Consultant

Eli David

Founder of Ivy MBA Consulting · Tuck MBA, one of the most decorated MBA admissions consultants in the world, now combining forces with Admissions Gateway.

Eli David

About Eli David

Background.

Eli David is one of the most decorated MBA admissions consultants in the world. Over 19 years he has earned a place among Poets&Quants' Top 5 Highest-Rated MBA Consultants of All Time and has been ranked in their Top 20 across multiple years, backed by a long record of perfect client ratings. He has helped candidates win seats at Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, and every other top-tier program.

His path there was anything but conventional. He served five years as an intelligence officer in an elite air force unit, then advised multi-million-dollar clients as a management consultant in New York. He graduated his undergraduate studies summa cum laude from Paris and earned his MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.

An insatiably curious globe-trotter who has lived and worked across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia and traveled to 30 countries, he has completed the Annapurna Circuit and trekked to Everest Base Camp, and is always scouting the next peak.

Work style.

Eli is strategic, competitive, and a straight shooter, a coach who tells you what you need to hear rather than what you want to hear. He works with every client personally: no assistants, no associates, no handoffs. From the first call he digs past your résumé and your stats to find the real story underneath, then challenges you to build an application only you could write.

He is relentless on the details. Every essay, every draft, every line of interview prep gets his direct attention, as many times as it takes. Clients get a mentor who is genuinely invested in the outcome and treats their candidacy as his own until they're admitted.

Why the merger with Admissions Gateway.

Eli has known Rajdeep Chimni, the founder of Admissions Gateway, for twenty years. In that time the two became not just peers at the very top of the field but close friends, and combining forces was always a shared dream.

Admissions Gateway is the most-reviewed and consistently top-ranked firm in the industry; Ivy MBA Consulting is a boutique built on founder-led, one-on-one coaching for the most selective programs. Bringing the two together lets Eli and Rajdeep do what they always talked about: build the strongest, most impressive MBA admissions consulting firm in the world, one that pairs boutique intimacy with unmatched global scale.

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What clients say.

“Before choosing Eli, I spoke with several admissions consultants. Many were knowledgeable, but the conversations felt transactional. With Eli, it was different from the very first call. I felt that he genuinely wanted to understand who I was, not just what I had accomplished.”
Verified client review · Poets&Quants · Yale SOM and Chicago Booth
“Where other consultants hyped me up about how unique and “cool” my story’s arc was, Eli called out the flaws he saw. He was brutally honest, but never harsh for the sake of it. He genuinely cared about getting me best positioned in front of an adcom.”
Verified client review · Poets&Quants · Class of 2028 · Columbia, Booth, Yale SOM, NYU Stern
“Eli’s greatest strength was helping me uncover what made me unique. Through countless conversations, questions and moments of reflection, he helped me identify themes in my life that I had never connected before.”
Verified client review · Poets&Quants · Yale SOM and Chicago Booth

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