Episode 2: "Why do you want to do an MBA?"

Disclaimer: This isn't Poets and Quants. I'm not trying to sell you on applying to business school. My experiences and opinions aren't meant to translate for everyone.

I spent my twenties trying to get into business school. In 2018, I had applied to HBS, MIT Sloan, Booth, Stanford GBS and Wharton. I was rejected from all of them. I obsessed about that rejection for at least the next four years until, in an effort best described as an exorcism, I re-applied in 2022.

In 2019, I got a job at Google, an end-state that many MBA candidates desire. By 2022, I had a promotion under my belt, a significant network of genuine friends, mentors and well-wishers that I had made through work. I lived in New York City, and I had enough time to pursue creative hobbies like performing comedy, writing and designing. So why, really, should I change all of that to be unemployed and significantly poorer for an MBA?

The Answer I Tell Myself

I applied to get an MBA because I simply did not want to feel beholden to, or intimidated by, the concept of money.

I started my career in machine learning research and at the beginning of the Dunning-Kruger curve. I had many uncharitable moments when I needed to prove to people I was smart, and I made sure that people understood that I Have A Complex Job You Probably Couldn't Understand.

But I was also most susceptible to the weapon I wielded. For a long time, I believed that people who worked in Corporate Finance or were accepted to Y Combinator possessed some secret genius that philistines like me could not even begin to comprehend. Even if I tried to read about it in my spare time (which I didn’t make for this) or take Coursera classes (which I didn’t feel committed to), I felt that I wouldn't ever be able to grasp how money worked because I felt afraid of this mystical, elusive and evidently powerful concept.

As of today, my declared majors are Finance and Entrepreneurship. Just as Jane Goodall lived among the chimpanzees for years in order to explain their behaviors, so too am I living among the Finance Bros and Entrepreneurs to realize that they are people just like me.

(Yikes?)

I applied to get an MBA because of my parents. My parents believe that my education would not be complete without a graduate degree, and that their fundamental duty as parents would not be fulfilled until I had one. Unironically, my parents were financially planning for my education at least 3 months before I was born. To that end, I have witnessed my parents make enormous sacrifices so that I would never have to be in debt to be educated.

My parents’ fiscal discipline was also partly to be blamed for why I didn’t understand money. Their operating logic was very simple and very debt-averse. For education and schooling, there was no budget. For everything else, if we couldn’t afford it we didn’t have it. To owe other people/entities money was more shameful than to possess the item in question. This means I didn’t understand the concept of a loan or of negotiating a price, and this is also why my parents were terrified of letting me have a credit card because America doesn’t recognize you as a real person until you are in debt. I wanted to go to business school so that my parents could exhale.

I will also say that I got lucky with timing. By the time my applications were submitted, there were whispers of a downsizing in tech in 2023. Instead of figuring out the mess of layoffs or interpret the general paranoia, I thought I would sit this one out.

The Answer That The School Accepted

Let's consider HBS, Stanford GSB and Wharton and how they ask you why you want to do an MBA.

HBS begins with the metaphysical. The prompt is that there is no prompt: Please include anything else you might want to consider as part of your candidacy to Harvard Business School [900 words]. The word-limit went into effect in 2019, so when I had applied in 2018, you could write literally anything you wanted.

HBS releases a magazine called The Harbus, which contained 10 anonymized essays of the admitted class that year. I bought a copy to really understand what the admissions committee really cared to know. A woman from the Middle East wrote about her experience of wearing a hijab at her corporate workplace. A man from Illinois wrote about using leadership strategies to convince his 6-year-old son into vegan snacks. Someone climbed a mountain in 70 words. A war refugee compressed a detailed immigration history in 3000 words. I imagine the point was to behold he diversity of the HBS community and I want to imagine that by “being myself”, I too can be a member of this community.

Being rejected for “being myself” in 2018 with no feedback by an invisible and faceless entity gave me the chip to carry on my shoulder for four years. And even then, I hesitated with “being myself” when a 9-ish% admission rate and a $250 application fee was at stake.

Stanford is also existentialist, but in a flirty manner. What matters the most to you and why? (Recommended 600 words) and Why Stanford (Recommended 400 words). This is a "be yourself" followed by a "why me". You see the operational constraint here? You can only share a core value that somehow involves Stanford in it, which implies that this MBA has to be so fundamental to you that without it you would lose a way to define yourself. I've tried answering this question twice, and Stanford rejected me both times.

Wharton asks two questions, How do you plan to use the Wharton MBA program to help you achieve your future professional goals? (500 words) and How do you plan to make specific, meaningful contributions to the Wharton community? (400 words). It sounds transactional: what do we do for you and what do you do for us. I found it refreshingly transparent, compI found it more transparent than having to dig up a deep trauma or search for meaning in order to get a graduate degree.

I told Wharton that I wanted to do entrepreneurship and finance because I believe that tech entrepreneurs need to understand finance in order to do their jobs better, and because I hoped to be one someday. In return, I claimed to contribute my menacing sense of humor and devastating cultural critiques (this blog).

The Answers I Tell Strangers

Plenty of my colleagues in tech don't see the value in getting an MBA as a career accelerant, and believe that I am making a mistake. Many don't understand how business is something you can be educated about, because learning “business skills” is something that happens on the job. People find it hard to accept that academic rigors can impart skills like plasticity, adaptability, change management, negotiation, leadership and other abstract nouns that have been bastardized into meaningless buzzwords.

So I like to play this as a guessing game.

For immigrants, an MBA in opens up opportunities for employment in the US. For those who pivot their careers entirely (artists who want to become investors), an MBA is a good foothold to step into the new role they want to do. For military veterans, for parents of very young children, for people actually burnt out by the stress of corporate hours, for people looking for something non-volatile to do in these uncertain times, an MBA is also a two-year pocket of time where such people can safely disconnect and transition to a different lifestyle. Colloquially, a full-time MBA represents a two-year long vacation with lots of partying masquerading as Networking™. It’s a place for a lot of expensive international travel, for lasting friendships and for even finding romantic partners.

Then, I like to hear interpretations of the persona they think best fits the bill.

Thanks for reading thus far. If you are considering applying to business school or want to protect a loved one from doing so, please feel free to subscribe or forward this email to them.