Regina Altaras

Regina Altaras helps scientists, engineers, and biotech operators stop sounding like their last grant proposal and start sounding like someone an admissions committee wants to meet. She’s spent more than a decade translating technical careers into MBA narratives — and her clients have landed at Harvard, Wharton, and Columbia, across the M7 and T15, and at top-ranked European programs.

She knows the translation problem firsthand. Regina grew up in Venezuela, came to the United States, and built a career that crossed every line between lab and boardroom: product development at P&G Latin America straight out of undergrad, a Master’s in Chemical Engineering at Tufts, then Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, where she helped launch the company’s first-ever commercial drug. By the time she got to Columbia Business School for her MBA — enrolled when her baby was four months old — she’d already lived the career-pivot story most of her clients are trying to write. She later served as a Columbia ambassador, which means she’s seen the admissions process from inside the building, not just from the applicant’s side.

That arc is exactly why her method works. Regina reads a résumé full of process development and clinical-stage milestones and sees the leadership narrative buried underneath. Her clients are often people with serious technical depth who’ve been told their background is “too niche” or “hard to explain” — pharma scientists pivoting to the commercial side, lab researchers making the jump to management consulting, engineers who’ve led cross-functional teams but never learned to describe what they actually did in language a generalist would care about. She turns that into clarity.

She’s especially effective with international and ESL applicants, first-generation candidates, and professionals from oversubscribed countries who need someone who understands both the cultural transition and the narrative one. Hispanic and Latinx applicants. Career changers from healthcare and life sciences. People whose professional story makes perfect sense to a colleague but falls flat on an application — Regina closes that gap.

Her style is warm, direct, and low on ceremony. She can build you a spreadsheet and a timeline, or take things as they come. She checks in proactively, turns drafts around quickly, and communicates in concise bullets rather than paragraphs. The energy isn’t rah-rah; it’s steady, clear, and grounded in the confidence of someone who’s actually done the things her clients are trying to do next.