Leland+ Content Library

MBA Optional Essays - Your Complete Guide

The optional essay is one of the easiest places to hurt your MBA application. This guide shows you when to write one and when to skip it, with a real successful example explaining a low GMAT quant score and a clear framework for addressing extenuating circumstances without overexplaining.

Telling Your Story: Tips for Crafting Your Perfect Law School Personal Statement from Expert Coach & Stanford Law Grad [5/13/2026] (Recording)

After this session, you will know how to build a personal statement that reads as a cohesive narrative rather than a resume in prose. The coach will walk through how to identify the right story to tell, how to open in a way that holds an admissions reader's attention, and how Stanford Law's own approach to evaluating applicants shapes what a strong statement actually needs to do. Attending live means you will learn how these principles apply to your specific background and hear the coach respond to real situations, not hypothetical ones. This coach works with law school applicants every day and brings a clear sense of the patterns that separate personal statements that resonate from those that fall flat.

Sector Overview: Fintech

Learn about the Fintech Industry, its sub-sectors, key players, valuations, and how VCs approach it

How to Use AI to Break Into Investment Banking & Private Equity [5/21/2026] (Recording)

In this session, you will learn how to use AI tools to research firms, personalize cold outreach, and prep for technical interviews in investment banking and private equity recruiting. You will also walk away with a framework for identifying which parts of your application process AI can accelerate versus where it tends to create generic, forgettable work. Attending live means you can ask how these approaches apply to your specific background, whether that is a non-target school, a career pivot, or a gap in your deal experience, and hear the answer in real time rather than guessing from a recording. The coach works directly with candidates breaking into finance and will share the patterns that consistently separate the ones who get interviews from the ones who do not.

Top 5 Tips for Your Law School Application [5/12/2026] (Recording)

Join Indrani as she goes over her top 5 tips to help you put your best foot forward as you apply to law school! A great law school application requires research, authenticity and hard work, and Indrani will help you strategize. She will go over the importance of the LSAT, putting together a thoughtful school list, who should submit letters of recommendation, how to go about writing your essays and the optimal timeline for getting it all done! The session will end with ample time for questions and answers.

Claude Design: Build Campaign Ready Assets in 60 mins

​Most marketers leave a brief meeting with a direction and a timeline. You're going to leave this one with the assets. ​Join Albert C., a former marketer at Meta, for an exclusive AI Builder session where you'll produce three campaign-ready assets in real time. By the end of the hour, you'll have a landing page, a 5-slide social carousel, and a short product video, all built by you, on brief, from scratch. ​This isn't a walkthrough. You build alongside Albert C. the entire time, so you leave with finished work, not notes about finished work. ​The session covers prompt patterns for visual consistency, how to brief Claude on brand voice and color, and how to move efficiently across asset types without losing creative direction. You'll also walk away with a reusable prompt framework you can take back to any brief, for any product, so the work you do in this session isn't a one-time thing. ​Come with a product in mind. Everything else is provided.

Sector Overview: Healthcare & Digital Health

Learn about the Healthcare & Digital Health industries, their key players, metrics, valuations, and what VC's look for.

Sector Overview: Crypto & Web3

Crypto has quickly become a huge industry. Check out its key growth drivers, sub-sectors, major players, and what excites VCs.

Sector Overview: AI/ML & Foundation Models

AI/ML & foundation models are huge in VC today. Check out this industry snapshot to get an industry overview, learn key metrics, industry players, and valuations.

Sector Overview: Consumer Tech

Consumer Tech has a massive market. Learn about its key growth drivers, metrics, economics, and what excites VC's.

Sector Overview: Sustainability & Energy

Learn about the Sustainability and Energy industry and what VCs look for there. Check out key metrics, valuations, and major players in the space.

Nailing the McKinsey PEI [5/22/2026] (Recording)

After this session, you will know how to structure a Personal Experience Interview response that resonates with McKinsey evaluators, including how to select the right stories, frame leadership moments with the right level of specificity, and avoid the pacing mistakes that consistently undermine otherwise strong candidates. The focus will be on how McKinsey interviewers actually probe PEI stories and what they are listening for beneath the surface of your answer. Attending live means you can ask about your specific story or background and hear how I respond to the details of your situation, which a recording cannot replicate. I work with consulting candidates on PEI preparation regularly, and what I share here reflects the patterns I see across candidates who successfully navigate this round.

Job Search Operating System | Prompt Library

Build Your Own Job Search OS — Companion Guide — the underlying system from the May 13 Build Anything session, packaged so you can recreate it from scratch. Inside: - Step-by-step build for the 6 trackers in Notion or Excel: full property lists, view filters, exact column headers - The full prompt library, every prompt mapped to a specific moment in your search (spotting a role, auto-filling an application, weekly inbox sweep, interview prep, reference calls) - A 7-day runbook to get the whole system live inside a week - Scheduled-task templates for the morning brief, weekly sweep, and Sunday retro - A failure-modes table for when the prompts don't behave This is for anyone running a real job search who's tired of holding 50 active threads in their head, rewriting "why this company" for the 47th time, or losing track of which recruiter said "check back in a month." You walk away with working trackers, prompts you can actually run, and daily/weekly cadence prompts to keep you up to date so you can focus on networking, prep and the more important human components of a real-life job search.

Sector Overview: Infrastructure & Security

Learn about Infrastructure and security, their sub-sectors, metrics, valuations, and VC must-knows.

The BCG Offer Blueprint

The unfiltered insider playbook on how BCG actually evaluates candidates — from interviews to promotions to what separates offers from rejections. Written by a former BCG Partner. This document is part 1 of a 9 part Consulting Interview Resource kit.

The Consulting Recruiting Command Center

Track every application, referral, networking touchpoint, and interview in one streamlined dashboard built for consulting recruiting. This document is part 9 of a broader 9-part consulting interview resource kit.

How to Ace the Master's Personal Statement

I've helped dozens of candidates land spots at top master's programs in fields ranging from public policy and business to architecture and engineering. In this video, I share with you the essay writing insights that helped me and my clients get into the Ivy League, Oxbridge, M7, and Schwarzman Scholars (Tsinghua University).

Guide to Negotiating MBA Scholarships

Everything is negotiable, including your MBA scholarship. This guide walks you through the full strategy for increasing your award, from leveraging competing offers to highlighting recent achievements to following up effectively, plus four plug-and-play email templates covering the most common scenarios so you can negotiate with confidence.

Sample MBA Interview Answers

A comprehensive library of sample MBA interview responses across every major question category: leadership, teamwork, problem-solving, communication, self-awareness, resilience, ethics, and adaptability. Each example uses the STAR method to show you exactly how to structure compelling, quantified answers you can adapt with your own experiences.

2026-2027 Columbia Essay Brainstorm

The complete brainstorming workbook for Columbia's 2026-2027 essays. Inside: step-by-step exercises for every prompt, from short answers to Essay 1 goals to Essay 2 collaboration stories to Essay 3 "co-create" arguments, with structured charts to help you organize your stories, research, and outlines before you start drafting.