Sadie Polen
Sadie has more than ten years of experience in higher education. She reviewed statements of purpose, personal statements, and resumes for political and public service opportunities and made candidate selections for elite programs at Harvard University. She also has experience advising graduate students on their career and post-graduation plans. Sadie holds a BS from UC Davis, an EdM from Harvard, and a DEI certificate from Cornell.
Natalie Grinblatt
An AIGAC member and Michigan Ross MBA, Natalie has served as admissions dean/director at Michigan Ross, Cornell Johnson, and ASU Carey. With almost two decades of admissions experience, she’s helped hundreds of clients get admitted to top U.S. and international business schools, graduate programs, colleges, and universities in her 15 years as a consultant. Described by her clients as strategic, engaged, creative, nurturing, and direct, she’s earned high ratings on Poets&Quants, GMAT Club, and Trust Pilot.
Karin Ash
With 30 years of career/admissions experience at four universities, including Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Business and College of Engineering, Dr. Karin Ash has met with thousands of recruiters seeking to hire the best graduate students from leading schools. She has served as a member of the admissions committee, ensuring that the applicants who ultimately enroll are a good fit for the program and prime candidates for employers. Karin has been a Consultant with Accepted for almost a decade and has facilitated students’ entry into top engineering, data science, MBA, and other STEM graduate MEng, MS, and PhD programs. Her clients have been accepted into top graduate programs at MIT, the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, UPenn, USC, and more than 60 other schools.
Vanessa Febo
Vanessa has more than seven years of graduate school and scholarship consulting experience and specializes in helping clients communicate their research and goals. She’s coached clients to top programs in engineering, English, social sciences, and business and has mentored applicants for major scholarships for the past five years. Vanessa has taught writing for over a decade and is particularly skilled in writing for professional communication. Her working style is client focused, organized, and positive.
Kelly Wilson
In her past roles as executive director of admissions at CMU Tepper and assistant dean of admissions at Georgetown McDonough and Pittsburgh Katz, Kelly oversaw admissions for 23 years for the MBA and master’s programs in management of information systems, computational finance, business analytics, and product management. Having approved more than 38,000 admissions decisions, she has a deep understanding of what top MBA and graduate programs value. Her working style is warm, supportive, straightforward, and organized. Kelly is also a member of AIGAC.
Barry Rothman
Barry’s clients have successfully applied to MD, MD/PhD, dental, vet, pharm, PA, PT, nursing, optometry, podiatry, PhD, and MPH programs. He is an emeritus professor of biology, former health professions advisor, and former director of three post-bac programs at San Francisco State Univ. whose post-bacs had an 80% success rate. His Accepted clients have an even higher rate. He has his PhD in biochemistry from CalTech and conducted biomedical research at CalTech, UTMB Galveston, UC San Francisco, and SFSU.
Esmeralda Cardenal
Esmeralda consistently receives five-star reviews on Poets&Quants, GMATClub, and Trust Pilot for her personable coaching style, helping her clients present their best. Her nine years in MBA admissions as former Yale SOM associate director of admissions, Michigan State director of MBA admissions, and Cardiff Business School (United Kingdom) consultant prepared her to effectively help clients gain entry to elite MBA/EMBA programs and a wide range of master’s programs, as she’s done for more than eight years.
Alice Diamond
Formerly the associate dean for career and community service at Lesley University, Alice brings 35 years of experience in career and admissions advising for undergraduate and graduate students. She has expertise in working with candidates applying to top graduate degree programs in a wide range of fields including psychology, social work, public health, public policy, education, expressive arts therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and environmental studies.
Herman "Flash" Gordon
Flash applies his teaching of problem-solving and strategic thinking to helping clients present their most compelling stories to admissions committees. A tenured faculty member at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, he was also the admissions committee chair and a neuroscience graduate admissions committee member. He earned his biochemistry AB from Harvard College and his developmental neuroscience PhD from Caltech and was a postdoctoral fellow at both the MRC Cell Biophysics Unit (London) and UCSF.
Mary Mahoney
Mary earned her PhD from the University of Houston and her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is director of medical humanities at a liberal arts college in New York and has been a tenured English professor, specializing in the personal essay, for more than 20 years. She also teaches narrative medicine, empathy, health equity, disparity, bias, and social justice. She specializes in helping medical school, psychology, and humanities graduate school applicants, with whom she has a high success rate.
Valerie Wherley
As the former assistant dean of student affairs at the William Beaumont School of Medicine and former director of pre-health advisement and the Postbaccaulaureate Certificate Program at Sacred Heart University, Valerie brings more than 20 years of success working with pre-health candidates in medicine, dental, vet, PA, PT, OT, exercise science, and nursing. Her clients appreciate her expertise in the holistic admissions process and her patient, thoughtful, strategic, and data driven working style.
Christie St-John
Dr. Christie St-John, a member of AIGAC, has a deep knowledge of MBA, specialized master’s, and EMBA admissions. With more than 25 years of experience as MBA admissions director and career coach at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, she’s read thousands of essays and conducted thousands of interviews around the world. Her clients have been admitted to Columbia, Wharton, Harvard, Kellogg, UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, Virginia, Oxford, INSEAD, and ESADE, among others.
Cydney Foote
Having served on admissions committees at the University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine and the curriculum development team at the UW School of Dentistry, Cydney uses her more than two decades of real-world admissions expertise to pinpoint what is unique about her clients’ stories and help them present their authentic voice. She has advised hundreds of successful applicants to MD, DO, and other healthcare programs in the United States and Canada and authored three e-books on medical education.
