When you select PREMIUM NEED-BASED (PNB) support, your team will have 30+ years of diverse, expert experience. Who's on your team?
Works with you to build all your work for every school you do with us
Works with you and your advisor to build your career vision (short-, mid-, long-term goals), foundational for your goals essays and interviews. We don't work with you for 15-30 minutes to build a career vision that you don't feel truly excited about and capable of writing about in a differentiated manner. We spend 3-4 hours doing work with you that is about helping you define with you REALLY want to do.
Oversees your partnership logistically. We do weekly (at minimum) updates with you and your advisor.
Works with you and your advisor to select your schools and recommenders, assesses your career vision, and reviews your resume and essays.
* Our Founder is not in PNB partnerships
The areas of coverage are:
This is how we kick-off all comprehensive partnerships. It is a call, typically 4-5.5 hours long, that allows us to get to know you (and you to get to know yourself) as a top business school applicant. We help you understand how you compare to your competition by focusing on who you are from an academic, professional, extracurricular, and school-positioning perspective. We help you understand your areas of strength/weakness and begin to set forth strategies to mitigate your weaknesses/highlight your strengths in your applications. We also begin school selection, goal narrative, and recommender selection discussions – begin being an important word, as those topics often require several calls/weeks to resolve. At the end of this call, you will know you made the right choice by partnering with us.
This is a day-by-day visual schedule that helps you understand how we plan to help you do all you must to submit stellar applications. Whether you are partnering with us on one school or all your schools, your schedule will take into consideration your broader application objective because we need to help you create a pace that will enable you to meet that objective. When you see your schedule, you will know you are in good hands with us.
Your smart, tech-based schedule - something no other firm in the world offers - ensures you are aware, in real time, of where you are in your partnership relative to your overall application strategy. Further, our Chief of Staff oversees your partnership daily from a logistic perspective to provide you with the support you need to stay on pace, and understand your options if you struggle to stay on pace. Leadership is always one step ahead of the partnerships. Again, it’s about making sure you are in good hands.
Even if you partner with us on just one school, we assist you with selecting all your schools because we want your application strategy to be a smart one; we want you to succeed. Both your advisor and Square One Prep’s leadership team work with you on selecting schools.
Unsure what you want your career post-b-school to be? Worried your ambitions are too conventional? Have some general ideas about what you want to do but need guidance to flesh those thoughts out in order to develop a narrative that has continuity, logic, and passion while being realistic, ambitious, and capable of compelling the admissions committees? We guide you through this endeavor and help you craft a narrative that will excite you and the admissions teams. Both your advisor and Square One Prep’s leadership team - which includes former top business school Career Management Officers - work with you to define your career vision.
The resume you submit you to get a job is not the resume you submit to get into business school. Admissions committees want to see your academic, professional and extracurricular stories on the page. They are more focused on your accomplishments and impact than your tasks and responsibilities. They want to know what you did in extracurricular organizations, not just that you were a part of them. They want to know what you did in college – in and out of the classroom. One reason our Square One Assessment calls are the length they are is because we are preparing to help you transform your resume into a piece of work that will resonate with the admissions committees. We share resume guidelines and samples with you. We then work with you to ensure every line in your resume is additive and won’t lead the admissions committees to ask questions due to a lack of general clarity, or because they aren’t intimately familiar with your industry and work. Your resume will set you apart from your competition, even if you are coming from a traditional b-school feeder industry, and lead the admissions committees to want to know more about you. Once you and your advisor build a strong resume, Square One Prep’s leadership team adds two more layers of rigor and reviews it to ensure it is as strong as possible. Get ready to have to do a little more work as our role collectively is to help you craft the most effective resume possible. Leadership often needs to see your resume more than once to ensure it is submission ready.
Essays are the most important part of the written application, once you pass the resume test. If your resume is strong, admissions committees will read your essays. If your essays are strong, you will likely get interviews – the goal with written applications! Writing essays that resonate with the admissions committees and make them want to know even more about you isn’t easy – not when you are competing against thousands of other extremely accomplished, dynamic people from around the world. We share successful samples with you, we encourage you to trust and be share your vulnerabilities, we brainstorm with you and help you select the right collection of essay topics to best capture who you are, and we then help you craft work that is strategically, creatively, and editorially so memorable that admissions committees want to see what you are like three dimensionally, having been moved by who you are two dimensionally. We are able to help you best capture who you are because we have gotten to know who you are due to all of our work with you to this point in our partnership. With all schools in your partnership, once you and your advisor believe the essays are complete, Square One Prep’s leadership team, which offers one more layer of rigor, reviews them. Be prepared! Often there will be more work as our job collectively is to ensure your work is as memorable and compelling as possible. Leadership often needs to see essays 2-4 times before feeling they are submission ready. Building essays is a real team effort!
Applicants often underestimate how much weight admissions committees place on LORs. They are considered the most objective piece of your applications. They are important! They need to have the right tone and be consistent with all the other content in your applications, all while being additive and having a distinct voice. Even if you partner with us on just one school, we offer guidance on all your schools’ LORs. First, we help you select your recommenders. Second, due to our thorough process – that no other consultancy employs – we help you ensure your recommenders’ time assisting you is as effective and efficient as possible. Because you show such respect for how busy they are, they remain happy throughout the process. Because they are well supported due to our process, they create strong LORs that are completed well ahead of your deadlines.
Once you have submitted your applications and are ready for the next (hopefully final) application step, we send you questions (typically 40-55) that we have learned are in rotation for you to study. When you feel ready we discuss fundamental guidelines to be aware of in the interview experience, give you a 45 minute mock interview, prepare you for group-based discussions (if part of the process), and offer debrief that is 45-90 minutes. We give you as many mock interviews as we feel you need to ensure you're prepared to ace the actual interviews so admissions committees make you an offer. Additionally. if you secure interviews at schools that have a pre-interview essay, post-interview essay or team-based discussion pitch, and we worked with you comprehensively on those schools, we will assist you with that work.
Further, if you partner with us on one school comprehensively, but fail to get an interview at that school, you may transfer interview prep to any other school, as we are committed to your success. To that end, when you work with us on 1-2-3+ schools, we will offer you interview prep on any 1-2-3+ schools. The prep does not have to be for the schools we prepared with you at the written application stage. Note, this flexibility does not include coverage of pre-interview essay, post-interview essay or team-based discussion pitches.
We will help you craft your strategy to secure funds (or more funds if that is your situation), and we will review any emails you craft to make your request(s). This does not include essays for specific scholarships.
* While we will do a waitlist strategy call with you and share materials, the work to build content is not included in PNB partnerships
The pricing is:
First School with STANDARD Advisor............................................$5,200*
First School with SENIOR Advisor..................................................$6,300*
As a team, we will spend 45-60 hours guiding you. No other firm will spend even half that with you. We do because we are focused on guiding you to success, not just on offering you a service. Below we break down how we typically spend that time:
Your day-to-day advisor: 29.5-39 hours
- Your Career Narrative Expert: 4-6 hours
- The Leadership Team: 11.5-15 hours
Each Additional School with STANDARD Advisor......................... $1,600*
Each Additional School with SENIOR Advisor............................... $1,800*
*School prices remain the same, whether you include all schools of interest at the outset of our work together, or add schools during the course of our work together.
View the Refund Policy for Comprehensive Services.