Shaking Off “Not MBA Material” & Finding My Story

I loved working with Vijay and enjoyed the Career Protocol’s overall approach to MBA applications. The CP folks go by “MBA coaches” [not consultants] and Vijay embodied that in every sense, letting me drive the game play into directions I wanted to go in while guiding me throughout the way. A few things that stood out: a) They backed me before the score did. CP onboarded me without waiting for my GRE score and after having received it, helped me apply to schools I wanted to go to, not ones they believed were a match. This is rare in MBA consulting. Most coaches I contacted in India said, “Let’s talk after you get your score.” and when I asked them what schools I should apply to, never have I been asked the question: “Where do you want to go?”. Vijay was the first. b) The process of discovering my stories was impeccable. We began with a 40-page write-up of all the turning points in my life, personal and professional, which gave me all the fodder I needed for essays and interviews. In a two-hour long conversation, Vijay reflected back some of the moments that stood out to him, helping me commit to the themes I really wanted to explore. I tend to write whimsically and was nervous that coaching might flatten that voice—but Vijay encouraged me to keep it. And I’m so glad I did. I never felt like my work was rewritten into something generic; it always felt like mine. c) He helped me shoot my shot and get in. Vijay went above and beyond, supporting me through two additional schools when I was struggling, even though it was technically “out of scope.” I was insecure about having worked at only one company for five years—even though the progression had been strong—and from our very first call, Vijay helped quiet the noise around what I had assumed was or wasn’t “MBA material.” We did more versions of my resume than any essay, teasing out the nuance in the different roles I’d held and helping me capture the full scope of my contributions. I also walked away with heuristics I’ll use for every resume update to come. Most importantly, I now feel more confident in my story and my ability to hold my own at a place like Stanford. d) The Career Protocol community was a real value-add. Office hours exposed me to multiple coaching perspectives, and I appreciated that my essays got input from more than one coach. The collaboration across the team showed through in the final product. I’m so grateful for all the support I received over the past year, from the coaching to the community to the sheer belief in my potential. With Vijay’s help, I not only got into both Stanford GSB and London Business School, but I also feel more grounded in my story and more confident about what I bring to the table.

The highlighted sentences are the ones quoted above.

Your go-to person to create value well beyond a successful application

When I was first looking for an MBA consultant all I was asking myself was “Who will get me into a top 10 MBA program?” Having gone through the process successfully, I now know that this wasn’t the right question to ask. Writing successful MBA applications is about understanding who you truly are and connecting the dots in your life meaningfully to tell your story in a compelling and authentic way. The key to unlock the full potential of this insight, to me, was Angela.

I initially connected with Angela because her post-MBA career path was similar to what I was looking to pursue so I thought we would be a good match. Within a few minutes of our first conversation I knew she was the right consultant for me – blunt, honest, fair, fun and easy to talk to; the kind of person who keeps you positive and relaxed as you explore the tough and fundamental questions in your life that are crucial to answer to build a strong MBA application.

After the initial assessment we decided it would be best to defer my application by a year and give me time to grow professionally. To maximize my additional time, I started to work with Angela as my career coach. What started off as a laundry list of things I enjoy, tasks I hate, successes, failures, attributes and values, turned into a deep insight into my purpose and motivations in life. Angela helped me to seek and create opportunities at work that I would thrive in, which in turn made me feel more confident, raised my profile with senior managers and eventually landed me a promotion.

As we transitioned into essay writing for my applications, we were in a good shape: We knew where I was in life, why I was there, where I wanted to be and how the MBA fit into this equation. What fascinated me about Angela at this stage was her ability to take random anecdotes from my life and draw very meaningful and accurate insights of my character. Because Angela had done such an incredible job to help me find and use my inner voice and realize what I really wanted in a career and why, most essay and interview questions became very easy to answer. Even then, her care for getting the best out of me constantly pushed me to do an even better job.

I interviewed with LBS, IESE, Booth and Kellogg, got admitted to all four schools and held a scholarship from two. Ironically, Angela was the one to suggest applying to these four schools. It was on her insistence that particularly one of them would be truly right for me that I explored these options, and I could not be any happier or more grateful for the outcome. In hindsight, I can see why Angela was pushing for these schools over my initial choices.

I am walking away from my experience with Angela with not only a spot at an elite MBA program that is right for me, but also more confidence in my abilities and a deeper level of self-awareness that will be invaluable going into the MBA and beyond. I was looking for an MBA consultant to get me into a top program – little did I know that with Angela I was going to find a mentor, an inspirer, a cheerleader, and most importantly, a friend who I truly enjoyed sharing this very unique journey with. For that and more I will forever be indebted.

The highlighted sentences are the ones quoted above.

Lucky to work with Angela Guido

I am very lucky to have Angela Guido as my LBS application consultant. I applied LBS in round 3 with a very tight timetable, but got admitted with a scholarship fully covering first year tuition. Without Angela's strong help, sincere encouragement and infectious enthusiasm, I could never achieve that.

Angela was very engaged in my whole application process. She is more like a friend and mentor, who genuinely wanted me to have the best and spared no efforts to help me to attain that.

Angela is very very nice yet never hesitated to give me candid and honest feedback. I applied for two other schools in round 2 before working with Angela and got no interview invitations then. I wanted MBA this year very much and began to be a bit panic but didn't know what was going wrong in those applications until my thirty minutes free consultation with Angela. She listened to my previous application strategy carefully and pointed out that my weakness in career planning (Angela is also career consultant and gave me constructive feedback and advices on how to leverage my past experience to break into a new industry and then finally achieve my LT goals. She did that with solid placement statistics, broad knowledge in various industry and quick but sound analysis of my specific case).

Among other things, I especially appreciate Angela in below areas:

1. Her insights. I didn't find my edge during my previous applications, and thus while my applications had a complete and cohesive story, I cannot be remembered by adcom with a simple statement. But Angela helped me find my competitive advantage (balanced creative and logic capabilities) in our brainstorm stage after I complete a long list of questions. I really appreciate that because to me, MBA is not just about school application, but also self-reflection and self-exploration. Angela is so smart and experienced that she easily identified my strongest areas and I feel like she knows me for a long time and knows me better than myself.

2. Her encouragement. Essay writing and editing is a long and exhausting process. Sometimes I struggled to find the right angle to tell the story, while other times, I was not satisfied with what I wrote or had no idea about how to further improve it. Angela gave very specific comments about how to improve and she can always find my shining point or good paragraphs to cheer me up. It is extremely important when I was frustrated because of the time constrain. Angela believed in me which gave me a lot of confidence and inspired me to find something important of my experience I neglected previously.

3. Her knowledge. Angela really knows what makes a great essay and how to have your essay be remembered by adcom. After selecting the most impactful stories to tell, as an experience screenwriter, Angela taught me a lot on how to develop a story, how to make it more personal and how to convey the passion between lines. It is super helpful not only in terms of mba application, but also writing and presentation in general and to master the technique of storytelling really has a lifelong benefit. Besides, her golden advice of interview really helped me excel in two interviews.

4. Her dedication. Angela worked very hard to help me on my essays, letter of recommendations, short questions, resumes and scholarship essays. Personally, I am not very disciplined. However, I faced a very tight timeline. Angela helped me come out a feasible timetable and structured the whole application process which forced me to work in a very efficient manner. Angela was there for me during the entire process which really beyond her job descriptions - I greatly appreciate her advice on scholarship bargaining, school decision, career development and arts (my interest) around school.

Together with Angela, I achieved something marvellous that I could not achieve otherwise. I am beyond thankful!

The highlighted sentences are the ones quoted above.

Brian The Magician

I still can’t believe how meaningful and game-changer Brian’s counseling was for my MBA admission process. The bottom line: I got a scholarship of $70k at Haas and admission to my dream program at London Business School.

My MBA admission process started with another consultant who was very discouraging because of my low GRE scores. He told me not to even waste my time with LBS and suggested Florida instead…

But then I met Angela and Career Protocol. She matched me with Brian and my journey started. Working with Career Protocol and Brian was a transformative experience for me – they coached me to know myself better and my self-esteem grew a lot through the process. I started unsure of what value I would add to the class and I finished with a clear understanding of what matters to me and the value that my experiences have to offer to my classmates.

The Awesome Sauce call (or kick-off call), where Brian presented my life story back to me, was particularly meaningful. It helped me realize how much people mean to me, how passionate and also empathetic I am, and how one of my biggest strengths is in connecting with people.

Brian also gave me the best advice for handling the GRE and helped me stop going crazy with it. During the whole process, he was optimistic and realistic. Not discouraging and not just a cheerleader for taking the biggest risks with the schools I applied to. Brian pushed me to chase my dreams and also to hedge with some other schools (though not Florida).

One thing I’d say to people getting started with applications is to change their mindset from “how can I make these adcoms like me” to “how can I be most myself”, and that was one of the most important mindset changes that I developed thanks to Career Protocol.

I will forever be grateful to Brian and Angela.

Thanks CP!

The highlighted sentences are the ones quoted above.

A consultant, a friend, a mentor, a great sounding board- your biggest champion and the best consultant to work with

My coach really sees you for who you are! Working with her has been the best decision I ever made. Right from the onset, she was super invested in me and my story, she was determined to see me getting accepted at all the schools I had applied to and pushed and motivated me to have it no other way. Every interview was preceded by a heartfelt message instilling a whole lot of confidence in me. There were times when I had lost hope and doubted myself, in these desperate times she helped me regain the confidence and reminded me of the accomplishments I belittled.

As someone who came from a non-feeder school, competitive pool (Indian, female), WE: top 5 consulting firms with a pivot to social enterprise it was important to make every move, decision and experience personalized and explain the WHY? My coach spent multiple sessions just probing and asking me questions to dig deeper and reflect on my experiences. I was able to uncover so many hidden parts of my story that put things into a new light for me. All the sessions helped me craft my story amazingly well and bring them to the interview as well.

She goes beyond the applications and interviews and invests in you SO personally. She constantly reminded me ‘You are a BADASS’. This single line has been the biggest source of inspiration for me and reflected in my interviews. Once accepted she helped me research schools and make decisions, she helped me plan for the MBA life and most importantly reminded me of the great things I will accomplish at school.

Your consultant is your biggest champion in the MBA journey and as someone who had constant self-doubt about my average journey, I would say this to everyone ‘You need to believe in yourself and your story’. It is often difficult to underappreciate and my coach has experience of personalizing stories and uncover things even from the most ordinary experiences. It is all about having this strong support who pushes you reflect until you believe in yourself and appreciate your journey. My coach did just that for me (in addition to the other amazing insights, techniques and processes that made my applications a success). I would absolutely and wholeheartedly recommend everyone to work with her 🙂

Where am I headed: well thanks to my coach I have acceptances from London Business School, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and waitlisted at Kellogg (Her amazing mojo might turn this into acceptance :))

The highlighted sentences are the ones quoted above.

Incredible experience - Caring, knowledgable, honest and devoted coach!

Working with my coach was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had and I would strongly recommend her as your consultant! I had previously applied to B-Schools two years ago (I was not even remotely successful), without a consultant and with little guidance. I attended a lesser known state college for my undergrad and spent my career working for the federal government. With a goal of transitioning out of the public sector and into investment banking, I knew that I needed to find someone to help craft my story. As a first generation college student at a company with few MBAs, I didn’t know anyone personally that could assist. From the first consultation, I knew that she genuinely cared about my story and wasn’t going to cut any corners during the process. She has an innate ability to understand people and was exceptional at helping me explore my experiences, passions, motivations, and life goals. During our conversations, she helped me uncover strengths of mine that I wasn’t even aware of and highlight them in the essays.

My coach went above and beyond during our time together. When providing feedback on one of my essays, she was completely honest and told me it just wasn’t working. Knowing that the deadline was around the corner, she made herself available and we spent multiple hours (at 10pm nonetheless) brainstorming content and coaching me on ways to fix the structure. Her dedication persisted from the day one consult to the interview prep, and even continues today as she’s helping me negotiate scholarships. Our work together resulted in admittance into LBS and into an Ivy League program (with a partial scholarship), while also getting waitlisted at a third school. I know I couldn’t have done this without her dedication, care, and support!

The highlighted sentences are the ones quoted above.

If You're Going All In, Go With Angela

To be honest, I wasn’t even sure I needed an admissions consultant at the beginning of this process. I knew that I could do an application that reaches 80-90% of its potential, but I also knew that MBA applications are ridiculously competitive and that the margins of success are small enough that the last 10% could make a big difference, so I decided to go all-in and work with Angela. There’s no way I would’ve gotten into Wharton and LBS without her, given that I went to a no-name school and worked for no-name companies.

My favorite parts about working with Angela and CP were (1) the introspective deep dive, (2) the additional resources available, and (3) the human approach.

(1) The introspection that CP “forces” you through goes very deep, and is a key part of the process to help identify what you bring to a class. Especially for me, having a resume without any brand names, I knew this would make or break my application.

(2) There are A LOT of complementary resources available in the app they built – everything you possibly need to know about applications, resumes, interviews, scholarship negotiation, but also other lots of stuff post-acceptance, to make the most of the MBA itself. I didn’t really appreciate how much time all these resources and having Angela at the other end of an email would save me in the application process to be honest – especially when things got very busy.

(3) When you look at the Career Protocol (CP) website, you’ll realize that they’re a bit different from other admission consulting firms out there haha – a lot wackier, more human, and definitely more fun. That was a big part of why I chose to go with Angela in the end, and given that I’ll be attending Wharton, I’m really damn glad I did.

The highlighted sentences are the ones quoted above.