There’s a letter, known as The Letter, that’s been making the rounds among MBA students for decades. Although I am a Stanford MBA alum, worked in MBA admissions there for five years, and now work with MBA applicants, I read The Letter for the first time about a week ago when one of my clients asked me what I thought about it.
For those of you who haven’t read it, the letter begins by decrying the lack of institutional knowledge available to entering MBA students. The author attempts to remedy that situation with an analysis of the world.
Here’s my immediate reaction: though I have no argument with The Letter, it’s the perspective of one person. No two MBA experiences are the same, which is one reason I always recommend that clients talk to as many current students and recent alums as possible. The elephant is going to look different to different people, and a program that is a perfect fit for your colleague is not necessarily optimal for you.
Next, be aware that the culture of a two-year program cycles rapidly from year to year. Unlike high school or college, where you spend a couple of years just figuring out what’s going on before you’re expected to pass along your wisdom to the next crop of students, one MBA class can have a different culture from the next. By the time you get through your second year, you will be familiar with three different sets of students: those in the class before yours (whom you revere), your classmates, and the innocents in the class after yours. Some classes are more serious, some more outgoing, some a little more focused on fun than others. One year that I worked at Stanford, a mid-year tragedy cast an almost palpable cloud over the entire school. I’m not sure the students graduating ever got over it.
I have to disagree with The Letter’s author about one premise: I’d say that incoming students are deluged with advice, not all of it consistent. Whom can you trust? I remember the orientation packet I received when I was about to start the program. I probably spent hours reading the profiles of current students, envying them for having made it through the grueling first year, trying to absorb every breadcrumb, hoping it would help guide me to the finish line. But there are no shortcuts: your journey will take you down a road that’s filled with potholes that may jolt you out of your seat. Tempting detours and diversions abound. No amount of preparation is going to soften the ride. Your best bet will be to learn how to handle the unexpected and manage the stress.
As a corollary to that: your MBA classmates will mostly be high-achieving, intense, and competitive. It’s easy, in that kind of environment, to get sucked into a mindset that is both counterproductive and not good for your health, mental or physical (when I was a student, I heard that MBAs comprised a large percentage of students visiting the health care center, and I admit to keeping a bottle of Maalox next to my bed for those middle-of-the-night anxiety attacks.) Don’t forget to take time off, care for yourself, try to get enough sleep (ha) and find something that makes you laugh at least a few times a week.
An MBA program prepares you for the long-term, and some of the best advice you get may not make sense at the time. When I was a student, I was constantly hearing that Organizational Behavior classes were the most important. Small comfort when I was trying to absorb managerial accounting concepts. And some of those lessons didn’t fully sink in until I’d been out of school for years. A lot gets crammed into those two years; you plant dozens of saplings and it may take a decade for those trees to bear fruit. It wasn’t until I was coaching my 8-year-old son’s basketball team – 15 years after I first started at the GSB – that I realized how many lessons learned during Touchy Feely could be applied to unruly third graders.
Which reminds me of another topic I often raise with applicants: you aren’t just signing up for a two-year program; you are joining a family. The intense experience of those two years doesn’t evaporate on graduation day. Your classmates will be in your life, well, forever. They will come to your wedding, you will attend their kids’ christenings and bat mitzvahs; you’ll get together for regular dinners and plan reunions together, at which point you’ll meet some really chill people that somehow you didn’t get to know when you were a student, and perhaps also learn that a lot of other people in your class didn’t like that guy who was always rude to you.
A chunk of The Letter discusses the grading system. Should you be gunning for top grades? Or take advantage of the myriad other opportunities available – opportunities that won’t help your grades but might lead you to your first job out of school or your next mentor or perhaps a serendipitous adventure? As one who was never grade-driven, I had no interest in climbing on to the academic hamster wheel. I did not brown nose professors, I didn’t feel as though I always had to make brilliant points in class, I took the courses that sounded interesting without worrying that they might knock me out of the top 10%. (I will say that the #1 student in my class was a super nice guy – not one of the annoying in-your-face attention-getters that we used to refer to as redhots. And I also haven’t seen a huge correlation between top 10% and subsequent career success. The traits required for top grades aren’t necessarily those that will ensure you reach your goals. I see Shirzad agrees with me on that one.)
But that’s me, and if grades are most important, I get that. Be aware, though, of the tradeoffs.
Finally, and most important, is to find your people. Even if you get to know most of the people in your class – and in a smaller program you can – you won’t love all of them. The admissions officers do their best, but perfection is hard to achieve. (One year when I was working in admissions, we questioned a few of the decisions, especially with one new admit who exhibited all the challenging behaviors of a petty tyrant during Admit Weekend. Could we withdraw an offer of admission simply because someone was arrogant and insufferable? Fortunately, the admit decided not to attend the GSB.) But you will find people that you can trust and whose company you enjoy. I had to smile at The Letter’s characterization of the Reporter, as I spent many happy hours on the Reporter staff, staying up very late to put the newspaper together, going on ice cream runs, and cackling over stories that we didn’t dare publish. We were definitely not cool. Most of us weren’t particularly close friends. But we created a mutual safety net and support system that I didn’t fully appreciate until I had graduated. Being on the newspaper staff helped me keep a proper perspective and maintain my sanity, such as it was.
Every school has lots of clubs, organizations, and informal networks, Figure out who those people are, and take a chance on classmates who may look/act different from those you’ve hung out with in the past. I’m the slowest, most uncoordinated person you’ve ever met, but when someone invited me to go for a run, I went for a run. Latino friends took me to a Cuban dance club in Berkeley. A wild and crazy friend gave me my first tour of San Francisco, insisting we get up at 5 am to catch the first train into the city. I got to know some of the people who worked at the school, getting into conversations with the librarians, with the career center staff, and of course interviewing the admissions director for the Reporter. (For me, it was a relief to talk to regular people who weren’t caught up in the intensity of the student bubble.)
Above all, as I tell my clients, an MBA program is a transformational experience. It won’t change your fundamental self, but you will emerge from those two years with a different mindset, a different perspective on yourself and your life, and a different worldview. I look back on my MBA years as a time-out-of-time, a rare and valuable trip to a parallel universe where anything seemed possible, and magic occurred every day, especially on days when I stepped back from the stressors and let myself experience it.
P.S. The herd is right about one thing: Touchy Feely deserves its reputation. Don’t miss it.
