Alex K.
Current Stanford MBA | Harvard+Oxford grad | Candidate success at HBS+GSB
Studied at Stanford Graduate School of Business
Not currently taking new clients
Alex’s MBA Qualifications
Open to working with clients outside the U.S.
So far, all three clients I've worked with have gotten into at least one of Stanford GSB, HBS, and MIT Sloan. I can help with all aspects of the application process, from essays to GMAT prep to strategies around references to interviews. My strengths as a coach are: --Knowing the audience: an admissions committee is a different audience than a boss or a professor, and I'll help you tailor your application in a way that most impresses them, not anyone else. --Thinking holistically: I'll make sure your entire application goes together in such a way that it tells a coherent story about you. --No BS: "Let your true self shine through your essays" is a nice thing to say, but isn't really helpful. I'll focus on the practical things that can actually improve your chances of getting into your dream school.
Alex can help with:
Editing
Recommendations
Interviews
School Selection
Secondary Review
Application Strategy
Essays
Resume
About Alex
I'm a current Stanford MBA student who's helped several peers earn spots at HBS, MIT, and Stanford. I'm a Harvard and Oxford graduate. I've worked in finance for my entire career and am now a vice president at The Growth Stage, an investment bank that specializes in working with startups. Outside of work, I like to fish, play tennis, and root (unsuccessfully) for the Jets. As a coach, my superpower is balancing the creative with the pragmatic — expressing what makes you special and unique, but also helping you communicate your story in a way that's exciting to the admissions committee. I love helping with all aspects of the essay writing process (even the less fun parts like finding typos), test prep (I got a 790 on the GMAT and 170/170/5 on the GRE) and resume review (I wrote my undergraduate thesis on finding the best strategy for writing resumes). I also enjoy helping with application strategy and interview prep. That’s me—I’d be excited to help you get into your dream school!
Why do I coach?
Ever since I can remember, I have seen the world through a lens of numbers. By the time I was three years old, I had memorized the height in feet of most of New York City’s major skyscrapers; at five, I took pleasure in calculating the ages of my friends and family not in years, but in days, and sometimes in hours. Despite being decidedly average in many of my other subjects in high school, I had a passion for math, coming up with original proofs and winning competitions. That’s why I was shocked when my college admissions counselor told me I should present myself as a Latin scholar if I wanted to get into my dream school, Harvard. I didn’t have much interest in Latin and wasn’t very good at it, but apparently Harvard had a lot of applicants who liked math and not as many Latin experts, so I would have a better chance of getting in if I got my references from Latin teachers and emphasized my interest in Latin in my essays. There’s probably some Latin expression that described how confused I was then, but not being much of a Latin guy, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. When I described my new application strategy to my grandmother, a former teacher who knows me better than anyone else, she told me to reconsider. I had always been a math person, she told me, and when in doubt, she said that I should always be true to myself. I decided to take her advice: I was going to put my best foot forward, even if it wasn’t the foot I thought Harvard was looking for. I was fortunate to get in, and since then, I’ve found more evidence that the most pragmatic strategy for applications can be the one that’s most authentic to who you are. When I applied to business school, again I didn’t think my story was all that compelling, and so in rough drafts of my essays, I highlighted the things that I thought made me generically attractive to business schools—going to a good college, decent analytical skills, and work experience at a few name-brand companies. My admissions coach gave me the same advice my grandmother had: find a way to highlight the things that were actually unique about me. I took her advice, again wrote my essays about my love of math, and got into Stanford GSB. I think it’s often a lot easier to see what is exceptional about someone else’s story than your own. When helping a friend with his own business school essay, I immediately noticed that while it detailed his professional accomplishments quite well, it said nothing about the thing that I admired most about him: his resilience. He had been through things that I could not even begin to imagine and had come out stronger, but there was no mention of them in his essays. Fortunately, I was able to convince him to highlight this quality—and he ended up getting into both Harvard Business School and Stanford GSB. This is why I coach: because sometimes the best story is the one you actually want to tell, sometimes the answer people want to hear is actually the one that is the truth, and sometimes the correct solution is actually the simplest one. Sometimes you just need someone to remind you of that.
Education
Stanford Graduate School of Business
MBA Student
University of Oxford
MPhil, Economics
2016 - 2018
Harvard University
BA, Applied Math
2012 - 2016