Ask an MBA Admissions Consultant

Hello! Paxton Helms from Kaplan Admissions Consulting here.

You are right to be thinking very carefully about who you want to hire as your admissions consultant: it is an important decision. Not only should you be thinking in terms of bang for the buck (a good consultant is not cheap) for the applications themselves but you should also be thinking about the secondary impact: that is, if your consultant can help you get into a business school you wouldn't have gotten into otherwise and can help you get scholarship money, fellowships, etc. There is, in other words, a lot to gain from working with the right person.

In my experience, the best admissions help you soup-to-nuts:

- Helping you think carefully and systematically about where you want to go to business school (my first order of business, for instance, would be to ask: why are you applying to just HBS? That is a red flag for me for a variety of reasons.) and which schools are the best fit.

- Help you position business school as the fastest and most efficient way for you to get from where you are now to where you want to be in two years, in other words, position an MBA as a "bridge." This is often harder than it sounds but is essential for a successful application.

- Help you achieve internal consistency in your application. Are you saying one thing with your resume but another with your essays? Are you claiming experience that is not backed up by your reommenders? Do your short and long term goals align with the strengths of the program to which you are applying?

- Helps you structure your essays. Sometimes a big chunk of essay needs to come out (and the writer --and this happens to everybody-- invested too much time in it to feel okay with taking it out) or paragraph order needs to be switched around. It's amazing how much an essay can be improved by switching two or three paragraphs and cleaning up a few transition sentences.

- Help you make your application letter-perfect. An oustanding admissions consultant can go from big-picture positioning and consistency issues all the way down to wonky syntax, clunky writing, and other tone and style issues.

- In terms of style, a good MBA admissions consultant is responsive (e-mail and phone), enthusiastic, friendly, easy to work with, has a sense of humor, and has learned how to work quickly and efficiently, maximizing the value of the time that you have bought.

- Finally --and this is very very important-- the best MBA admissions consultants don't hold criticisms and comments back. They don't attack but they do candidly and respectfully share all of the concerns and issues that they see with your application and candidacy --you're not paying somebody to tell you how great you are, you're paying somebody to give you direct and at times pointed and uncomfortable feedback. If you're consultant isn't doing that, fire him or her and find another one immediately.

Given my tenure at Kaplan Admissions Consulting, I have gotten to know my colleagues (and my own skill set) well enough to tell you that Kaplan's team meets or exceeds all of the criteria I have outlined above.

I hope you will include us on your list, too.

Stay in touch and let me know how your thinking is evolving--

Paxton