Results

I had a good profile and a bad story. Three consultants had told me to lead with the promotion; he worked out in one call that the interesting part was the two years I spent rebuilding a pricing model nobody had asked me to touch. The essays were unrecognisable afterwards. LBS came back with a scholarship I had not applied for.

I could do the mathematics. What I could not do was think out loud under pressure without sounding uncertain, and that was costing me every final round. We spent four sessions purely on that. The measure-theory work was excellent, but the thing that actually got me the offer was learning to be wrong confidently and correct myself quickly.

Korean preparation is very good at drilling and very bad at interviews, where you are supposed to think aloud and be visibly unfinished. He ran mock interviews that were harder than the real one and never once gave me the answer. By December the actual interview felt slow by comparison.

I had sat the GMAT twice and plateaued at 690. He did not give me more practice questions — he watched me work and identified that I was losing points on a specific reasoning pattern I did not know I had. 760 on the next attempt. The application work afterwards was of the same quality.

Agencies in China will write your essays for you. That is exactly why admissions committees discount them. He refused to write a single sentence, made me rewrite the personal statement eleven times, and the version that went in was recognisably mine. The stochastic calculus preparation meant the interview was a conversation rather than an examination.

My concern was that a committee in Philadelphia would not understand what my work in Riyadh actually involved. He understood it immediately, having done the equivalent job, and helped me write it so that someone who had never been to the Gulf could see the scale of it. That was the whole problem, and it was solved in two sessions.

We had used two agencies before. Both subcontracted the mathematics to people who could not do STEP, which is the only part that mattered. He teaches it himself, every session, and told us plainly in the first conversation which of our two children was ready and which was not. That honesty is why we are still working with him three years later.

Six weeks, eight sessions, and the mental arithmetic drills I resented for the first month turned out to be the entire second interview. He also told me in week one that two of the five firms on my list were a poor fit for how I think. He was right about both.