Grace Education's 5 Tips to Get Into HBS

1. To future MBA applicants, Five Key Tips to get into Harvard Business School from a Harvard-educated MBA admissions consultant For more invaluable advice and tips, visit Grace Education at www.graceducation.com and send an email to contact@graceducation.com for a free consultation. 1. Introduce yourself to your dream business school well before you send off your application. Reach out and connect with alumni, current students, and professors from your dream business school. When necessary, make appropriate mention of these contacts in your application and interview. These connections and relationships demonstrate to admission committees that you are really interested in their school and becoming a member of its community. Believe me, given the choice between two candidates with equal credentials, admission committees will be more inclined to choose a candidate who already has begun to build solid connections with the school. 2. Know the reasons why you really want to go to business school. It sounds crazy, but many applicants have really not thought about why they are pursuing an MBA at the time they decide to apply. Are you seeking to transition into a new profession? Finance to Consulting, etc. Will an MBA offer significant career advancement in your current field? Where do you see yourself two years after earning your MBA? Five years? Knowing this is critical to shaping your written application essays and interview responses for the famous questions regarding short and long-term career goals. It can be hard to project oneself this far in the future and admission’s committees know this. They simply want to see that you have you have thought about why you are about to quit your job and invest over a hundred thousand dollars in your education. More importantly, like you, they want to ensure that their program will best help you achieve your career objectives. 3. Don’t’ be shy. Get ready to show and tell. It is time to shine. For your written application essays and questions, every time you cite a professional achievement, make sure you show and demonstrate how your strong leadership/management skills had a concrete and direct impact on company profitability, productivity, shareholder value, brand equity value, and/or operating cost reduction etc. Your CV. should be a narrative about you and not simply a 6, rue Polonceau 75 018 Paris - tél : +33 (0)1 44 27 08 69 - contact@graceducation.com - www.graceducation.com SIRET 531 119 519 00027

2. laundry list of bullet-point tasks. It should show your skill progression and increased responsibilities over time. Remember to highlight specific achievements using strong action verbs and limited technical jargon to illustrate how your strong leadership/management skills had real and tangible effects on company profitability, productivity, shareholder value, brand equity value, and/or operating cost reduction etc. During interviews, be able to defend why you took each professional position and how it has or will help you to reach your short and long-term career objectives. 4. Practice makes perfect. Practice sample interview questions well in advance of your admissions interviews. Business school coursework is largely based on individual and group oral presentations. For admission committees to gain a deeper understanding of a candidate’s interpersonal sills and communication style, nothing seems to beat the interview. Additionally, more and more business schools are offering applicant-initiated interviews as part of the application. These interviews, conducted on Skype or video-cams, usually allow a candidate forty-five seconds to reflect after the question has been posed and ninety seconds to articulate a response. This does not leave much time for you to improvise an impressive answer. To avoid memory blanks and lapses, research sample interview questions from online student forums, student alumni, etc. and practice many times before admission interviews. During the actual interview, you may not have the same questions that you had previously rehearsed. However, chances are likely that you will have similar questions. You can then adapt your answers and succeed your interviews with flying colors. 5. You are nothing if you are not the truth. See the big picture. Define and be your unique truth! Admission committees want to admit candidates with strong revolutionary visions such as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but they are one in a million. While admission committees look for candidates who will be future business leaders, they are essentially looking for candidates with human character, those who care about others, have ideals, and will leave a legacy behind in the world. Maya Angelou, the late critically acclaimed American poet and Pulitzer prize nominee, defined “legacy” as not the financial wealth and material possessions you will bequeath your children and loved ones after your passing. It refers to how your life, your choices, personal and professional, as well as the sum total of your accomplishments will have touched and improved the lives of others. When you reflect on your applications, in particular, you career objectives, remember to ask yourself what your legacy will be and be sure to explain this in your essays and interviews. 6, rue Polonceau 75 018 Paris - tél : +33 (0)1 44 27 08 69 - contact@graceducation.com - www.graceducation.com SIRET 531 119 519 00027

3. Grace Education Client Success Story: Profile of a Georgetown, McDonough MBA graduate Name: Sophia Nationality: Chinese Age: 34 Educational Background: Undergraduate and Masters degrees in Chemistry Profession: General Manager, Advanced water purification treatment technology investment/water plant construction department for Chinese private investor in environment projects GMAT: 690 TOEFL: 99 Undergraduate GPA: 3.79/5.0 Personal Interests: Cooking, yoga, Chinese Opera, skiing, traveling, and running marathons Motivations for MBA: Growing up in a rural Chinese village, Sophia’s calling to improve the environment came to her at a young age when she witnessed children in neighboring villages with hereditary physical deformities caused by environmental pollution, a direct consequence of massive industrialization. A chemistry master’s graduate, she began her career working as an investment consultant for water purification technology financing. After several years, she was rewarded for her excellent work with successive promotions to become general manager of the water treatment and plant construction investment division. Recommended by a former Grace Education client and now successful Yale MBA graduate, Sophie solicited our admissions consulting services to help her with her MBA applications. She hoped to use her MBA to facilitate her transition into entrepreneurship. This new business venture would leverage her dedication and commitment to the environment’s conservation/protection, her passion for innovative anti-pollution technologies, and her strong private-sector finance/project management experience. Grace Education Offers A Helping Hand: After a free consultation session via Skype, Sophia was assigned to Kevin, a Grace Education MBA consultant who attended Wharton. Developing the foundation of what would become a lasting professional collaboration and personal friendship, the initial conversations between Sophia and her consultant consisted of brainstorming sessions to craft and create her unique story setting her application apart from thousands of MBA candidates. 6, rue Polonceau 75 018 Paris - tél : +33 (0)1 44 27 08 69 - contact@graceducation.com - www.graceducation.com SIRET 531 119 519 00027

4. That story, resumed in one sentence, was the following: Chinese female visionary with strong science and investment skills creates Chinese-based company to improve the public’s health by reducing the country’s dangerously high air, land, and water environmental pollution levels. Grace Education then helped Sophia to reflect on what form the company would take and what its eventual function would be. The answer to this question came about during a Skype conversation between Sophia and Kevin when she mentioned the increasing role of the Chinese government in financing and implementing measures to combat pollution. Sophia’s consultant helped her to see the big picture and to come up with the idea of creating a public-private-funded investment consultancy. This entity would invest in and integrate environment anti-pollution treatments for water, soil, and solid wastes into urban building programs via partnerships with construction companies, government, and private sector investors. Sophia and her consultant decided that in the short term, she would need an MBA to enhance her corporate finance, entrepreneurship, and public policy management skills. Before opening her company, Sophia decided her short-term career objective post-MBA would be to work for a Chinese publicly-funded institution involved not only in the financing of anti–pollution technology initiatives, but also the policy implementation of these measures through government legislation at local and national levels. This invaluable experience would give Sophia the public policy skills and government contacts needed to start her future business venture. We then researched with Sophia business schools with strong entrepreneurship research centers as well as significant public policy management course offerings. After establishing her list, Sophia began to introduce herself and, more importantly, her short and long-term professional objectives to the schools via interactions with alumni, professors, and current students from each school on her list. These schools included Yale School of Management, Stanford, Georgetown, NYU, and the W.P. Carey School of Business. Next began the laborious task of the application essay redaction. Sophia emailed her drafts to Kevin who then sent her edits within 72 hours. Grace Education’s successive draft editing process is a rigorous sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by- paragraph interrogation with one objective: the clear and concise expression of a candidate’s strong leadership/management skills and its direct impact on his/her company’s profitability, productivity, shareholder value, brand equity value, and/or operating cost reduction etc. 6, rue Polonceau 75 018 Paris - tél : +33 (0)1 44 27 08 69 - contact@graceducation.com - www.graceducation.com SIRET 531 119 519 00027

5. While working on her essays, Sophia also benefited from Grace Education’s obligatory Enhanced Interview Coaching Module for English as Second Language (ESL) clients who do not have minimum TOEFL scores (100 for internet-based test (IBT); 600 for paper-based test (PBT); IELTS 7.0 overall band score, or PTE (Academic) 68 overall score). This module is run by TEFL/TESOL/ Cambridge English certified teachers who work with our MBA applicants on oral presentation skills and syntax to ensure they are able to express their ideas clearly and coherently in English and in their own words during MBA interviews. After Sophia completed her applications and interviews, she was accepted at Georgetown, WP Carey School of Business, NYU, and Yale. She decided to attend Georgetown because its financial aid and scholarship package was the most interesting. To date, Sophia remains in contact with Kevin, her former MBA consultant, who continued to help her after the application process ended. More precisely, he helped her in finding summer internships during business school. 6, rue Polonceau 75 018 Paris - tél : +33 (0)1 44 27 08 69 - contact@graceducation.com - www.graceducation.com SIRET 531 119 519 00027

6. Biography for Samuel, founder of Grace Education, Leading Admissions Consulting Training Center Harvard and London School of Economics graduate, Samuel worked as an investment banker in New York and London before moving to Paris to begin a new life in film and television production. Published in the New York Times, an avid writer and storyteller, Samuel has always been committed to education. A volunteer professor/professional coach of underprivileged youths as well as former Harvard applicant admission interviewer, Samuel decided several years ago to leverage his love and passion for education, professional coaching, writing, and business expertise by joining Admissionado, one of the world’s top MBA admissions’ consulting firms. Helping hundreds of successful MBA applicants, predominantly Asian and South East Asian natives, to gain admission via his one-on-one, highly personalized application review/editing and interview coaching, Samuel honed the craft that would later inspire him to found Grace Education in 2013. This college and MBA admission consulting training center is composed of consultants who themselves are successful graduates of Harvard and other top schools. Grace Education is proud of its 95% applicant acceptance rate as well as its highly efficient applicant management practices allowing it to offer client prices 50-60% less than that of leading MBA admission consultancies. 6, rue Polonceau 75 018 Paris - tél : +33 (0)1 44 27 08 69 - contact@graceducation.com - www.graceducation.com SIRET 531 119 519 00027