Julie Strong

Working with Julie was a journey inside-out, emotional, intense, and hard-working. Julie guided me to achieve my major goal, the acceptance to the MIT Sloan Fellow MBA.

She asked me the most challenging questions to bring out the best in me. Being guided by her incredible energy throughout this overwhelming process was the turning point to keep me going and believing that I could do it.

Julie is a strong and admirable woman I will always be grateful for, and one I can call my dear friend.

I strongly recommend Julie to anyone who wants to succeed in their MBA application process.

Julie helped me secure admission to Sloan’s Class of 2024, and her expertise and insight into Sloan’s application process were no doubt critical to my success. She was very attentive, patient, and helpful throughout the entire process and with her personal approach, helped me with identifying and highlighting my strengths, in particular with regard to my resume and essays. She also helped with a very comprehensive mock interview, giving me a great feel of how the real thing would go.

Julie was fantastic in helping me out with five applications. As a former admissions director, she has great insight into the entire process. Julie spent time learning about my background and personality so that she could provide me with unique insights into how to craft my story in an authentic way to capture the attention of admission committees at my target schools.

Julie was probably most helpful in telling me when and why my essays were not meaningful enough. She helped me understand why I needed to go deeper and ensured that my edited versions were perfectly crafted. I couldn’t recommend her highly enough!

Julie helped me with applications to my top 5 schools. She encouraged me to introspect and uncover my true purpose for pursuing an MBA. She was instrumental in keeping me focused on my long-term goal and how I would add value to the programs that I am interested in. Her patience and thorough work allowed me to secure an admit at Kellogg!

Though this was a very competitive admission cycle, she also helped me secure a waitlist at MIT Sloan and Berkeley Haas. Her past experience with MIT Sloan was very helpful for that application in particular.

Julie assisted me with my applications to Yale SOM, MIT Sloan, and Harvard Business School. I was accepted to Yale SOM and HBS, my two top choices. Julie was great at giving me candid, informative advice throughout the process and providing direct, actionable feedback on my application, essays, and interview prep.

Julie’s long history with MIT Sloan makes her the ideal counselor for someone seeking interview advice for that school (and the advice she gave me was perfectly applicable to other school interviews as well). In our session, Julie’s attentive notetaking stood out as particularly useful in evaluating my mock performance. She was well up to speed on my application prior to our meeting, which allowed us to workshop stories that best represented me in the context of b-schools. She is warm, thoughtful and full of strategy advice tailored to the school of interest. After my acceptance, she talked to me (joyous herself!) about scholarship opportunities and other questions I had for almost an hour off the clock. A great human and coach, would use her services again if I had to do it over 🙂

(NOTE: I used Julie for interview consultation only)

Julie is so patient, intelligent, and honest. She had me dig really deep into my professional and personal experiences to bring out my best “story” for my MBA applications. She has incredible expertise on all of the top schools (especially MIT, as she worked there for a number of years). I worked on my top choice school with her, and I got in! Thank you, Julie! I can truly recommend her to anyone.

Julie was such a pleasure to work with and I was admitted to MIT Sloan EMBA thanks to her help and guidance! She was able to assess my strengths and weaknesses from the start and give constructive feedback on how to improve/present to have the most compelling application possible. She did not hold back from providing honest and extremely effective feedback that got me through some of the initial hurdles. She was very attentive but was able to clearly spell out the higher level strategy that would make an applicant’s case a winning one!

Julie was so helpful in my interview preparation process — she took the time to evaluate my application as a whole and tell me which parts of my story should shine the most in my interviews. She was candid with her feedback and great at identifying my strengths and development opportunities. She had a great knowledge of the schools I was applying to and what they were looking for!

As a former Senior Director of MBA Admissions at the MIT Sloan School of Management for 12 years, Julie’s extensive knowledge was instrumental in my successful application to the Stanford MSx program. She kept me on course throughout the Gmat, resume building and essay writing processes. Julie motivated me by providing small deadlines along the way to make the entire process seem less daunting. She always answered my calls and emails promptly and thoroughly. She allowed me to create an application that was all my own and completely true to myself making it enjoyable and smoother along the way.

When it came time for my interview, Julie’s help and mock interviews were key to my confidence and success during my actual interview.

Julie was an absolute pleasure to work with. She is a very kind and caring person and I will miss working with her. I would recommend Julie Strong to any of my friends or family embarking on an MBA application process- her patience, encouragement and knowledge far exceeded my expectations!

It was a great experience working with Julie on my Tsinghua MBA interview preparation. There was only ten days left when I asked help from MBA Exchange program and got in touch with Julie. However, after reviewing all my application materials, she quickly offered me a very targeted set of mock interview questions. She also clarified my misunderstandings about interview questions preparation, guiding me to search from my background and give more daily and specific examples instead of very broad and ambiguous ones. Some of the mock interview questions did turn out to be asked during my actual interview. I made a success in the interview and got admitted by my dream university. I do recommend Julie and MBA Exchange program for anyone who is applying for an MBA program. It will hugely increase your chances.

Julie helped prepare me for my MBA interview at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. After conducting an in-depth review of all my application materials, Julie formulated a very targeted and insightful set of questions for our Mock Interview. Many of the elements of my candidacy that Julie focused on during our session together turned out to be large components of my actual MIT interview. The level of confidence, preparedness, and ultimate success that Julie helped me achieve speaks to her extensive experience as a former senior director of admissions. Overall, Julie was an absolute pleasure to work with and I strongly recommend her services to anyone preparing for their MBA interview process. Thanks to Julie and the MBA Exchange, I am now extremely excited to join the Sloan community next fall!

It was an excellent experience working with Julie on my MIT Sloan EMBA application. With her valuable direction and guidance, I successfully made it to the program. I sincerely believe I would not have gotten through without her help.
She had a very unique structured approach to translate my experiences and learnings to powerful stories which helped put my best foot forward. We worked hard on every aspect of my application and she challenged me throughout to go an extra step and do better. She helped me with the final interview process as well, which made a huge difference.
Julie was special in that she was not just helping for the sake of it but was genuinely interested in a successful outcome for me. There were never any limitations on her time and availability.
My best wishes for her to continue helping future aspirants achieve their goals!

I worked with Julie on my successful Round 1 application to the Michigan Ross Full-Time MBA program, even though I started my MBA application process very late (late August). Julie and I started off by having a two hour Skype conversation diving into my ambitions, my profile’s strengths and weaknesses, and my internal thought processes. She then leveraged her knowledge of the MBA landscape to recommended a few schools, all of which are excellent for my short-term post-MBA goal of transitioning into management consulting at an MBB firm. After selecting Ross, we structured all the data from our initial conversation and added plenty more via a methodical process that Julie stepped me through, which included identifying themes, connecting them to Ross’ offerings, and mitigating my below par academic history. After submitting my online application, Julie was so confident that we started preparing for my interview, and once the interview invite came through we did some more interview prep. On top of all this, there were various other insights that are too many to detail that Julie provided as and when necessary, which helped me get into Ross and be one step closer to making my ambitions a reality!