Please evaluate my profile for top schools (e.g., Columbia)

midgely,

Thanks for your note. Please see my thoughts below.

I would like to get a sense of what areas I will need to highlight and what areas I will need to bolster to get into a school such as Columbia.

Here is some information about me and my candidacy:

- Desired schools: Columbia or NYU, with focus on Entrepreneurship track. Would also like to be active in the Women's association at either University. Ok, what are your entrepreneurial career goals? Why are you interested in the CBS and NYU programs in particular? It will be very important to show your fit with each school.

- 3.85 GPA from University of California Berkeley (double major in innovation and Spanish). Graduated in 2007.
- 730 GMAT (43 Quant, 46 Verbal)
You have very strong academic credentials - so you will be academically competitive at top business schools such as CBS and NYU.

- Current Customer Experience Analyst for startup software company (market research analysis, working on customer experience and doing some product management for small changes to site, also technical writing and management of Help center for website). Been there for over 1 year. Ok, it sounds like you have had a solid year of work experience. As long as you can show the impact of your work and demonstrate your project leadership, your work experience should be fine.

- Former team leader of Berkeley's fundraising center. Personally raised over $150,000 for the University in FY07, trained and managed up to 35 fundraisers each day. **This was technically a "student" job that I had part time while in school, but I think I was able to show much more leadership here than in my other "real" jobs. Yes, this sounds like an impressive achievement - it clearly shows your leadership and your impact. Hopefully you can demonstrate similar impact during your year of full time work.

- Current volunteer for a senior center and volunteer translator for micro loan non-profit
- Volunteer for Obama (canvassing, 08) and Kerry (telephone banking, 04)
- Launched and led several one-off community service projects both at work and among group of friends
- Active participant in local women's organization
- Professional actress with credits in independent film and network television
- Fluent in Spanish, spent a year abroad in Spain and 4 months in Australia
- Competitive horseback rider and active horse trainer, former paid and volunteer riding instructor. I am very impressed with the range of your outside interests. They will really allow you to stand out from other applicants. First, you have some nice volunteer activities with the senior center and micro loan non profit. Second, it is rare for applicants to have professional acting experience - this will clearly help you to stand out. Third, your horseback riding is pretty interesting as well.

Any insight you might have will be helpful. You clearly have a strong academic background and an interesting array of outside interests. As long as you can show your leadership and impact at work, and clarify your career goals, I am confident that you will be a competitive candidate at top business schools.

I'm also currently evaluating admissions consultants' hourly packages as I need a bit of help outlining my essays and determining what information to highlight in each. If you could send me information about hourly consulting, that would be great too. Yes, we do offer hourly consulting. We generally bill 30 minutes to provide feedback on a 500 word essay or 2 billable hours to provide feedback on a set of 4 essays. Thus, if you need 3 rounds of essay feedback for a school, it would take about 5-6 billable hours of time. Obviously, if you submit high quality essay drafts, it might take less time. Again, the benefit of the hourly system is that it is quite flexible - you can just use what you need. Feel free to contact me if you would like a free initial phone consultation.

Sincerely,

Eliot Ingram
Clear Admit LLC

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