“I would say do not even think of applying to M7 schools. Duke, Ross should be fine”, said Stacy Blackman Consulting during their 30-min free evaluation call, without even listening to my “what matters most?” story for once. I was dejected.
From that moment just over a year ago to getting into Stanford GSB on a full tuition fellowship, has been an amazing journey!
But it all started when Maria “listened” to my story after I reached out to her as one of the 50 finalists for the Stanford Reliance Fellowship (given to 3 Indian students every year).
Being the first one to pursue a proper college education in my family, let alone applying to a business school, I had no clue about the admissions process, and I wanted someone to guide me – and not spoon-feed me like most Indian consultants do, for exhorbitant rates! – on what the admissions team expects from applicants. And Maria was willing to be the mentor I was looking for!
I wanted to take a DIY approach with some expert inputs along the way – something ApplicantLab offered in a unique way as Maria has listed specific advice for each school in terms of short write-ups and in-depth videos…and with a good dose of humor!
The best thing about the ApplicantLab platform is that it guides you to do a lot of “pre-work” before getting to write essays. Be it about your career journey, leadership traits, extracurricular stuff, future goals – it all comes into a matrix form once you are done with the pre-work steps. And then, it is very easy to pick and map the important points for a particular essay prompt. More importantly, this pre-work gives you enough time for self-reflection, something that eventually helped me bring out my most personal and authentic stories in the “what matters most” essay.
Towards the R2 deadline (I applied to 3 schools all in R2), I was lagging behind and so I even availed a few hours of help for AL’s premium services, where each of the conversations with Maria were very helpful, especially for my MIT and HBS MS/MBA applications.
On the platform, the video guides for essays of all schools are in-depth and you’ll have enough guidance to write the best essays on your own – that’s what ApplicantLab stands for: “Be your own admissions consultant!”.
In all, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of working with ApplicantLab/Maria and would HIGHLY recommend anyone to go for it. ApplicantLab will be your best guide if you are taking the DIY approach!
