Harvard, Stanford & Wharton MBAs On How Admission Consultants Helped Them Get In

When a mob of Trump supporters attacked the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, Matthew Bernard was in the building on a Congressional fellowship.

Three years later, when applying to Harvard Business School’s highly selective MBA program, he decided to write about that traumatic experience.

A third-generation naval aviator, Bernard had spent more than ten years in the U.S. Navy, including a stint as an assistant strike operations officer. He had plenty of material for a compelling essay. But he felt that most other military candidates would inevitably reflect on their deployments, so it would make sense to instead write about his presence in the U.S. Capitol on a historic day. That essay would take him out of the pile of military applicants.

‘SHE PUSHED ME TO DIG DEEPER’

In a first draft, however, he took a more matter-of-fact approach. It took the urging of Heidi Hillis, an MBA admissions coach with Fortuna Admissions, to convince him to convey his experience with more expressive language and storytelling, a point of view that would have a more lasting impact on a reader. After all, it was only his third day on the job in Congress, and he found himself barricaded behind locked doors to keep himself safe.

“I thought I had a pretty good narrative going in,” says Bernard. “But Heidi really pushed me to dig deeper. I wrote it from a more clinical perspective. It was distant. Heidi said there is something more that you don’t want to put out there. I needed someone who wasn’t going to accept my first drafts at face value. She asked me to write more emotionally. She was looking for how I felt emotionally and its impact on me as a driving force for pursuing this change in my life.”

Like many candidates to highly selective MBA programs, Bernard believed he needed the extra edge a consultant could provide. In hiring an admissions coach, he got expert advice from someone who has been helping applicants for the past ten years. A Stanford MBA with extensive international business experience, Hillis, recognized by Poets&Quants as one of the top MBA admission counselors in the world, has worked with hundreds of candidates.

A COACH, FRIEND, MENTOR & CONFIDANT

To assess what an MBA admissions coach provides a candidate, Poets&Quants asked Fortuna Admissions to select three recent clients open to interviews about the process they underwent to get into their programs. The trio of former candidates aimed for the very top of the elite MBA hierarchy: Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton.

Bernard was accepted to Harvard Business School and will graduate with his MBA next year. Rochelle Dubrovsky, who racked up six years at J.P. Morgan Chase in wealth management, will be awarded her MBA from the Wharton School on May 18. Abhinav Kejriwal, formerly chief of staff in the vice chairman’s office at the Times of India, will graduate from Stanford Graduate School of Business next year.

Not surprisingly, given their excellent outcomes, the students were highly positive about their experiences. In hiring a consultant, they got more than an expert admissions advisor. They gained a friend, a mentor, and a confidant for an important leg of their career journeys.

‘IT CAME DOWN TO THE MAGNITUDE OF THE DECISION, APPLYING TO SCHOOLS THAT WERE A REACH’

For Bernard, it was something of a no-brainer decision, despite the cost. “I consider myself a pretty good writer and a decent test taker,” he explains. “For me, I wanted someone who didn’t know the military, someone who would read it as an admissions official. If I used an acronym or turn of phrase that was well known in the military, I wanted someone who had distance from it.  It also came down to the magnitude of the decision. I was applying to schools that were a reach.”

One immediate concern was a quant score on the standardized test that was below the class average. A husband and father, Bernard was working at the Pentagon for a two-star admiral when he applied. He hit the submit button on his application and did his admissions interview with HBS from an aircraft carrier.

“I live a pretty busy life, and I needed someone who would keep me accountable,” explains Bernard. “I needed someone who was going to push me a little bit and to slow me down when I was going too fast. It’s hard to put an exact value on people who have experience in admissions and know how the process works. But I still think I got the better end of that. I could not recommend her enough. Some of the things that I loved about working for Heidi was that she lives in Australia. Given my hectic schedule, the only time I could work on this was in the evening. It was a match made in heaven. It was an amazing experience. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to her.”