and bounds. Part-time programs are, you’re working full-time and in the evening, you go take a class. You still apply. You still get in, but you take a class. You work your way on your own schedule through a curriculum. It can generally take a little bit longer. A big advantage is you’re not giving up two years of salary. Often, your company will reimburse a lot of that for continuing education. The disadvantages are, it’s much harder to change careers.

You’re not career services at the business school. It’s not looking out for the part-time people. Recruiters generally are not looking at the part-time responsibilities. Easier to get into, It may be more cost-effective and harder to switch careers. Executive MBAs are for people who are generally sponsored by their company, their twenty years into their career and their company wants to invest in them to help them move up within that company. Generally, it’s a weekend or a week every few months. The company has to either sponsor or commit to giving you the time off. I do have to send a letter to admissions to say that.

That’s also not for career changers as much as people who are growing within there and there are the hybrid programs you mentioned. By the way, I should say that none of this is set in stone. There are full-time one-year programs. There are part-time programs that are more relaxed out but, generally, this is the majority of the programs each time. The hybrid programs are online with a combination in person.

Duke undergrad has a wonderful MBA. It used to be called the cross-continent MBA, where you go and spend a week at Duke and then you do classes maybe every weekend or every week online with a group then you go to a different country for a week. You do classes for three months and then you go to another country for a week. You build that community while also having the flexibility to being able to work.

When you and I were applying to school, this is mostly a US phenomenon, the idea of business school but there’s an increasing array of global options. What are the differences now between the traditional American programs and the non-American programs? What are the similarities and differences?

There are more and more prominent European and Asian programs. Probably more European, but still some very good Asian programs as well. The difference is, generally the European programs have a wider age range of applicants and students, and a wider GMAT or GRE range. Which means often that it’s easier to get into. It’s a nice option for American applicants who want to go to a top school but may not be competitive at the very top US schools. They generally are one-year programs, which makes it harder to switch careers because you don’t have the summer internship. The benefit but also a cost.

The other key factor to consider is name recognition, depending on where you want to end up or if you want to come back to the US. In Seattle, which is arguably the top European business school and which has a one-year option where you still do get the summer internship. January, summer, then the fall are not well known in the US. People don’t have heard of NSATs. Maybe in that case, the London Business School, which has a lot of name recognition so it makes sense.

If you’re looking at those other programs, you do want to check the alumni population and where students end up going to work afterwards. By the way, the best tip ever, Google the name of your school and career profile or career report. They will tell you a list of every company that recruits on campus, the percentage of students that go into different parts of the world and different companies. It’s just a goldmine of information.

How To Choose The Right MBA School And Program

If I’m a candidate, I’m thinking about business school. I come to mbaMission or another admissions counseling service. What are the types of things that you advise people to think about in terms of which type of program? I think you’ve covered a lot of that already but also, which programs or which specific schools?

A type of program would be your goals, your age, your scores, feasibility of getting in and where you want to end up. We’ve done those. Which schools? I always ask people to think about what I call their tipping points school. If this line here is staying in your job, most people just think, “I want to go here. I don’t want to go here.” I always ask them to think about the sandwich. What’s the best school that they would not leave their job for? What’s the worst school that is better than their job?

I’ll give you my favorite example because I thought it showed so much self-awareness. I had a client many years ago. He only applied to two schools. He applied to Harvard and the University of Miami, because he thought about where he should go. He was not that competitive for Harvard, but he wanted to give it a try. There were many schools above University of Miami in the rankings that he would have been a good fit at.

For him, his career is going to be in Miami. The network from the University and being affiliated with the business school was not worth giving up. I love that because so many people chase crustaceans and for some industries that might be appropriate. For him, it was clear that the name wasn’t important. It was the network and the location that mattered. That’s something that’s important to think through.

There are some forms of differences, too. I haven’t kept up with it. I remember Harvard was very case focused. Darden was too with more cases a week and, to me, that felt like a death march, so I didn’t apply there. Other schools were a bit more, I’ll say traditional classroom instruction model. How does that factor into how you should think about your options?

It’s important to know your own learning style and your own goals. As you said, at Harvard, not only is it the case method but we had no electives that first year. We still don’t. I remember sitting next to an accountant in first year accounting. I didn’t even know what a balance sheet was. It was completely overwhelming until I’d gotten into business school, but I had never worked with one. I just took accounting over the summer before.

It was overwhelming to be in that classroom with people who were experiencing so many different ways and not to have the option for them to opt out. It was all mandated and as you know, a tremendous amount of reading, the ability to speak, conceptualize, and pull ideas together from multiple parts when you’re cold in a class with a classroom discussion in the case method. If you don’t like reading, if you don’t like being put on the spot, if you don’t want rigidity in your curriculum, Harvard may not be the best place for you.

In contrast, at University of Chicago Booth School of Business, there are zero requirements. There’s one requirement in the first year. If you are going into business school knowing exactly what you want to get out of it, then Booth is a great place because you can start owning your curriculum from day one. I’ll give you another great example. A client I had when he was a lawyer. He wanted to switch from the legal side of corporate finance to the finance side of corporate finance. That’s a big leap.

He told Booth in the essay, “The only way I can get an investment banking job when I graduate is to have an investment banking summer internship. The only way I can get an invested banking summer internship is to front load my banking classes in the first semester, so that I can show as in my classes by midterms and I could handle work. Any other school where there are requirements would prevent me from doing that and not help me achieve my goals.” It worked out exactly the way he wanted.

He ended up at a top investment bank, got the summer internship, took other classes, and wrote a compelling essay to Booth about how it was the only school that was a good fit for him because of that. you have to know yourself, your values., your style and what you’re looking for and the industry you’re going into. Unfortunately, it’s still the case but in private equity investment banking, they overemphasize prestige to a point that is damaging as acceptance rates have gone down.

Do you feel like there are some lesser-known programs that are say punching above their weight class in terms of what they can offer students that you encourage your clients to consider?

It’s different for every person. I can give you more anecdotes, but we host an mbaMission show. Our most watched episode ever was a few months ago. It was on, what would be the M8? There’s the M7 or the magic 7, Harvest, Stanford, Wharton, MIT, Kellogg, Chicago, and Columbia. Those are the M7. There’s a question about what would be the M8? We had a panel discussion and it was such a good discussion. What it came down to in the end was Berkeley, Duke, and Tuck would be the next level. Those are important.

I had a client who turned down who dropped herself off the waitlist at MIT, because she got a full ride to University of Wisconsin. Which was a very small program, but because it was small and because they wanted her so much. They put a tremendous amount of work into helping her with her career goals because it was something they were not familiar with as a very niche area. They hold her through the application process, “We will figure out a way to help you get there.” I don’t know that the University of Wisconsin is great for everyone. It’s coming down to, where do you want to be, what are you looking forward to in school and assessing fit, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a lot as well.

What MBA Schools Are Looking For In A Candidate

What do the top schools look for when they’re looking at applicants? What matters most?

I think all schools say the same thing and it’s just a question of how they express it. All schools are looking for leadership. What that means is initiative, problem solving, creativity, being proactive, and driving results. They’re looking for teamwork and collaboration. Only because you’re a leader, doesn’t mean you can’t learn from others. They want to know that in a classroom, in a business setting, you’re going to be someone who will work with teammates well and you’re going to be not just a leader, but also a good participant.

MBA Admissions Process: All business schools say the same thing about their admissions. It is just a question of how they express it.

They’re looking to understand character. When you finish law school, you’re a lawyer. When you finish medical school, you’re a doctor. When you finish business school, you’re not anything. You have an MBA. That means it’s much more of a generalist degree where your character matters more. Do you remember our first class at HBS, it was a module on ethics. It was that very first thing we learned there. Business schools care more about that element as well, just to understand who you are as a person.

You look at the kinds of application essay questions that are being asked. Stanford’s flagship essay, what matters most to you and why? That’s not a career essay. That is what they call bleeding on paper. That’s a character essay, which is how you fit with their values and pick one of the values. Tuck has a question that they keep changing the exact wording of it but essentially, every year what they ask is, “Tell us about a time that you were a nice person.” That’s never the actual wording, but it’s a time that you went above and beyond for someone without payback for yourself.

A time when you put yourself in a position to support someone, even if you aren’t going to get something back. Those kinds of things. There’s still lots of questions about DEI and enabling a more diverse and inclusive environment. The one thing I want to say, if we can put this in the European schools. Everything I said about them being easier to get into is changing because in 2025 with the VISA issues in the US, we are seeing a huge boost in the European application volume.

There’s so much uncertainty around this. We try not to get too deep into politics here, but it’s hard sometimes to completely avoid current events. The reality is, it’s harder for foreign students to get visas to come into the US now and that’s particularly for these MBA programs. They deliberately seek a global base of students because particularly in the case model, you’re going to learn a lot more about the world when you’ve got a bunch of people around you who didn’t grow up in the same country and in the same culture as you did.

For me, that was one of the real things I hadn’t fully appreciated when I was writing my applications but I certainly came to appreciate in the couple of years that we were in the program. It’s unfortunate but it’s the reality. If you want to go to business school and you want to go now and you’re not an American citizen. You’ve got to have a backup plan that potentially sends you some place elsewhere in the world.

I will say, though, what that means is this is a pretty good year for domestic applicants because the national volume goes down but the school has to keep its population. It’s going to be a boost for the domestic applicants or if you are an international applicant who has dual citizenship or you have a green card option or something. This is a good year to apply.

How mbaMission Can Help MBA Applicants

You mentioned in passing earlier that you provide a bunch of services to your clients. When do they tend to engage in mbaMission? What are most of them looking for you to do besides guide them on writing their application essays?

There are two big misperceptions when it comes to admissions consulting. One is that we do the work for you, which we don’t. That would be unethical. AI doesn’t do it for you because we can always tell when it does. Admission officers can too, and we won’t write your essays. The other mistake is thinking that all we do is editing. When someone tells me, “I want you to edit my essays.” I’m like, “You can hire someone a lot cheaper to edit your essays.” That’s not the main point of it.

What we do is, we call it the start to finish package. We have less expensive different modular versions but like the main service. That starts with brainstorming. It’s understanding who you are. Before we even touch a school, we’re getting to know you through a very long document that you fill out and that we read multiple times.

It’s trying to craft your story in a way that when you then take the 3 or 4 or 5, in Stanford’s case, six essays first school or even worse, if it’s only one essay. How do we help you tell your story in a way that maximizes the leadership that you’ve shown, the impact that you’ve had, the character that you bring, and the perspective that you bring with each essay so that they’re learning more about you with each essay.

We do the same with your resume. Is your resume telling a one-page story that supplements the essays that are a quick scan? A lot of the schools when they interview you, the interviewer only sees your resume. Do they get the complete picture from that? We help you pick your recommenders. We help you guide your recommenders. If the recommenders let us, we’ll guide them. We’ll review the letter. This is a part where a lot of people forget about, there’s a short answer. There’s an application itself, which might have five pages of additional questions.

London Business School, by the way, is the worst at this because they say there’s only one essay, but those short answers on the application can be 200 to 400 words and there are like six of them. We look at that, too. Again, our idea is not copy and paste from your resume, but how can you use that space strategically? You’re teaching them more. You’re going more in-depth. You’re not just copy and pasting.

We also will help with mock interviews. Probably the biggest value we add is we can never take away the anxiety, but we can make it a lot easier. If you are climbing Mount Everest, you would not do it alone. You would hire a sherpa. That sherpa is not carrying you, but they’re going side by side with you. They’ve been up that mountain so often. They can tell you how to conserve your energy, where you have to push ahead and what happens if there’s a pitfall that suddenly comes up.

We’ve had plenty of pitfalls and applications along the way, scores that don’t work out, recommenders who disappear, arrests people and lose their job. These things happen and we know how to help you navigate through it and just reassuring presence. Someone who’s so experienced. You wouldn’t hire or represent yourself in a law case. You wouldn’t do your own taxes. Even if you could, it’s probably easier if you hired an accountant. It’s the same with admissions.

Being Strategic With Recommendation Sources

You mentioned recommendations. I remember that’s a particularly stressful part of the process because you want to find somebody who’s got enough clout to come across to an admissions reviewer. Somebody works in these admissions departments as a credible and senior enough person. You also want to make sure that they know you well enough. How do you balance that? What is the best way to think about being strategic about your recommendation sources?

Often, people come in and they say, “I need to pick lots of recommenders. It puts a lot of work and I don’t want to ask them to do too much.” Don’t do that. It’s like herding cats. The most stressful part of the entire application process is picking your recommenders and hoping they complete them on time. Recommendations are 95% done with the first one. They are very similar. Pick two recommenders and don’t worry about it beyond that.

They say things like seniority. They went to my school. None of that matters. A lot of people confuse what I call secondary criteria with primary criteria. Primary criteria is the only criteria that matters. The criteria that define your universe of possibilities for recommenders. At least one level senior to you. They think you’re amazing and they’re willing to do the work. That’s it. Figure out your 3, 4, and 5. If you’re lucky, people who fit that criteria.

Once you have that population, then you can start to say, “This person knows me now and has known me for six months. I want to pick someone who’s saw me more at the beginning of my career and has known me for three years, or this person can speak about my analytical skills. I want to pick for the other one. Someone who can speak about my interpersonal skills.” We helped match them up that way, but we don’t get involved in the secondary criteria until we’ve defined those criteria first.

How To Work Around Your Weaknesses

Let’s talk about some of the things that can potentially get in the way. You mentioned a low GPA or a low GMAT score or maybe you started college in a community college and then you transferred to a four-year program. How do you help people work around that?

Not all those are weaknesses. Starting at a community college and then transferring is a great story. I’ve seen some fantastic essays about feeling like imposter syndrome and about the value of that. I worked with someone who did that and now, had then started a program at his community college after he had graduated coaching them on how to do the transfer on their career goals and wants to go into community College to work and degraded in the process.

I would question whether that’s an issue. Most problems are surmountable. I worked with some of those who had an honor code violation in college for underage drinking and you would think that would be a deal breaker. I had another one who had a cheating violation. All applications ask you to explain it. As long as you can prove that you have grown and learned from the experience, it’s usually not a deal-breaker. With low GPA, if it’s continuous low for all the four years, it may affect where you are, safer or stretch schools but you can build what we call an alternative transcript. Take college classes.

HBS has a wonderful program called HBS CORe, which is an online 10 or 17-week program that is about three fundamental courses that you need to know that are great preparation for business school. Darden, which you mentioned earlier, will waive the GMAT if you took HBS CORe. They think they correlated that success at Darden. It correlates equally with completion of the HBS CORe as it does with the top GMAT or GRE score.

If you have a low GMAT, unfortunately, that’s the hardest but you can switch to the GRE, which is accepted at all schools now. It was not when you and I applied. It’s probably equal numbers now. Since the GMAT changed, we’re seeing more people take the GRE instead of the GMAT. There’s also a test called the Executive Assessment, which was started for executive MBAs because people who’ve been out of their career for twenty years are not going to go back and study for the GMAT.

Now there are full-time programs. Not very many, but there are full-time programs that accept the EA instead. It’s a test that relies more on life skills. I’ve even had clients who apply to schools with a lower GRE or GMAT score, but who took the EA as well and used that as evidence to the business school. The school didn’t take the EA but my client was able to say, “This test didn’t work for me, but here’s an example of a score. Here’s my test and my grades in a course and show other evidence.” You have to be realistic. I wouldn’t apply to only schools with a 10% acceptance rate if you have a low GPA, but there’s usually a story you can tell and a way to turn it around.

How To Prepare For Your MBA Application

How much time, hours of work and how much time calendar time should people be allotting for the process?

It will take whatever time you give it. We recommend giving it more time but that doesn’t mean endless time. Round one deadline was September and round two is January. One of the biggest pervasive myths in Ephesians is you have to apply. In round one, you do not. Round one and round two are pretty equal. I would try to avoid the last round in a school, round three or round four. Again, in European schools, that’s less of an issue. If you start your applications in November or December, you might not get six or seven done, but you can easily get to 3 or 4 good quality and recommendations done.

A lot of it depends on you. If you’re only going to give it two hours on a weekend or you’re going to save. Everything is trying to do marathon sessions on the weekend. It’s probably not going to be your best quality work, but if you can commit to an hour or two several nights a week, plus 2 or 3 hours, each weekend and a day, you can get it done. Our rule of thumb, although, is such a generalization. The first application takes about 30 to 40 hours on your part. The second application is 20 to 30.

Subsequent ones can be 10 or 15. The latest I’ve ever worked with someone who’s signed on. I remember it being news. I was eating dinner with my family and got a text saying, “I just took the GMAT and now, I want to reply. The deadlines were the first week of January.” We did five schools. She signed on January 1st. I committed to nothing else but working with her. Everyone else had fortunately finished.

How did she do?

There’s two of them, which is great. She had the GMAT. She was a good applicant. If you’re a weak applicant and you apply last minute. That’s not going to help you. I do not advise doing it that way. It was very stressful for both of us.

There Is No One Way To Write Your Essay

I’m sure. I don’t know if you remember writing. You did five and I did two schools. I remember I started probably in mid to late September. At Harvard, at the time, I think we had to write like ten essays. There were a lot of essays and I can remember working on them in the evenings and working them on the weekends. This is back before portable computers. I remember borrowing a luggable computer from the office that I could take when we would go away for the weekend or something or I could spend a few hours working on essays.

I worked on those essays all through say mid-September to Thanksgiving. I remember one of the last things I did. I had a good friend who came to stay with us for Thanksgiving that year and she was in a Master’s program and ultimately got a PhD in literature. She was a fantastic writer. The journalist ran the school paper at the University of North Carolina. I put a lot of pressure on her to help make sure that my writing was up to snuff, but I remember taking a lot of time. I was an engineer writing. It didn’t come naturally to me as it would to somebody who spent all their time in college writing papers.

For me, I remember staying late at work. I was spreading and going away from my office into a conference room. I still use this technique sometimes. I was spreading out by taping together print and paper and spreading it out, writing out the questions for each school and drawing arrows to see what could overlap and plan it out. I think Harvard asked for an ethical dilemma. Two schools asked for ethics so much, but one explicitly said, “Don’t tell us how you solved it or what you did.”

I know Harvard was one of them. It’s like, I can use the same topic here but it’s going to be a different essay. I remember sitting in this conference room and planning it out on paper before I started typing. That’s probably the biggest thing when I tell people to sign on early with us. It’s because if you knew your topics, you could just start. It’s so important to do the planning first, to plan out. Only because two schools ask similar questions doesn’t mean you can have the same answer because it depends on what other questions are being asked and what you want people to know.

It’s a little bit like when you go to interview for a job and you’ve got your stories. You have to think about, whom am I going to tell which stories to? You ideally don’t want to repeat them because then when they get together, they realize you’ve told them both the same story and there’s less information for them. I remember doing this same thing that you just described, sitting down with all the questions for both the applications in my case and saying, “What am I going to write about in each of these things?”

I’m making sure that I had ten different things for Harvard. I pretty much was able to mostly lift what I had done for Harvard, and then use it for Kellogg to which I did not get in, by the way. As you said, that first one is a lot of work and you got to get in front of it and be clear on how you’re going to fill out all these questions.

It’s different for every person. There isn’t a formula. I remember one of our classmates asked to read my application when we were in our first year. I don’t remember how it came up. After, he said to me, “You wrote about such personal topics. It would never have occurred to me to write about certain things.” I think I had written about working out and how I became a habit. I had been very ill at one point in school and paralyzed for three months and how I grew out of that and became commitment and stuff. I would never write about a personal journey like that. I was like, “We both got in.” It’s not that there’s a right or wrong answer, but maybe he didn’t have anything that was that deep or that personal.

Maybe he wanted to talk about his work accomplishments and needed more explanation than mine. I was in a pretty straightforward job. Who knows? There isn’t a formula and that’s what’s most important. I know we mentioned earlier, talking about the biggest mistakes applicants make. There are a few, but one is thinking there’s a right answer. They’re very few right answers that will get you in and there aren’t even that many wrong answers that will keep you out, but it’s writing about what you believe is most important to you rather than what you think the school wants to hear.

I know, be yourself or be authentic is so hard and such a buzzword, but it is true. The former director of admissions at Stanford just said that himself. He said, “The biggest mistake people can make is telling us what you think we want to hear. What we want to know is what you want to tell us.” Now, you have to overlay that with this is business school, not a therapy session, but you can get pretty deep on some of these essays.

MBA Admissions Process: The biggest mistake college applicants can make is to say what they think the school wants to hear instead of what they want to actually say.

Certainly, I’m sure some people go into deeply personal stories that they probably haven’t even shared with friends or family in these applications. They’re not necessarily looking for therapy, to use your words for a minute ago. They want to be able to show who they are and experience it’s shaped them. Sometimes, those aren’t happy stories.

There can be a tendency to be almost a tragedy jumping when you’re in the business and it’s important to level set and say, “A tragedy that shaped you.” I’ve worked with people who had horrible situations, it is different than when you had a bad day. You had one family member who wasn’t so nice to you. That’s not the same story. Business schools can sense when you’re not authentic about an experience. It’s finding that.

The phrase I’ve heard people use is trauma bragging. I got to believe if you come across this trauma bragging to the people who are considering your application is not going to go over well.

If it makes them uncomfortable. I was working with someone who had a truly horrific experience and wanted to write about completely who he was, but it was so uncomfortable for him to talk about. We talked a lot about it. It has to be in there but how do we do it in a way that is respectful of the experience of the impact it had on him, but not make the person listening to it feel uncomfortable? In the end, we shifted it from being a huge part of his Stanford’s what matters most essay to 650 words and put it as one line of a very short answer question in Stanford. It’s about 150 words on something in your past that impacted something you do now.

We had one line and then talked about the impact on how he gives back to certain types of people. He had to live with it and I said, “You have two options. This is your choice. This one makes people uncomfortable, but it is also more true to the experience. This one gets it across, but you’ll have to accept that it’s a little bit less.” That’s what we went with. We don’t have a decision yet but I was proud of him for thinking it through and for recognizing that you’re not bragging. This was truly impactful. It has to be part of his story, but it is not there.

How To Find The Right Consultant To Help You Out

When people are looking for a consultant to help them with this process, what should they look for in the firm? What should they look for in the individual that they work with?

It differs. There are a lot of admissions consulting firms out there that are not good. That doesn’t mean every individual in it isn’t good but it means that in general, they don’t train their people. They take people because they went to business school. That person went to business school or something. It’s an industry with very low barriers to entry and one way that MBA admissions differentiated itself. If I can boast for a minute. We are the number one term by every metric possible. Poets&Quants is a wonderful website that ranks us. In Manhattan Prep, we’re the only firm that they recommend. In GMAT Club, we’re the only company.

We invest very heavily in training our consultants. In fact, our consultants don’t go live with a client until they’ve shadowed for three months and we have twenty applications during that time. Their whole first year, they have a mentor who’s reviewing their essays the whole time because this is important. You’re spending a lot of money. This shapes your life. You’re the best. We also are all full-time. The magic trifecta for mbaMission is we’re full-time. We all have MBAs and we’re all writers.

Going back to the lawyer analogy. If you were being sued, you wouldn’t hire a lawyer who wanted to be an actor but was taking a few legal cases to pay the bills because you wouldn’t be a priority. When we are full-time, it means our boss is never pulling us away. Our CEO will not let us answer his calls if we’re with a client. He is adamant the client is first. There is never anything that gets in the way. Our clients are our priority. We all have MBAs because we have to know what we’re going through in this process. The most important part is that we’re all writers.

This was something that a former director of admissions at a very top school was thinking of joining us when she retired. She finally said, “I’m not going to because I’ve realized through this process that I would not be a good admissions consultant. Think of the difference between a food critic and a chef. A food critic reviews the final product. They know what they like to say, but they don’t know how to help you get there. A chef or in this case a writer, knows how to tinker with the ingredients.”

When I’m working with someone, they might send me a 30-page brainstorming document that they filled out. They have to spend 5 to 7 hours on this. My job is to take that and I read that through. The chair behind is my brainstorming chair. I print that out. I go sit on that chair and I read it through once. I read it through a second time with a pen and I’m noting down things I want to explore more. Ideas on page three that are echoed in page fifteen that they may not have realized. I go through it again with a notebook.

I literally have a notebook on my desk with all the questions, one page for school and I write out possible ideas, possible outline topics, everything. I read it through one more time just to check. Before I even meet with my client for the first brainstorming, they’ve spent 7 to 10 hours. I’ve spent 3 or 4 hours trying to get to know them. We have a call doing that strategy for one school planning it out because I know how to take ideas, pull them together and tell a story. An admissions officer who might have seen tens of thousands of essays is only seeing that last stage.

It is important to look for consulting firms that are credible in the industry, have history and reputation. Our consultants are trained and know what they’re doing in our client votes. In terms of individuals, it’s just a question of fit. If it’s a credible firm then everyone is good. It’s a question of personality. It does not matter. I have never set foot on the Booth campus.

I have a great track record with Booth. I have worked on Harvard applications, but most of my Harvard clients also apply to Stanford, Wharton, Penn, and Duke. I haven’t been to many of those schools. I only went to Harvard. It doesn’t matter that your consultant went to that school because our job is not to tell you about the school. Our job is to tell you about yourself and help you present your fit with the school.

The schools are also completely different. Harvard now is very different from the Harvard that you and I went to.

My experience at Harvard and your experience at Harvard were probably different, too. In the first year, it was the same. We’re sitting in the same classroom every single day together but by second year, I don’t think we are just single class together. I’m sure it was very different.

How To Get People Thinking About Value Equation

I do want to ask you about the value. I look back and I’d love to hear your thoughts. I was in the military. I looked at going to business school as a way for me to transition back into the private sector because it’s just a very different thing being a military officer and working in the private sector. I can remember sitting in school and listening to the bankers and the consultants who had done those two-year analyst type programs before they went to HBS and just being completely in awe of everything that they had learned in those two years.

I was coming into a lot of this pretty cold. I look back and say, “I got a good value out of the program.” It was expensive then. It’s incredibly expensive now. When people come to you on the fence, how do you get them thinking about that value equation? How do you feel like it’s worked out for you?

I’ll answer that one first. Business school was hard for me. Not just the academics of it. Although I did very well I had to work unbelievably hard because I thought it was a feeling all the time. Although, I ended up doing quite. Business school is very hard for me socially. Largely for what you identify, I felt like everybody knew more than I did. I came from nonprofit and admissions. I got into Yale and Yale put a big press on me to go there. I always knew that I would have been much happier at Yale, but I couldn’t turn down the value of Harvard.

I had gone to Harvard undergrads, so I already knew that the name had a lot of clout. I don’t think that’s the case for everyone. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I did want that generalist degree. For me, the best direct school I could go to would keep them more doors open. If you do know what you want to do like Chicago Booth, where you can tell your curriculum or if you are looking to go into Tech and Entrepreneurship. Harvard may not be that fit, but Berkeley, MIT and Stanford. Wharton has an amazing entrepreneurship program. There are one year tech MBAs.

If you think through what is right for you, then the value usually works out. The value doesn’t work if you go to a program chasing prestige only or chasing something else without understanding how the program will help you. If financial considerations are your biggest goal, then the strategy is a little different. If you’re looking to get merit scholarships, Harvard and Stanford don’t give merit scholarships ever. You want to apply to schools where they want you more than you want them.

It’s the traditional safety. Although, in this industry, with a 25% acceptance rate, it’s the most generous. Nothing is safe. The client I mentioned earlier, a full-ride to Wisconsin. She turned down a waitlist at MIT. For her, financially, that was if she was going into federal work. She needed that funding. It depends on each person what you’re looking for. It opened doors for me and the MBA was incredibly valuable. I’ll give you a personal anecdote.

My son is a sophomore in college and he just decided that he wants to go into consulting. He spent the last month applying for consulting clubs. When I was in college, if you wanted to join a club, you showed up. Read essays for each of five clubs and then you have to go to a behavioral interview. He had to go to a case interview and each one was weeding it out. He ended up, mom bragging. Sixteen people got in out of 400 applicants. He was one of them. Only two were not from business or engineering.

As I worked with him, practiced behavioral interviews with him, practiced case interviews with him, talked to him about the case method and how to read a case, it helped him with all of his application essays. My clients are usually 3 or 4 years out of college. To see someone who’s nineteen years old and the baby steps of this and teaching him how to think about this stuff was very satisfying for me to see how much business school shaped me and how I see things in a completely different way now.

It was definitely a very eye-opening experience for me and I learned so much there. I will say looking back, one of the things I realized probably a few years after school is that I had worked too hard, if that makes sense and focus more on the academic aspect of it. Not on building relationships with people. My social connections 30 odd years later are fine. I don’t think they’ve run as deep as they did for some of our classmates. You think about that group of guys who literally get together every year.

With one of my McKinsey officemates, he would do the same thing. He had a group of guys he got together with every year. He got groups of women to get together very regularly from our section. That level of connectivity, I underappreciated the importance of that. I would certainly leave our audience with a thought about that.

I feel the same way. It’s one reason I had not been to a reunion since the 5th and I went to our most recent one because I found so much value from my college reunions at rebuilding those connections. I was starting to feel bad as I worked with so many applicants about how few connections I had from business school. I made a very conscious effort to reach out to a few people and I went to the most recent reunion and had a wonderful time. It reinforced for me a feeling that those social networks are always there. I could pick up the phone and call anybody from our section and we still have those ties because of that shared experience we had.

A Special Offer From mbaMission

How can people avail themself with your service and you’ve got a special offer?

There are a couple of things. First, our start to finish services are amazing but they are expensive. We also offer hourly services which are much more reasonably priced, where you can just buy a chunk of hours if you still have a dedicated consultant. You work with them to figure out how best to maximize the use of those hours. You could also sponsor services for just an interview. Warden has this team-based interview where you sit in a room like a case method and solve a business problem with your classmates. We run through a mock test with that. You can buy individual services.

We also have a lot of free resources. Every one of our publications is free and downloadable. That’s a start to finish guide. It’s a 300-page book. Basically, a Bible of admissions from start to finish, guide to admissions. We have a research team that does nothing but write an insider’s guide and interview guides for all the top twenty schools. You could download those for free. Our show, the mbaMission podcast on YouTube or on every platform. We have admissions officers speak. We do deep dives on topics. We do two minutes on topics. We have past clients come talk about their experience at different schools. All of that is free as well.

What we have for the offer is something called onTrack, which was a further attempt to democratize the application process. We have over 500 videos about every aspect of the admissions process with templates as well. You could go on to onTrack. It’s an online program and picks resumes. I happen to write the resume section. We have 40 modules on resumes. How do you write a military resume, a business school resume coming from a military background, from engineering background, or consulting background, what font, what margins, how do you express impact versus responsibility or one page or two. All of these are different modules and training. We come with templates.

If you pick a specific school, there might be ten videos on that school, analysis of the essay questions, exploration of the school itself and things like that. We do have a 30% off offer for that. The service is a few hundred dollars per year unlimited. We also have free consultations. If you sign up for a free consultation, a 30-minute free consultation, it is not a sales pitch. You dictate what we talked about.

You can come in and say, “I want a profile review. I want school selection. I have this big issue and I don’t know how to handle it. I want to help pick my recommenders.” Whatever it is. We have people who do that before they’re ready to sign on. People who do that a year before, to get a sense of it and that can be with me or with anyone else.

We’ll help you. If you do want to move forward with the services, the person who did your consultation would help you navigate through but it is very much not a sales pitch. That’s one key thing that differentiates us. We think our credibility on those calls is the sales pitch enough. We don’t need to do more than that.

Fair enough. Thanks for doing this. We were probably overdue to catch up and certainly the episode is overdue and having a discussion focused on the MBA admissions process because it’s certainly relevant to our audience. Thanks for doing it.

Thank you.

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Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words

That was a very quick and probably incomplete flyby on the MBA admissions process and how you should think about it and how you should go through working with a consultant if you choose to do that. Thanks to Jessica for joining me. As a reminder, this episode is brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, you can join the PathWise community now. You can also sign up on the website for our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks.

Important Links

• Jessica Shklar on LinkedIn
• mbaMission
• HBS CORe
• Poets&Quants
• Manhattan Prep
• GMAT Club
• mbaMission Podcast
• mbaMission Podcast on YouTube
• onTrack
• Free Consultation at mbaMisssion
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok
• PathWise on Twitter

About Jessica Shklar

Jessica Shklar is an Executive Director at mbaMission, the #1 MBA admissions consulting firm. Jessica is known in the industry as one of the highest-ranked MBA admissions consultants in the business, and her testimonials back that up. Jessica’s clients say that she gets to know them better than even they know themselves because she digs deep, listens carefully, and makes connections they might not have recognized themselves. She also leverages her Harvard College anthropology background, believing that every individual is fascinating and that everyone has a story to tell. She sees it as her job to help them uncover it. She loves working with clients who start out not believing in themselves and helping them view their story from a different perspective, so that they discover their strengths and confidence.

Before getting her own MBA from Harvard Business School, from which she graduated with distinction (top 10%), Jessica worked in nonprofit education, first doing curriculum development for an adult education center and then in the admissions office of a small university in Los Angeles, where she advised applicants to both the undergraduate college and several graduate programs, including business school. While there, she developed and delivered workshops around the country on “Selecting the Right College” and “How to Write an Effective Application Essay.” After HBS, she volunteered in the New York City public school system, helping high school seniors with their college applications. She has also held positions at several Fortune 100 companies, including American Express and JPMorgan Chase, where she was the quality leader and a senior vice president for Chase Home Finance. In addition, she is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, with specific expertise in Six Sigma deployment and initialization.