Catherine Rolfe

I love a good story—both telling and hearing one. When I was applying to business school, what I found most helpful was having someone I trusted to bounce ideas off as I tried to make sense of my disparate experiences. I’ve since strived to meet that need for others. I enjoy getting to know my clients and helping them uncover their most compelling narratives, then working with them to build those stories expertly into the various components of their applications. There is nothing more satisfying than helping someone build work that leads them to secure business school offers so they can catapult their career and life.

While today I’m a senior strategy consultant at IBM Research, much of my professional and academic background is in writing. I graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern University with degrees in creative writing and sociology and, thinking I wanted to be a professional writer, took a job writing sponsored content at Atlantic Media. While my career goals changed, one thing remained constant: my love of clean, clear, engaging presentations. This helped me pivot into product management at Bloomberg where intimately understanding the end user’s experience is key. It also helped me immensely when I later applied to business school, receiving several significant offers with scholarships, and ultimately attended Wharton.

Professionally, I’m passionate about the need for businesses to genuinely make initiatives around equity, diversity and sustainability part of their core business model. Outside of work I love to travel—be it internationally or just by exploring parts of New York I’ve not yet been. I love a bad book or TV show almost as much as a good one, am an enthusiastic cat owner and (highly mediocre) New York Times crossword solver, and I am still searching for the best bagel and happy hour deal in NYC.