Earlier this month, Clear Admit Co-founders Graham Richmond and Eliot Ingram, together with Senior Admissions Counselor Stacey Oyler, traveled to Palo Alto, CA, to attend the fourth annual Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants (AIGAC) members’ conference. In total, the conference drew more than 30 graduate admissions consultants representing 20 consultancies from six countries. The consultants gathered on the campuses of Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley to share experiences and best practices with one another and to speak directly with admissions officers from many of the world’s top business schools.
AIGAC, which Clear Admit helped found in 2006, is an organization of graduate admissions consultants who pledge to uphold the highest ethical practices in graduate admissions advising as part of an effort to promote and maintain a standard of excellence in the field. Each year, members are invited to attend the AIGAC annual conference, which features panel sessions on a range of topics related to graduate admissions and career planning “fit,” as well as discussions with admissions officers and others involved in the admissions process.
This year, the three-day event, which took place from June 8th to 10th, included tours of the Haas School of Business campus as well as the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s new Knight Management Center. Admissions officers from those schools as well Dartmouth (Tuck), Columbia, the University of Virginia (Darden), UCLA (Anderson), Yale (School of Management), Cornell (Johnson) and IE in Spain all attended and met with participating consultants. Representatives from the Graduate Management Admission Council and the Educational Testing Service also took part, providing presentations on the “next-generation” GMAT and the revised GRE and new Personal Potential Index.
This year’s conference was sponsored by Veritas Prep, Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, Manhattan GMAT, Kaplan Test Prep, Clear Admit, Maxx Associates and Accepted.com, and attendees reported that it exceeded expectations. Anna Ivey, who serves as AIGAC president this year and next, praised the conference’s international draw. “Our 2011 Conference was our most international yet, with participants from all over the United States, Spain, Brazil, France, Germany, Russia and Japan,” she said. Admissions officers from schools both within and outside the U.S. also took part, she added. “The network effect was in full force.”
Clear Admit’s Richmond, who served as AIGAC president in 2009 and 2010, highlighted the conference’s ultimate benefit for business school applicants. “It is so terrific for leaders in our industry to share best practices and push each other to provide the best possible insight to the candidates we work with,” he said. He was also struck by AIGAC’s accomplishments. “Between the diversity of the consultants present and the quantity of school admissions representatives who took part, I was constantly thinking about how far AIGAC has come since the inaugural conference four years ago – and there’s still growth ahead.”
With panel discussions ranging from ethical best practices in the field of graduate admissions consulting to how admissions committees view traditional and unconventional MBA applicants, the conference truly armed participating consultants with valuable skills and tools to strengthen their work with prospective MBA applicants. The wide-ranging participation by admissions representatives from the very top MBA programs in the world truly signals their recognition and acceptance of the valuable role admissions consultants play in the graduate management admissions process.
For more on the recent AIGAC conference, click here.
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