Five Key Tips to get into Harvard Business School from a Harvard-educated MBA admissions consultant

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Grace Education
To Future MBA Applicants
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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_at_graceducation.com for a free
consultation.

• Introduce yourself to your dream business school
  well before you send off your application.
• Know the reasons why you really want to go to
  business school.
• Dont be shy. Get ready to show and tell. It is
  time to shine.
• Practice makes perfect. Practice sample
  interview questions well in advance of your
  admissions interviews.
• You are nothing if you are not the truth. See
  the big picture. Define and be your unique truth!

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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.

• 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 s ee 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 admissions 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.
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Dont 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 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.

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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 candidates 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.

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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.

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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

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• Motivations for MBA Growing up in a rural
  Chinese village, Sophias 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 masters
  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 environments
  conservation/protection, her passion for
  innovative anti-pollution technologies, and her
  strong private-sector finance/project management
  experience.

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• 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. 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 publics health by reducing the
  countrys 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. Sophias 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.

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• 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
  antipollution 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 Educations successive draft editing
  process is a rigorous sentence-by-sentence,
  paragraph-by-paragraph interrogation with one
  objective the clear and concise expression of a
  candidates strong leadership/management skills
  and its direct impact on his/her companys
  profitability, productivity, shareholder value,
  brand equity value, and/or operating cost
  reduction etc.

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• While working on her essays, Sophia also
  benefited from Grace Educations 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.

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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 worlds 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.

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