ApplicantLab

What is this? How did it get started? Little did I know, when I first started giving admissions advice as a volunteer project, that Id later be on the front-lines of a revolution, launching an interactive service to replace expensive admissions consultants! It all started when I was a student at Harvard Business School; I volunteered for the admiss... ions office to help put on events for prospective applicants. At those events, people would invariably come up to me and say something along the lines of: Arrrgh! The next set of deadlines is only X months away, and I have no idea what Im gonna say! Heyif I send you my essay drafts, do you think you could take a look? Due to my life-long passion for story-telling (plus always happy to have an excuse to procrastinate from doing classwork!), I readily agreed. And I found that I loved it. Somehow, even after I graduated, people would still send me their co-workers, friends from college, even their younger siblings and cousins! When the first person said: You know Maria, I dont know WHAT you do for your real job, but whatever it is, you should quit that and do THIS for a living! I mean, have you SEEN the kind of money you could be making?!?I thanked them for the compliment, hung up the phone, and chuckled at that CRAZY suggestion. But then more and more people kept telling me the same thing, that I should launch my own boutique firm! Not an eponymous one, of course, since my last name of Wich-Vila doesnt lend itself to that at all, but some generic yet inspiring firm name. I too could be charging $9k+ for a 5-school package! Wow! Wouldnt that be nice? AndI thought about it. For about a month. As the daughter of two public school teachers, it didnt feel right to me to hoard this knowledge for myself and then charge you thousands and thousands of dollars for it. Besides, I certainly could not have afforded those sorts of fees when I was applying, so what kind of a hypocrite would that make me? You know the adage of: Give a man a fish, hell eat for a day; teach him to ...Read More