5 Years Out: A More Candid Reflection on My MBA Experience
Or, “MBA things I didn’t know or couldn’t write about when I was in my MBA program and blogging about my MBA.”
In the last week, business school has become very much on my mind: friends from my program are coming back to Boston for on-campus recruiting, the admissions office is hosting ‘welcome’ drinks events for students admitted in Round 1 for the Class of 2021, I’m getting invitations to come to various alumni events back on campus, and most of all, friends are asking me to help them with their applications to graduate school.
Whenever people ask me for application advice, it’s as much an opportunity for me to analyze and enhance their candidacy story as it is for me to reflect on mine — both the story that was true to me when I was about to start in fall 2014 and the story I’d tell now if I were to apply to do it all over again. Helping others is also an opportunity for me to reflect on the value of these program, for which, in the case of a MBA, the two years spent on a campus (or more if you’re part-time or joint degree) is only the starting point.
Having lived through business school and now been out of it longer than I had been in it, I can offer a different perspective that the “front lines” one I had offered while writing blog posts throughout my time at the program (most of which can be accessed here). I wouldn’t say I’ve accumulated terribly much “wisdom” since then, and certainly haven’t gotten much distance from business school from a geographical perspective (I work barely a mile away from Sloan), but the passage of time since writing applications and graduation has gives me the courage to write about the things I couldn’t admit to myself — or to others — then.
This post is a collection of truths about my own experience and tidbits of tough love for those who are considering a MBA or other graduate school programs at competitive institutions.
Let’s start with the truth: I was pretty unhappy in business school
In fact, I felt quite low for much of it. All the brochures with glossy pictures of happy, diverse faces and beautiful facilities are just that — glossies. The same goes for all the “user-generated content” of students in MBA programs who are instagramming their latest parties and travel adventures. Those pictures are curated and filtered. If I had taken pictures of what I was really doing and how I actually felt for much of those two years, those pictures would be encapsulated by something like the “This is fine” meme (which has an interesting backstory):
Even though there were definitely far worse things happening in the world outside of my bubble of b-school privilege in 2014–2016, my internal world, like the room in the comic, was on fire. I felt some mix of anxiety and depression on the daily while enrolled in the program, and while I suffered from both well before starting my MBA, the circumstances of the program made them harder to manage.
No matter how much I prepared myself to be overwhelmed by all the new people, unfamiliar coursework, and the latent career pressure that would build to an intolerable crescendo in winter of first year and fall of second year, I couldn’t brace myself well enough. I instantly overcommitted to meaningless leadership positions in various clubs, before paring my nine or ten obligations down to one. I stressed out about my grades until I finally internalized the truth that the grades didn’t matter. The best thing I did for myself was make the deliberate choice to not do any consulting recruiting, but that also created a different kind of challenge: finding the rare thing that wasn’t consulting that a generalist like me could be good at, since did not see myself leaning into operations, finance, or analytics. I also came in on the younger end of my class (most people have around four or more years of post-college work experience; I’d strung together two years). Since the prior experiences I had had were far less formal from a business perspective, I wasn’t accustomed to the more corporate worlds my peers were coming from, the pace at which they operated, and the types of expectations to which they were accustomed.
Five years and two full-time jobs later, my skin is significantly thicker than it was when I was a wide-eyed applicant to my MBA program (not to mention, almost two years of jiu-jitsu later, my body and mind are stronger than they were then, as well). If I were starting this fall as a member of the Class of 2021, I think I’d be far better equipped to deal with some of the pressure I experienced as a member of the Class of 2016, though I imagine that I would still have oscillated between anxiety and depression on the daily.
All of this is to say that you may be happy when you get into business school, you won’t always be happy while you’re in business school. Even if you don’t struggle with your mental health, it’s hard to reconcile the external marketing of MBA programs with the internal reality of that experience.
Business school did prepare me for the real world — though not in the ways I expected
Whenever anyone asks me about what I thought about my time at business school — whether it’s a prospective student, a recruiter, family member, or friend — I say that I struggled a lot when I was there, but it did pay off. It was a two-year crash course in the business world common sense I’d later apply firsthand every day at my jobs post-MBA.
Gone would be the pre-MBA days of my quietly and comfortably holing up in a Boston coffee shop or a hotel room in Shanghai and writing case studies about businesses in China. Here to stay would be bustling open office plans, meetings after meetings, and plenty of challenging projects and people to keep me busy throughout the day and up throughout the night (not to say I’m up all night, but I still work with folks in China who work “12 or 13 hours into the future,” as I like to say, and certain decisions and management of cross-team dependencies rely on communications during our shared hours of wakefulness, either 7PM-11PM or 7AM-11AM).
Dealing with difficult people, structuring big projects, managing expectations, learning how to communicate with and align different pieces of an organization, the MBA braced me for all of that through countless group projects, constant confrontation with unfamiliar subject matter (and having to make sense of it), and various sorts of hard work powered by plenty of coffee.
Your MBA does not make you special
Elite MBA programs — and undergraduate programs, for that matter — cultivate a bit of a “special snowflake” mentality that anyone in a program should prepare to rapidly snap out of upon graduation. When I graduated from undergrad (I went to Princeton), I walked out of the FitzRandolph Gate without a job (which sucked), but because my first job was as a researcher at Harvard, I was still insulated by the academic elite bubble able to hold onto some flavor of the snowflake mentality.
After getting admitted to a MBA program, spending two years having it communicated to you how special you are and how you can do anything and everything you want (either implicitly or explicitly or both), and having companies come to YOU rather than you go to THEM for internships and jobs, it’s easy to think that you are entitled to everything that comes afterward. I’d argue MIT is far more tempered (whether deliberately or indeliberately) than other business schools when it comes to inflating the egos of its students and their sense of potential. It’s a rude awakening coming back into the real world and no one giving a fuck about your MBA — at least it was for me, coming into a product management role in the tech space, where I was instantly and consistently humbled (and continue to be). The MBA is prized in some fields (consulting, banks) or at some companies (Amazon, Wayfair, in some parts of the company), but not in others (startups). At some of those companies, you need the MBA to move up in the hierarchy and are essentially stalled without it — your work and its merit only take you so far without the school on your resume and the stamp of approval that comes with it. That isn’t true for everyone, though, and it certainly hasn’t been true for me.
In the last few years, I’ve found that few people, aside from the occasional recruiter, Sloan alumni, and prospective MBAs, show much care for or interest in my MBA. Maybe it’s because I’ve built my career in startup-style teams (even if in more established tech companies), but no one I’ve worked with cares about my degree. It got me in the door, but I like to think that the quality of my work is what gets me hired in this industry and makes me valuable.
“Remember who you are and what you are doing .” Or try to, anyway.
One current Sloan student captured this sentiment well in a blog post on the Sloan student blogs — kudos, Elias.
Going to business school can be like drinking from the Lethe, one of the lesser known rivers of the Underworld in Greek mythology (everyone knows Styx). When souls drink from the Lethe, they forget their earthly life and from there are able to be reincarnated.
Similarly, when shiny MBAs enter business school, they “drink the Kool-aid” and often forget who they were outside of it and leave “reincarnated” as consultants and whatever else the program specializes in. Put bluntly and based on what I know, this is my take: MIT pumps out tech company product managers, operations experts, and analytics professionals; Kellogg and NYU Stern are known for producing brand managers for the big CPG companies like Unilever and Procter and Gamble. Stanford GSB and HBS push people toward whatever is marketed as the trendiest and most prestigious post-MBA path at the time. Based on a conversation with a friend who is a first year at HBS, I think the school is pushing venture capital and entrepreneurship of late. There’s a focus on tech at both schools, but if I had to guess, it’s probably stronger at GSB because of its location in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Speaking as one of the “reincarnated” I’m guilty as charged: I applied to MIT Sloan in hopes of scaling my food startup. When I began the program, I changed my plan to try working at a big food company instead of my startup. When I graduated from the program, I had a job as a product manager at a tech company.
The advice I once received from a mentor was a line from Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius,” to, “Remember who you are and what you are doing.” It’s far easier said than done. Sometimes, you don’t even realize it’s happened until after the fact. It’s easy to forget who you are and what you want to be when you’re in the company of so many people who are lost or become lost upon arrival. Plenty of people go to business school less because they believe the degree will give them value and more because they don’t know what they want to do and are using the two year hiatus from work to figure it out. Plenty more people go into the program having a plan for what they want to do and getting sucked up into on-campus recruiting and the peer pressure that comes along with it.
At the time, I would never admit it, but three years later, it’s easy to say it: I took the first offer from the first place that would hire me not because it was what I genuinely wanted to do, but because I was scared to graduate without a job. I was stressed out by being in the (perceived) minority of folks who hadn’t locked up a full-time offer by the beginning of second year. I did my best to rationalize my decision to go work at a furniture company, but I knew my heart wasn’t in it. Only now, three years later and doing a deep-dive on my professional ambitions, do I feel like I am approaching realignment of my career with who I am and what I want to be doing. Needless to say, it’s got nothing to do with furniture. For those in programs now or about to enter one, I urge you: “Remember who you are and what you are doing — or try to, anyway.”
Lastly, the “free advice” that I tell pretty much everyone who calls me with advice
- On what it’s like to be in business school: refer to the “Three S’s”: “School. Sleep. Social Life. Pick two out of three.”
- On applying to business school: a complete application story will explain the following: why you want the degree, why you want it now, and how a degree from that specific program takes you from where you are to where you want to be. If you can, make your story as real as you can. Make it impossible for them to think of you as a number. Also, the application process is difficult and stressful, but it’s also a blessing in disguise: it’s valuable because it forces you to deliberately reflect on who you are, how you got to where you are, and what you want. Lean into the suck and try to enjoy it — it will make you better on the other side
- On the value of business school: As I see it, the education, the career switch/advancement, and the network are the three core reasons people choose to attend business school. Every person will rank those in a different order as part of their “Why MBA.” When I applied, I ordered those three reasons with the career switch at the top of the list, then the education, and then the network. What’s paying off the most is the career switch, followed by the network, followed by the education. I barely remember most of what I learned in class. In another 5 years, I predict the network will easily take the number one spot on that list.
- On life after business school: you’ll probably leave your post-MBA job within a year or two. It’s okay. It happens to the best of us. It happened to me. I turned out fine. Not “dog in a room on fire” fine. Actually, genuinely fine.
