AIGAC Board

AIGAC Officers and Directors

Chris Aitken — President & Sponsorship Committee Chair
Adam Markus — President Elect & Communication Committee Co-Chair
Scott Edinburgh — Treasurer
Candy Lee Laballe — Director and Conference Committee Co-Chair
Eric Lucrezia — Director and Conference Committee Co-Chair
Prashant Tibrewal — Director & Membership Committee Co-Chair
Thomas Kalandranis — Director & Membership Committee Co-Chair
Preeti Wadekar — Treasurer Elect
Amit Kapur — General Director

Chris Aitken, President & Sponsorship Committee Chair

Chris is a co-founder of MBA Prep School. He is also President of AIGAC and chair of the Sponsorship Committee.

Chris has 20+ years of experience in top-tier management consulting as a partner, managing director, and executive vice president. More recently, he has been focused on helping to fund and grow promising early-stage companies applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to help address health, safety, and environmental issues in heavy industries.

Chris enjoys hiking with his wife and sons or sharing a good glass of Australian red wine.

Adam Markus, President Elect & Communication Committee Co-Chair

Adam was born and raised in Los Angeles California. He attended the University of California, Santa Cruz for his BA (1989) and the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1993) for his MA. He studied political science at both schools. He had become interested in Japan when studying comparative political economy and took a position teaching business English at Japanese government agencies and major corporations in 1995. He left Tokyo in 1997 and then worked at the University of California, Berkeley promoting their English language and professional certificate programs.

In 1999, Adam moved to New York City and joined the International Division at Kaplan, the test prep company. At Kaplan, he worked in online sales and marketing. In 2001, he and his wife, now refugees from the exploded tech bubble, decided to go back to Tokyo. He started working at The Princeton Review of Japan almost immediately after arriving. Adam learned to be an admissions consultant in one of the few places in the world where admissions consulting training was taken seriously.

At The Princeton Review of Japan, he did an average of 900 hours of face-to-face consulting per year between 2001 and 2007, even when his responsibilities greatly expanded to include managing other counselors and running the one-to-one service. In 2007, Adam decided to create his own consulting business so that he could focus only on admissions consulting, alter his lifestyle, be his own boss, and always select his own clients. This has worked out even better than expected. Adam joined AIGAC shortly after founding his own business.

Adam is a 2016 graduate of INSEAD’s Executive Masters in Consulting and Coaching for Change program. The program has given him a strong foundation in core areas of organizational and clinical psychology that relate directly to his work as an admissions consultant and coach. His thesis was on MBA admissions interviews.

He and his wife, Akiko, have been married since 1996. They live in Sapporo from spring to fall and in Chiba (near Tokyo) in the winter.

Scott Edinburgh, Treasurer

Scott earned his BS in Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his MBA from The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania. Scott began his career in management consulting with Deloitte and has run internal strategy teams and worked in corporate development across financial services and travel and hospitality.

Scott founded Personal MBA Coach in 2008 to offer a boutique and personalized approach to MBA and graduate school application consulting. Scott is a speaker at events worldwide on MBA application strategies, and his firm has advised hundreds of applicants throughout the process. His commitment to AIGAC has been increasing in recent years, and he is excited for what is to come with the annual survey presented to admissions directors and AIGAC members.

Candy Lee LaBalle, Director and Conference Committee Co-Chair

Founder of LaBalle Admissions (previously mbaSpain, founded in 2005), Candy is an expert in the educational admissions consulting industry. In addition to her current term on the Board, Candy served as a Board Member in 2012 and 2013. She has chaired or co-chaired several AIGAC conferences including those taking place at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Cornell, Yale SOM, NYU Stern, Kellogg, Chicago Booth, London Business School, INSEAD, HEC Paris, and IESE. Candy is regularly featured in publications about the MBA application process and was voted in 2022 as the number one admissions consultant in the world by Poets&Quants. Candy has a degree in Anthropology and worked as a researcher and travel writer for years. She lives in Madrid.

Prashant Tibrewal, Director & Membership Committee Co-Chair

Prashant is an alum of ESSEC Business School, France (2010) and MIT Sloan School of Management, USA (2021). He is an edupreneur with a specific interest in the international education landscape. Through his admissions consulting ventures AdmitSquare Consulting and ISBmantra, he has personally mentored 1000+ applicants to top-ranked global universities. He is also the founder of GIC Academy, which facilitates in-person short-term programs at international universities, and Alum-n-i, which is an experience-sharing platform between international alumni and applicants.

At AIGAC, Prashant has enjoyed volunteering with the Conference Committee and held the position of Conference Committee Chair for the AIGAC 2022 Conference. Prashant is also trained in Martial Arts, loves playing sports such as Cricket, Tennis, and Table Tennis, and has won Poker games in six countries.

Thomas Kalandranis, Director & Membership Committee Co-Chair

Thomas began his university studies as an aspiring Chemical Engineer, eventually switching to Business Studies, culminating in his MBA from Seattle University (1996). Professionally, Thomas enjoyed a successful corporate career as Regional Sales manager, in the USA and Greece. His
meanderings took him across Latin America, most of Europe, and the Middle East, managing the distribution network of various medical equipment companies.

In 2012, together with his spouse, Dia Gerontoudi, he co-founded the Dia Gerontoudi Prep Center in Athens, a GMAT/GRE prep school, where he took on the role of Head of Admissions Consulting. With scores of successful applicants in the top European and American universities, both in Master and MBA programs, Thomas has established himself as the go-to person for bespoke application consulting and expert interview coaching.

In his spare time, Thomas continues his involvement in sports and fitness, always looking for opportunities to enjoy his definition of heaven: basking in the sun at some forgotten beach on a Greek island.

Preeti Wadekar, Treasurer Elect

Preeti Wadekar is a global higher education consultant and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School. She is also a certified Career, Executive & Life Coach. She brings over 17 years of corporate and international business experience, working with brands such as EY,
Siemens and KPMG in business areas of governance, enterprise risk management, statutory audit, accounting, human resources, project management, behavioural change management & communications, talent management and leadership development.

She also leads the MBA Admissions Consulting team at The Red Pen working with high potential entry-level executives around the world for admissions to competitive global business schools. As a Board member of the Association of Graduate Admissions Consultants, she has unique insights to enable students to make informed choices about global education opportunities, while providing holistic guidance to navigate complex admissions processes.

She has studied and lived in the USA for over 9 years as well as travelled to, worked in and led teams across 25 countries including the UK, Germany, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, France, South Africa, Chile, Brazil and more, enabling her to work seamlessly with culturally diverse clientele and global organisations.

Amit Kapur, Director

Amit is a veteran of Wall Street, large-cap technology companies, and 10+ years at Sparrey Consulting coaching next-generation business leaders into business school, Amit joined SCG full-time in 2018. In his role, Amit is expanding coaching programs, managing alumni relationships, and helping launch new products to supplement SCG’s coaching services. In the meantime, Amit still coaches a cross-section of clients directly, provides a sounding board for other coaches, and celebrates every client’s success with a mixture of fist-bumps and emojis. In his spare time, Amit volunteers at local schools,& loves games, whiskey and creating learning opportunities for his two daughters.

AIGAC Board – Get Involved!

Each year we solicit nominations for Board of Director candidates to run for three seats with a three-year term. Learn more.

Minimum Qualifications for Nominees

AIGAC Individual Consultant or Business Organization member in good standing.
At least three years of experience as an admissions consultant.
At least six months of participation on an AIGAC committee.
Only one person per company or consultancy may serve on the AIGAC Board of Directors at any given time.

The first step towards a board position is to volunteer for one of our committees or suggest a new one if you have great plans or ideas that don’t fit into our current structure. Our current committees (and current chairs in parentheses) are: