Apologies to any clients who experienced problems trying to purchase one of our services via the online store. The glitch affecting the processing of credit cards has been fixed and all functionality has been restored. Looking forward to working with you on your applications in the leadup to Round 1 deadlines in September!
When we went through the MBA admissions process, we found it full of unnecessary anxiety, odd speculation, and bad information on sketchy websites. The goal of Ivy Admissions Group is to take the stress out of the process by sharing good information born out of our own experience and working with admissions.
Yes. We’re not trying to be a big industrial admissions consultancy. We only want to take on a few select clients and offer them exceptionally insightful and highly personal advice. We have very different backgrounds and are confident that between the two of us, each applicant gets a diverse set of perspectives.
A lot, actually.
I (Nate) know from experience. When I applied, I had all the right elements. An above average GPA from a target school, a perfect GRE, impressive leadership experience in the military, and glowing recommendations. What I had was a brand, but not a narrative, and so I was placed on the waitlist at HBS, Stanford, and Wharton. Through update letters that established my narrative, I was able to get admitted to all three. So take my advice, and get your narrative right the first time around.
I (Nate) started by re-reading college applications of younger friends after they had been deferred admission from Dartmouth. I’d go over essays about community service and cringe because I knew that admissions officers would read them as “vacation stories”. I would work with them to improve their narratives for the general admissions cycle and got a lot of satisfaction watching them get get into fantastic universities.
No. We wanted more than just a series of worksheets and spell-checkers. We wanted someone who had actually been admitted to HBS, who knew what the classes and clubs were like, and who had enough contact with admission deans to know how they think. We built Ivy Admissions Group to be the service that we wish we could have used.
When we found ourselves spending 20+ hours per week advising MBA applicants for free! We realized the advice we were giving them was superior to what our advisees were getting from paid consultants, that we were more responsive than paid consultants, and that we sometimes found ourselves more invested in our advisees' admissions prospects than they were. Switching over to a professional service allows us to go deeper with a smaller number of motivated applicants.
We have day jobs (as marketing managers), so we're not in it to earn a living. We believe in offering the best value of any admissions service, while charging and fair and consistent prices that are just enough to make it worth our own substantial time investment in each applicant. Definitely do your diligence before choosing a service, but let us know if you can find a better deal.
We only work with clients we think we can offer substantial value. If we don't believe we can move the needle that much in a particular case, we figure that out upfront, refund that client's money, and try to refer them elsewhere. We believe our value is clearest for applicants applying to top schools, where the admissions process is most difficult.
The conventional wisdom can be summed up as follows: apply when you’re ready but as early as you can. The common fear is that later in the cycle, particularly Round 3, it becomes “impossible” to get in. One admissions prognosticator I read said that she believes HBS admissions rates drop from 14% in Round 1 to 7% in Round 2 and below 3% in Round 3.
This is baloney. If you ask the admissions deans and dive into the data, you will find that while the number of applications fluctuates with each round and cycle, the acceptance rate remains reliably constant.
However, the key insight is that the applicant mix in each round is different.
Round 1 is for all the traditional MBA candidates: consultants, investment bankers, private equity investors, etc. If you worked at McKinsey or Goldman, your time to apply is in Round 1. And why wouldn’t you? You’re on “the path.” You’ve known since the day you started at your firm that everyone expects you to go to business school one day, maybe even with the company’s sponsorship. That means that you took your GMAT early, had your recommenders at the ready, and kept your resume up to date. All you needed was the essay prompt and you were ready for Round 1.
What happens to a candidate in this bucket who instead decides to apply later in a later round? Well, at the start of each application season, the admissions director allocates the number of admissions spots for each kind of profile. Because the traditional candidate applies early, by later rounds, almost all the spots for them are filled. You might be just the consultant the admissions committee was always looking for, but unfortunately they already gave your spot away. To prevent this from happening, follow the herd and apply with your cohort.
Are you literally any other type of candidate? Someone with a background in entrepreneurship, manufacturing, military, corporate finance, or healthcare? Then feel free to apply in whichever round you like. If you apply early, all the spots will be open to you, but you will be competing with the most prepared and impressive applicants. HBS usually places some Round 1 applicants under “further consideration” each year, bumping them into the Round 2 applicant pool. It can be nerve-wracking waiting for months while your application collects dust, so if you apply early you need to prepare yourself mentally for this possibility.
As for Round 3 – it’s not just for super impressive Olympic athletes and ex-presidents. Spots in the class are in short supply, but then again the applicant pool is much smaller too. More volatile industries like start-ups give less runway for employees to make important decisions like returning to business school. Accommodating those candidates are the reason why MBA programs have later admissions rounds. It is perfectly fine for those individuals to apply with confidence in Round 3; they should just make sure they’re applying then because that is the right time, not because they were lazy.
Harvard is home to a famous allegory often attributed to the late management guru Peter Drucker. The fable initially came to my attention from an address Harvard University President Drew Faust made in 2008 on the future of business education. It is The Parable of the Three Stone Cutters and while many versions of it exist, this one is mine:
A rich nobleman was on a journey far away from home, when he encountered three laborers toiling away in the quarry by the side of the road. When his caravan stopped for a rest, he called out to them and asked each what he was doing.
The first rested his arm on his pick, wiped the sweat from his brow, and replied, 'I’m making a living – as honestly as I can.'
The second stood tall, puffed out his chest and replied, 'I’m working hard to become the best stone cutter in all these lands.'
The third barely looked up, instead pointing a finger skyward. 'I’m building a cathedral.'
The question that often follows this parable is which of the three stone cutters is the most compelling? Let’s put it another way. If you were an MBA admissions director and had one final spot in your class for a stone cutter, who would you admit? Are they all the same, or do their answers reveal something important about their work and motivations? Let’s examine them in turn.
The First Stone Cutter is transactional. He is providing for his family and the nature of his work is ancillary. He provides no reason as to why he is a stone cutter instead of some other profession. Maybe his true calling was to be a brick layer. He doesn’t bring any passion to his description of his work and so we’re not that excited about it either. If we were to consider his future, what would we expect his next career move to be? We really have no idea. His vision offers no roadmap of where he’s been and where he is going. We really know nothing about him.
The Second Stone Cutter is professional. He is motivated to become the best version of himself. With confidence, we may assume that his current job is a necessary step on his path to become a better stone cutter. We can imagine a set of follow-on jobs – surveyor, foreman, architect – that he may pursue once he has learned everything he can at his current job. Sure, stone cutting may not be that interesting to us, but we can admire someone’s dedication to their chosen profession. Yet somehow his story is still lacking. His vision starts and ends with himself. He sounds like he is gliding through the world, not improving it. He offers no “cause” that we can be behind if we were inclined to support him, except perhaps a scholarship for stone cutter school.
The third stone cutter is aspirational. He tells us nothing about his specific work or how he came to pursue it, yet we understand him instinctively. We know why he is doing what he is doing and have a clear road map of where we think he will go. He offers a mission that is audacious, concrete, and larger than himself. It’s a vision we can root for and one large enough for us to imagine concrete ways of helping.
What makes the Third Stone Cutter so much more compelling than the other two is his narrative. Though he may be engaged in the small work of cutting a single stone, he vividly shows us how it fits into a greater mission. His purpose in life has shocking clarity. In our hearts, he is so much more than just a stone cutter. He is a “cathedral builder”.
Now, think about how you can apply this parable in your MBA application. How can you become the Third Stone Cutter?
Click here if you missed Part 1!
After a light breakfast of pickled fish and (a lot of) eggs we lock ourselves in a board room, agree on which customer pain points are most pressing, and debate which recommendations we wish to advance to the company. We settle on two broad categories: improvements to the existing ReimaGo sensor experience, and out-of-the-box new services that support Reima’s mission of promoting the “joy of movement” to children. We hammer out the final shape of our recommendations and assign them to individual team members to completely flesh out and assemble into slides for the deck.
In the afternoon, we visit Reima’s gleaming new corporate headquarters to debrief our initial conclusions on customer pain-points to the leadership team, and set expectations for the recommendations we will deliver to them on Monday. They give us a tour of their offices, complete with a sneak preview of their 2018 collection.
In the evening we rejoin the entire Finland section in a private room at Restaurant Sipuli for a Q&A with a local Finnish venture capitalist and the young co-founder of Wolt, the Finish version of Instacart / Seamless.
We set a goal of finishing up all the recommendation slides in our PowerPoint by lunch and set about dividing and conquering. We end up with visually compelling mock-ups for new ReimaGo applications: one targeted towards daycare centers and another offering busy parents a one-stop shop for apparel-related services.
Over lunch at the Michelin-starred Restaurant Ask we forget about work for a while and focus on team bonding, sharing funny stories from our lives before HBS, and riddles that we take turns trying to solve. The food is incredible, the atmosphere is relaxing, and the staff seamlessly accommodates all dietary restrictions.
We spend the afternoon as a team enjoying the sunny weather, strolling around the downtown seaport and over to the beautiful mansions of embassy row. At night, some members of my home section meet up at another Michelin restaurant, Chef and Sommelier, to celebrate a birthday.
Saturday is our day off, so a cross-section of the Helsinki section travel with our team’s local guide to Porvoo, a nearby Finnish village that dates back to the 1300s. We walk around the cobblestones streets, past a bank of red barns perched upon the river, to a chocolate factory and an unusual barn-shaped church perched on the hilltop. After some ice cream (the Finns also consume more ice cream than another other nationality in Europe), we head back to Helsinki to one of the weekend markets, where we grab lunch and buy some souvenirs.
I take off on a long run to explore parts of the city I hadn’t seen before. Eventually I find myself in the military section of the Hietaniemi cemetery where the national heroes of World War II are buried, notably Finnish President Marshal C.G.E. Mannerheim, who has been voted in surveys as the Greatest Finn of all time. Having lived close to Arlington Cemetery when I worked in Washington DC, the solemnity of the cemetery and the beauty of the headstones left a profound effect on me.
In the afternoon we present an abridged version of our client presentation to our FIELD professor and two other teams for feedback. Drawing on some of the media training seminars I attended at Harvard Kennedy School, I help coach our designated presenters on best practices for speaking to the room and making effective use of hand gestures. Our team does a great job and gets excellent feedback from the others.
The evening is spent at one of Finland’s famous saunas located right on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
We arrive at the Reima Headquarters at 9AM for our two-hour final presentation with the company CEO and her senior leadership. Our tone is conversational and we answer questions in real time. The CEO’s face lights up at our recommendations and her team asks what feedback we got about them in the field. Though her team has already considered some of our recommendations, I could tell that the fresh perspective we brought inspired them to think differently about both content and implementation. Each member of the team does a great job presenting, and in the end the CEO offers each of us a job at the company should we ever come back to Finland.
In the afternoon, we reconvene as a section to debrief the projects, offer feedback to team members, and go out for a group dinner. I also hit the saunas one last time.
We catch our flights back to Boston satisfied with the project we completed for our partner company and empowered by the strong bonds we made with each other.
(Click here if you missed Part 1!)
I would only recommend this if you (1) truly need to be admitted to one particular business school in one particular cycle and (2) you are comfortable taking on the social capital debt of such a favor.
The people who make up admissions committees are social animals like the rest of us and can be influenced by others. Specifically two types of people: VIPs with opinions that the Adcom would respect (e.g. famous CEOs, political leaders, and prospective donors with whom the school is trying to curry favor), and current students whom can vouch for your “fit” at the school.
When it comes to VIPs, either you have one or you don’t. Personal/family connections are often too weak to be meaningful, and the waitlist timeline is usually too short to develop a good relationship with a VIP from a cold start.
When it comes to current students, start by looking at your network on LinkedIn and see who is currently at your target school. Look for shared connections such as employer, undergrad, or high school. If you find someone you know well, explain your situation and see if they are willing to vouch for your fit at the school to the Adcom, using your new awesome narrative (see point #1).
Showing any sign of frustration with your situation is absolutely lethal to your application. Often, admissions deans are just itching to find reasons they can remove people from the waitlist – don’t give them one. Remember: you are the happy warrior, and the waitlist is a marathon, not a sprint.
Many schools look favorably on re-applicants and the classrooms are full of them. Next time, hire us the first time and we will make sure that you put your best foot forward.
For many HBS students, the FIELD Global Immersion is the seminal class of the HBS experience. Broken into two parts over the first year, the goal of the course is to stretch students’ emotional intelligence and apply the business learning of the RC in an international context.
A few months before departure, the list of 15 destination countries is announced, presentations are held on each, and students rank order their preferences. The goal is to send each student to a country they have no prior experience with. Once assigned to a country (in my case, Helsinki, Finland – my top choice), students are assigned to six-person teams, each curated from different sections to possess a diverse set of professional and personal backgrounds. Each team is then paired with a local company, non-profit, or government institution and given a consumer-facing business challenge to solve using the using the process of “Design Thinking” made popular by IDEO.
In college, I studied abroad in two different European countries, and as a military officer deployed throughout East Asia and Central America. I felt confident in my international exposure, but was excited by the chance to help an international company with a live business challenge. My teammates include two female MIT engineers, three consultants, five different nationalities – and me. Our project was with the PE-backed Finnish outdoor children’s apparel company Reima and centers around finding the best consumer use case for their new “ReimaGo” line of wearable activity trackers.
Today is the final day of class in the RC year. Our TEM Professor, the former President of Babson College and COO of both L Brands and Au Bon Pain, delivers a stirring valedictory about the keys to success from his own experience in entrepreneurship. Our BGIE professor, a former White House Economist, ends with a mini-case on ways activist business leaders influence policy change. Both classes end with the traditional student-performed “roast” of the professor, poking fun at their quirks and lampooning some of the funnier things said in section. I perform as our BGIE professor.
We head to the airport for a 9:30PM departure from Boston Logan bound for Helsinki, Finland via Reykjavik, Iceland. Inspired by our BGIE course, I re-read part of my international relations textbook from college and try to get some sleep. The earplugs and eye mask prove to be a lifesaver.
Having painlessly exited EU customs in Iceland, we simply walk out of the Helsinki Airport and find our guides waiting for us. It’s gray, windy, and snowing. I think of my wife – also an RC – currently on a plane to the warmer shores of Cape Town, South Africa. We get to the hotel late in the day and find our way to an Italian restaurant able to accommodate the 16 members of our party (there are 72 of us in Finland) in a private downstairs room. The fish is incredible.
The snow continues and so after our first Finnish Breakfast, we hit the museums. Today is also “Vappu,” one of the four biggest holidays of the year in Finland. Students from the surrounding universities descend along the Helsinki waterfront, and place a ceremonial white cap, the kind awarded to every Finnish high school graduate, on the head of a statue in the water fountain. From that moment on, the champagne corks pop, singing breaks out in the packed streets, and seemingly every Fin, young and old, dons the white hat they received at their college graduation.
The weather turns absolutely beautiful as the Vappu celebrations continue for a second day. Businesses are closed as families head to the parks for picnics. All 72 HBS students head out of the hotel for a wilderness cooking class where we learn to smoke salmon and barbecue reindeer, before playing some traditional Finnish camping games. After a full day of outdoor fun, we return to Helsinki for a lesson in traditional Finnish folk dancing at the local performance hall, before a huge section dinner at a local restaurant.
We meet the CEO of our client company and her top leadership for breakfast at the hotel. We’ve been in contact with them over Skype for a few weeks refining the business problem, and they share final guidance on the direction they would like our project to take. After the meal, we split up into teams of two to interact with local Finnish consumers in parks and playgrounds to understand what pain points they encounter in children’s apparel and outdoor activity. We meet with new users of the ReimaGo technology to understand the value they derive from the product, and the ways they believe it can be improved.
Helsinki is home to four restaurants with one Michelin star and all are reasonably priced, especially given the high cost of lower-end restaurants in the city. I decide to explore one of them with some friends from my wife’s section. The dinner comprises 15-courses and lasts 4.5 hours.
Half our team visits a daycare center running a pilot of the ReimaGo product, while the rest of us demo our very own versions of the product and the iPhone app. We meet up at the mall to visit the Reima store to see how the products are displayed and advertised. After lunch, we bust out the post-its and start compiling the pain points we have observed, brainstorming ways to improve the ReimaGo product, and ideating entirely out-of-the box ideas that Reima can pursue to promote the “joy of movement” at the center of the company ethos. The Finns drink more coffee than another nationality in Europe, so our caffeine needs are satiated by the high-quality roasts they keep on tap.
We draw up some prototypes and immediately test them on some local Finnish MBA students who join us at the hotel for drinks. Their feedback is incredible. We mull it over a team dinner at another fabulous Finnish restaurant and present some initial ideas to our professor, herself an accomplished marketing executive, during evening office hours.
Many admissions consultants focus on "brand" while we at Ivy Admissions Group focus on "narrative." Every future leader who works with us on a Complete School Package has their personal narrative developed through our proprietary Narrative Bootcamp.
What is the difference? Which should you maximize in your application?
A brand statement is a pithy phrase used to describe an admissions candidate. In 25 words or fewer these statements seek to capture the essence of who you are, what you have done, and where you are headed. These statements are relatively easy for people to write themselves. For example,
Battle-tested female veteran accomplished in leading analytical teams in high pressure environments seeking a job as an investment banker in Chicago.
Athletic and analytical male ex-consultant with start-up experience seeking to build competencies as a general manager at a large manufacturing conglomerate.
The problem with these statements is that they just sort candidates into buckets. All they do is tell the admissions committee who they are supposed to compare the candidate against, not why this candidate is the best one. In this way, brand statements for people are just like brand statements for cereal -- they tell us that Lucky Charms is different than Shredded Wheat, but don't offer a compelling reason why it is the best.
In contrast to the who, what, and where of a brand statement, a personal narrative focuses on the why. Whereas the brand statement distills the facts on your resume, the personal narrative is a story arc that connects your personal inspirations and motivations to your career aspirations. In the case of an MBA application, a personal narrative will inform the admissions committee how you ended up on your current life story arc, show where this arc will take you by projecting it into future, and then argue why business school is the logical next step in your career because it is the perfect bridge to connect the two. Consider a narrative we can tell for the military officer in the first brand statement above:
I joined the military as an intelligence briefer because I wanted to personally advise senior leaders, work with top-talent peers, and thrive in a team-first culture. As I complete my service, I'm applying for an MBA because I want to transition to investment banking where I can still experience all the best qualities of my former job, while also helping reinvigorate businesses back home in the Midwest.
This narrative is much more compelling than the brand statement above because it explains to the admissions committee why the applicant did what she did, what she values, where she is going, and how an MBA will help. It makes total sense why she is going to business school and the admissions committee should give her a spot in the class. She is a person, not a product.
You send us your essays in Microsoft Word and we mercilessly edit them. Tactical edits for grammar and tone will be made using Tracked Changes, and strategic edits on how to better use your essays will be made using embedded comments. We also recommend getting at least an hour of Hourly Help so that once you digest the edits we can workshop improvements on the phone.
($125 per 500 words)
Need special attention on one part of your application? Want expert assistance but without committing to an entire package? This is the package for you.
In a hurry?: Click here to book 1 hour of help immediately
You’re stuck on the waitlist – now what? In this complete package we run a campaign to influence the admissions committee to change their mind and let you in. We've used these methods to get clients accepted off the waitlist at Stanford GSB, HBS, and Wharton and currently boast a 63.6% success rate!
Our signature product -- we take you by the hand and craft the perfect story to build your entire application around. This process helps our clients achieve superior results while saving a ton of time by developing their personal narrative up-front before they write a single word of their resume, essays, or emails to recommenders.
Our key insight is that the way to earn the approval of the admissions committee is not to "sell them your brand," but rather to "win their vote." Based on techniques pioneered at Harvard, our proprietary system digs deep into your inspirations and motivations, and beautifully connects them to your MBA aspirations in an authentic and compelling way. Our goal at the end of the process is to develop a game-plan for crafting your MBA application (or job application!) such that the gatekeeper will feel that he or she is making the world a better place by putting your application in the admit pile.
This service is very creative and high-touch. Every narrative we create is absolutely unique to the individual, and not the cookie-cutter result of a computer print out.
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