Vikram Shah Consulting

Services

Full Service
Packages

Tailored to different schools, covering the resume, story building, essays, advice on recommendations, interview training, and waitlist strategies.

Rejection
Analysis

A review and analysis of all application materials of a candidate who has been denied admission to a particular business school.

Single App
Review

A review of application materials for any one school that are nearly ready for submission.

Single Essay
Review

A review of and advice on strengthening any one particular essay.

Single Essay
Editing

For candidates struggling to trim an essay and bring it under the word limit.

Interview
Training

Comprehensive training for MBA interviews, customized to each school.

Our process

The process starts with getting to know you. You will document your life history covering your personal and professional life. The purpose of this exercise is to help you recall the various activities you have participated in since childhood, challenges that you may have overcome, learning experiences, catalysts that have influenced your development etc. The professional part of your life story will help us understand your responsibilities, achievements, skills, and impact on the organizations you have worked with. This also lays the foundation for constructing your resumé.

We will teach you how to construct a world-class resumé that stands out from the crowd, is well-worded, and is easy to read. Importantly, your resumé will highlight your skills and achievements. We will share sample templates, help you create content, and teach you how to write each bullet. Your resumé will go through a number of edits (on average 7) and the process usually takes 2 weeks to complete.

Based on what we know of you, we summarize your strengths, weaknesses, skills, attitudes, and values into a document. We also identify some of your experiences that differentiate you. We use this document to help keep track of the messages we tailor to different schools.

While you are working on your life history document, we discuss and identify schools you should consider applying to. We encourage you to reach out to current students and alumni of every school on our initial lists and learn more about these schools. While we freeze on at least two schools to apply to, the initial list of schools may change through the duration of our engagement for a number of reasons. As the firm gets to know you better, we will be in a better position to suggest schools will match your needs and expectations.

We begin work on an application by discussing all the essay topics, identifying 2-3 stories for each essay, and then selecting the best or the most relevant stories. When you begin drafting essays, our initial focus and effort is aimed at getting the content of your essay right. Once we have most of the content in place, we then begin the process of editing essays and bringing them down to the word limit. For your first application, essays may go through anywhere between 2 to 20 edits (the average is 7 edits). Your first application can take anywhere between 2-5 weeks to complete, depending upon the degree of difficulty of the essay topics, your availability, and your ability to respond to and incorporate feedback.

Letters of recommendation take long to complete and it is essential that you give your recommenders as much time as possible to draft them. We advise you on tactics to adopt to ensure you get quality letters of recommendation.

 

Once you have filled in the entire application form and uploaded all your documents, the team reviews it to ensure that all the information you have provided is clear, correct and consistent. If there are sections of the form that have a character/word limit, we create and edit content for these in the same manner that we do for your essays.

Some applications require you to submit a video essay along with your application, and some with spontaneous questions. We share with you questions that have been asked in the past and teach you both how to prepare for such essays and how to answer random questions spontaneously in a time-bound manner.

Once we give you the go-ahead, you may submit your application. For candidates using services for more than one school, we usually complete 2-3 applications before submitting your first application as the more practice you get in writing, the better your essays will be. Hence, if time permits, we revisit your first application just to check if there is any further scope for improvement.

Once you receive an invitation to interview, we start interview training. Ideally, we need 2 weeks to get you ready. We share common interview questions and teach you how to answer questions. We will help you construct answers, monitor and correct your body language and answer delivery. Most importantly, we teach you how to take control of the interview. We do not limit the number of mock interview sessions or hours of training. We spend as much time with you as required and train you till you are ready.

There are three possible outcomes:
Accepted
If you are accepted and you accept, we then help you with any Scholarship Essays if required, and the I20 documentation review.
Waitlist
Depending on the school, we may adopt different wait-list strategies to help you convert the decision to one of “admitted”.
Rejected
We may decide to apply to more schools or will continue to await for the results of applications to other schools.

Our clients have been accepted at schools including

View Our Reviews

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INSEAD

Vikram is honest about your chances and has a fee structure tied to your success, both of which are quite rare. He is truly invested in helping you succeed. I decided to apply to INSEAD a little late and first spoke with Vikram five weeks before the deadline for the round…

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Harvard

Having applied to business schools by myself, I realised that I throughout the entire process I went though a lot of uncertainty, not knowing if I was doing the right thing…

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Stanford

I was jumping with joy when I learnt about my daughter’s admission in the full time MBA program in Stanford GSB. Though she had an attractive profile, in spite of…

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Wharton

If it were not for Vikram’s help, I am sure I wouldn’t have been successful in submitting my applications with so much confidence and quality. He helped me in shortlisting schools based on my interests and here I am with a Wharton and Yale admit in hand…

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Chicago Booth

Vikram played a vital and key role in my bschool application process. He was there from the start (resume revision/drafting) to the finish (interview advice/practices). I was having trouble…

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Tuck

Vikram is more of a collaborator than a consultant. He will not just limit himself to give feedback on your essays. He worked with me right from scratch to make that final big decision…

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Our Differentiators

We’re a team of MBA graduates from leading Business Schools, each with years of experience in MBA Admissions Consulting in helping clients get into top business schools.

We’re marketing experts with significant experience in advertising, public relations, marketing and communications consulting. We’re story-tellers with an innate understanding of what makes people tick. We leverage our marketing expertise to help you weave mundane facts into engaging stories which appeal to your audience, differentiate you and, most importantly, sell you.

As trained interviewers, we help you construct answers that bring out your unique selling points, aid you with your body language, teach you how to take control of the interview so that you can showcase your strengths and get your key messages across.

We don’t have a set number of hours or a maximum number of edits per document for people. We can invest as many hours as it takes to bring out the best in you.

We adjust our timings to accommodate your work schedule, take calls early in the morning, late at night and on weekends.

Officially, we commit to responding with 48 hours. In truth, it’s under 24 hours, enabling our clients to expedite quicker.

We set very high standards and don’t accept mediocrity. We critique your essays, often brutally, and coach you on how to improve. We challenge your ideas, question your assumptions and push you to give your best.

Compared to many firms abroad and in India, we charge significantly less and invest far more time in our clients.

Many of our clients get admission to schools that were seemingly beyond their reach. Many get awarded scholarships.

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