Colleen McLaughlin

Colleen McLaughlin helps MBA applicants who have lived winding careers find the story that makes every twist make sense — and land it at programs that reward that kind of path. She has coached more than fifty clients, with admits across Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Booth, Columbia, Kellogg, Sloan, and INSEAD. Nine of those placements are at Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton alone. She holds a BS in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Harvard Business School, and her own career has had more pivots than most applicants will have in a lifetime.

That career is the reason she is good at this. Colleen started in pharmaceutical development at Roche, where she helped scale a first-in-class HIV drug from clinical trials to market. That work shaped how she thinks about conviction. She went to HBS because she wanted to work in public health in Africa, and bet on herself. What followed was a decade and a half building HIV treatment programs for the government of Botswana, consulting for African governments on health infrastructure, leading the global transfer of an H1N1 vaccine manufacturing process, and running a team of twenty-five across multiple countries as the sole U.S. employee of a company that reinvented itself three times. She now runs her own consulting practice advising NGOs and early-stage companies across Africa, and is a member of Pipeline Angels, an angel investing network for women and nonbinary founders. Every pivot had a reason — and helping clients find that same clarity about their own pivots is the center of her work.

Her method starts with the person. She digs until she finds what she calls the secret sauce — the distinctive thing no amount of resume polish will surface. Her operating principle: if the resume tells the professional story clearly, the essays get to breathe and become personal rather than redundant. She uses editors as a proxy for the admissions committee — if an unfamiliar reader says “I don’t get it,” that is what will happen.

Colleen works especially well with career-switchers, international applicants, STEM-heavy candidates translating technical careers into human narratives, applicants with lower test scores, first-generation applicants, and anyone whose path looks unconventional until someone shows them it is actually their strongest asset. She is fluent in dual-degree programs — JD/MBA, MBA/MPH, MBA/MPA — and has placed clients at programs that select for exactly the kind of multidimensional profile she builds.

If applicants have done interesting, meaningful, hard things but cannot yet explain why they fit together — Colleen will find that thread faster than they expect, and she will light up when it clicks. That energy is not an act.