Impressive in Real Life, Generic on Paper–Initially.
SummaryKnowing what the plan had been on Day 1, there is a decent chance this candidate would have been 0 for 3 without our guidance at the schools she was targeting. This isn’t because she was a weak candidate, quite the opposite in fact. It was because she didn’t realize just how strong she was until we helped her realize and showcase it.
The Situation
While she had strong grades and test scores, and solid experience at a mid-tier consulting firm (think PWC), she didn’t know how to capture her experiences in a way that would impress an admissions committee and set her apart from her competition.
We see this a lot, but it was especially true in her case, not standing out from the crowd of consulting candidates. We needed to extract and highlight her personal contributions to her projects, one by one, examine the depth of her experiences critically, detect patterns, and then formulate those insights into a crystal clear value proposition. Initially (on her own) she didn’t do a thorough enough job describing her short and long term goals and why the schools she was looking at were good fits for her.
Our Solution.
We focused on her key strengths (leadership, teamwork, all the 6 Pillars). We clarified her short and long term goals and strengthened her business case for her goals. She demonstrated that she had researched her schools and understood what their cultures were like and how she could contribute there. Applying our methodology to attack this common problem from the ground up, we worked our way through this patiently and deliberately. The result was not only more coherency around her short term goal that led seamlessly into a compelling longer-term vision, the clarity of the final narrative better captured the passion and dedication that was evident in our interactions with her, but that were lacking in her original drafts. She had already unsuccessfully applied to schools in R1, getting rejected everywhere, when she started working with me. For the three schools we worked on together, she not only received acceptance letters but also received generous scholarship offers. She ended up going to her dream school with a scholarship of $60K.
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