Our Team
The ability to mentor MBA applicants is an art form. Equal parts writing talent, business acumen, marketing prowess, and patience—a great MBA application consultant is ultimately judged by one thing: talent. Of the thousands of bright men and women who graduate from top MBA programs yearly, only a precious few have that potent ability to properly mentor enterprising business school candidates.
Precision Essay Founders Jon Frank and Raj Patil personally train all of Precision Essay’s MBA mentors, putting each through a barrage of tests, exercises, and readings. For those few mentors who are ultimately selected to work for the company, their skill is unmatched. We could not be more proud to announce our lineup of Precision Essay MBA mentors for the 2011-2012 season.
Yaron Dahan – Head Consultant
Yaron, a.k.a. “The Professor,” is Precision Essay’s Head Consultant, and one of Precision Essay’s oldest (and some would say wisest) admissions gurus. Besides the usual skills critical to an MBA admissions expert, Yaron has deep experience with MBA programs in Europe, helping folks convert waitlists into admits, and sharpening clients’ interview skills. Yaron also heads up the research division, helping both clients and Precision Essay alike remain up-to-date with the latest trends and news in the world of business school admissions. Mr. Dahan has a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne, and is well versed in film directing. He has lived and worked in half a dozen countries, speaks French, Hebrew, German, and un poco Espanol. He has worked previously as an English Lecturer at various universities, including several French Business Schools and the University of Paris. Yaron embodies the ideal consultant by leveraging experience both in business school admissions consulting as well as the arts. We call him The Professor because, well, we all have a lot to learn from him.
Neel Shah – Senior Consultant
Neel Shah is the founder of Shah Capital Advisors, specializing in arranging financing and advising developers on real estate financings utilizing New Markets Tax Credits as well as Historic Tax Credits. With over 11 years of project financing expertise, Neel has worked as a financial consultant, developer, banker, and investor on an array of asset types around the world. He has acted as a financial advisor for developers, public and private utilities, not for profit organizations, social service agencies, and federal and city agencies throughout the United States, Latin America and Asia. Neel holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University with concentrations in finance, real estate and not for profit management, a B.Sc. from Brown University with concentrations in Applied Mathematics/Economics and Civil Engineering, and a degree in culinary arts from the Natural Gourmet Institute. Need to know the best way to build a building, raise money for a new entrepreneurial venture, or chiffonade fresh basil? Neel is your guy. Neel Shah is based in New York City.
Damon Chua – Senior Consultant
An award-winning writer and producer, Damon has worked in the media, entertainment and finance industries in both business and creative capacities. His films have been screened at many top film festivals including the Cannes Film Festival, and his works have been published by Samuel French, among others, and taught in schools in the US and Singapore. A recent recipient of a UNESCO grant, Damon has lived in Asia and Europe, and now calls New York City his home. He obtained his MBA from Stanford University and has a law degree from Oxford University. Who says it is possible to be overeducated, eh? One of PE’s most seasoned MBA consultants, Damon has worked for a number of MBA admissions consulting firms over the past seven years; today, he is delighted to have found an exclusive home with Precision Essay, the most forward-thinking, successful, and badass firm around.
Richard Vincent – Senior Consultant
Richard knows the MBA game, and he knows it well. In addition to doing admissions consulting for over five years, he has also served as a GMAT instructor for the world’s three leading test prep companies. Before graduating from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 2005, Richard had worked in both management consulting and investment banking. Through his diverse work experience, Mr. Vincent has learned to speak the languages of many different fields; post-MBA, he worked in management consulting (with AT Kearny), Investment Baking (with Wells Fargo) and logistics (with Aero Logistics and Concentric Solutions). It is this richness of experience that makes Richard one of Precision Essay’s most dangerous weapons—and our resident expert in career change applications especially. And for the record, Richard is also most likely the most wily poker player you will ever meet. (Trust us; we owe him money.)
Moah Son – Senior Consultant
Moah is a native New Yorker who has lived in four different cities in three years. One of those cities includes Philadelphia, where she earned her MBA in Marketing and Management from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. While at Wharton, she was involved with the Admissions Committee as a graduate assistant and developed a strong understanding of the admissions process while evaluating numerous applications and doing countless interviews for the admissions committee. Ms. Son began her career as an auditor with Deloitte & Touche before transitioning to forensic and dispute consulting at Deloitte Financial Advisory Services. Prior to business school, she worked at AIG Real Estate Investments, where she realized she no longer wanted to be an accountant. Moah currently works in corporate planning at American Airlines where she helps develop long-term growth strategies for the company. Her job also allows her to jet around the world and has brought the number of countries visited to 51. When she’s not traveling, she loves to try new restaurants, play volleyball, practice Pilates and watch reality TV. And she’s not afraid to admit it either…
Mandy Tang – Senior Consultant
Mandy started her career in the fashion world at W Magazine, where she was an accessories writer covering the women’s shoe, bag, and jewelry scene. After sitting front row at fashion shows, Mandy made the move to the online advertising world, where she worked for three years helping clients like The New York Times launch their style website. Mandy currently works at American Express, where she oversees the online personalization strategy for AmericanExpress.com. As a teen, Mandy grew up all over the world and lived in 15 different houses between the US, Hong Kong and Beijing. Mandy received a BA in Sociology from Brown University, where she discovered her passion for career mentorship as a volunteer at the Brown Career Development Center. In 2010, Ms. Tang earned her MBA from Columbia Business School, with a focus in Marketing and Finance (not to mention the occasional seminar at Columbia’s journalism school). As the only ex-fashionista in her Advanced Corporate Finance class, she’s proud to have rocked out killer discounted cash flows in three inch heels.
Mark Lellouch – Senior Consultant
Mark is a business strategy consultant with a passion for nonprofit work, and the environment. For the past 15 years, he’s used his consulting skills and management experience to advise nonprofits and environmentally-minded companies in the US, Brazil and Mexico with strategic planning, business evaluation and organization, market analysis, and outreach. After getting his MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1996, he headed south to Brazil to become the Marketing Director for SPVS, one of the Nature Conservancy’s most successful in-country partners. While Mark is our nonprofit specialist, he has spent his life honing his passion for and expertise in the consulting business. He is also an expert in languages (he grew up in Paris and speaks four languages fluently) as well as in computer science, which was his major at Brown University. Mark’s also a published photographer and an aspiring bossa nova guitarist. He currently lives in Taos, NM.
Vimala Raghavendran – Senior Consultant
Vimala is a native of Mumbai, India but has lived in the US for the past 10 years. Having recently gone through the application process herself, she understands it well. She spent the last two years of her life MBAing at Wharton, where she majored in Healthcare. Through the years Vimala has become an expert in the healthcare space, developing countries, and non-profit work—especially abroad. Before Wharton, she spent 4 years at a non-profit organization helping develop drugs for developing countries. Later this year, Vimala will be very busy, as she has accepted a job as a consultant with McKinsey and Company. However while we have her (through the 2011-2012 cycle) we are very lucky indeed…
Fritz Charles – Senior Consultant
Fritz Charles is the founder of DiamondOTC, an electronic swap trading platform that caters to Investment Banks. Prior to business school, Fritz worked as an equity derivative trader at Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital. In this role, Fritz managed the firm’s delta one client flow and proprietary book. Fritz obtained his M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Business with a concentration in Entrepreneurial Management. At Wharton, Fritz was part of Wharton’s student business incubator, the Wharton Venture Initiation Program, and served as a facilitator of Haitian disaster relief efforts through the program as well. Fritz enjoys working with MBA applicants because it allows him to relive his business school experience over and over again…without the hangovers. A native New Yorker, Fritz is a loyal fan of the Mets, Knicks, and Giants. And it has been through his loyalty as a Mets fan that Fritz has learned the virtues of patience and loyalty.
Lee Rom – Senior Consultant
With an MBA from Wharton and a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School, Lee has applied to more grad schools than she’d care to admit. She believes that the principles of good essay writing are applicable across all academic programs. In addition to MBA applications, Lee has also helped clients with apps for a broad range of other degrees, including public policy, law, statistics, Fulbright scholarships and all kinds of random programs you’ve never heard of. If you’re thinking about a joint degree, Lee is your lady.
Prior to joining Precision Essay, Lee was an Executive Director in the Investment Banking Division of Goldman Sachs. She has also spent time working as an independent consultant and interim executive for emerging market investors and their portfolio companies, covering South Asia and East Africa. Currently, Lee is taking a break from the rat race to focus on some entrepreneurial projects and spend time with her two-year-old daughter, Ella.
Aside from helping folks get into school, some of her proudest accomplishments include traveling solo in over forty countries, placing first in her age group in a triathlon, and – of course – winning her high school’s senior-year scavenger hunt with Precision Essay Co-Founder Jon Frank. Lee is a native New Yorker, and is now back in her hometown after a four-year stint in London.
Nelson Sun – Senior Consultant
After graduating from UC San Diego with a BA in creative writing, mad Kung Fu skills and a severe reluctance to abandon the comfort of cheap and delicious Mexican food near the Pacific Ocean, Nelson left behind a bohemian existence to forge his business skills at a startup during the dot com boom. Not only was working at a small company a winning strategy that allowed him to hone his entrepreneurial and leadership spirit, but his experiences there also helped him gain admittance to the MBA/MA program at the Wharton School and the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Armed with his graduate education, he switched careers, going on to work for several years in Private Equity, both on the transaction side as well as in turnaround management of distressed assets. Currently, Nelson has taken hiatus from corporate life to pursue entrepreneurial ventures, brush up on his martial arts and enjoy the opportunity to help others on their path toward MBA enlightenment.
Kyn Chaturvedi – Senior Consultant
An award winning game developer, Kyn Chaturvedi has spent a majority of his career dreaming up wacky ways to brainwash the masses with fun, addictive video games. Currently, he is scheming new ways to assault the senses through his startup Audio Catch, an online marketplace for the sourcing of professional music, sound effects, and voiceover. Kyn’s diabolical vision came about while earning his MBA from the Wharton School of Business and consulting for successful entrepreneurs as part of the Wharton Small Business Development Center. While currently working to achieve his dream for total aural domination, Kyn enjoys helping MBA applicants find creative ways to trade in those vanilla soapboxes for the ultimate cherry-topped choco-rainbow sorbet megaphone…
Alex Jarzebinski – Senior Consultant
Words to describe Alex: Academic, entrepreneur, gamer….or rather, nerd, risk-lover, geek. As an overall dweeb in high school, Alex went on to graduate from UCLA with College, Departmental, and Latin Honors (Magna Cum Laude) in Business-Economics. With a whopping 9 months of real corporate experience, Alex gathered a small team and formed ForeSight Systems LLC, maker of the Pertelian LCD, the world’s first commercial LCD PC Assistant. While serving as ForeSight’s CEO, Alex sought to start another cutting edge businesses and thus craved the education which would compliment the vicious real world business lessons already learned. He went on to attend The Wharton School of Business in order to learn and meet a partner in ‘business crime’. Kyn Chaturvedi proved to be a perfect fit and since graduating with an MBA (with Honors), Alex has started working with Kyn to build Audio Catch, a new business which will change the way audio is sourced the world over. When not trying to change the world, Alex enjoys strikingly geeky pursuits such as reading, watching the History Channel, playing video games, and running Dungeons and Dragons games.
Lydia Sandon – Senior Consultant
Lydia has worked with admissions on all levels, from SAT tutoring and undergrad applications to essay editing for all types of grad schools and professional situations, but she really loves MBA apps. Since the applicants have work experience and are usually older, there’s almost always a juicy story to help tell. If you’re having trouble shaping the big-picture narrative you want to tell, Lydia’s your girl.
In her spare time, Lydia is an entrepreneur and management consultant. She’s worked in healthcare IT, at Amazon.com in software engineering, in venture capital, in technology consulting, at Microsoft, and at Netscape. She earned her MBA from Wharton, where she focused on marketing and entrepreneurial management. She also holds Master of Engineering and Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science from M.I.T. Hailing originally from the Northeast, Lydia now readily admits that she lives in Texas with her hilarious husband, 3 beautiful kids, and two dogs.