Everyone in business school has a story. Without a story, we wouldn’t be here.
Our story is the story of why we belong in business school, what we bring to business school, where we are going after business school, and, most importantly, why our acceptance into business school is such a preordained inevitability, the culmination of so many interlocking forces of history and biology and destiny, that for an admissions officer to stand in our way would be tantamount to spitting in the eye of God.
We tell this story in our application essays, those 1,000-word masterpieces that strive to convey the following:
- I am an appealing, highly successful person.
- I do not need business school. I will conquer the universe with or without an MBA degree. I am a force of light and good.
- Nevertheless, as part of my meticulous life career plan (of which I am presently executing year 8 of 44, exactly as I anticipated I would), I have determined that my attendance at your institution would be to our mutual advantage for reasons X, Y, and, let us not forget, Z.
- The apparent holes in my employment, academic, and/or criminal record, though seemingly so gaping that you could steer the proverbial zeppelin through them, are, in fact, not holes at all. Quick, look over there!
- I am a motivated, highly appealing person. I am driving my roadster down the Highway of Success, navigating by the shining light of my own personal sense of purpose, my tank topped up with high-octane ambition. I know where I’m going and how I’ll get there. Vroom!
1,000 words are not a lot of words. Let’s see how this works in practice, with two different versions of my own life story.
Version 1: Steinosaur seeks a clue
I graduated from Stanford in ‘95 prepared for everything except employment. Having recently chucked my plan to pursue a PhD in biology, I spent an unpleasant last summer at home in Boston and then moved back to California, resolved to get into medical school as quickly as humanly possible. After all, I was 21 years old. My life was slipping away.
Although I had reconciled myself to the fact that a degree in biology preordained me to a career in medicine, I was determined not to go gently into that good night. I yearned for a hook, a twist, a path less followed. Fortunately, in my senior year of college, I had discovered a liking and an aptitude for computers. No surprise there, really; I’m frequently discovering likings and aptitudes. That is what dilettantes do.
Nevertheless, this one seemed worth pursuing. Computers were somehow important to medicine, I reckoned, and mixing the two might rescue me from a lifetime of asking people to turn their heads and cough. So I hurled myself at the Stanford Department of Medical Informatics until they agreed to take me on as a volunteer research assistant, a position that quickly turned into my first real paying job.
(Incidentally, I’ve been immortalized on the department’s web site, in a god-awful picture taken shortly after I shaved my head for the first time. I’m the guy in the upper-right hand corner pointing at a chalkboard or something, looking as though I was recently rescued from a refugee camp. This picture continues to baffle me. What could I possibly be pontificating about, I who at the time knew nothing about either medicine or computers? Presumably I’m saying something along the lines of, “Duhhh, I made a drawing of a bunny. Look at the bunny!”)
Six months later, while walking across the parking lot in front of my lab, I had an epiphany. (I mention the parking lot only because, in my experience, this is how epiphanies take place: small thoughts with big consequences that occur in unremarkable places. Nine years later, I can still see the damned parking lot.) The epiphany was, in a nutshell, fuck medicine. I liked computers, and although I didn’t think a self-taught programmer with a biology degree was particularly employable, I figured I could apply myself and maybe take some additional classes — get a Masters even — and then find a job in the industry.
I was an idiot. Of course I was employable. I was working in a computer research lab at Stanford, the beating heart of Silicon Valley. It was 1996, for Christ’s sake. Netscape had just gone public. Furloughed inmates with typing skills were getting six-figure tech jobs. The bubble economy was raging. It was like the ’80s on Wall Street all over again: programmers swinging from chandeliers, snorting coke off their Palm Pilots and all that. I called up my programmer friend for some general advice, and three weeks later I had a job slinging code at a hot, hot, hot enterprise software company in Austin, Texas.
The next few years passed predictably. I failed to get rich. I burned out several times. I liberally abused my employers’ generous vacation policies. I bounced through a few different startups. I got thrown upstairs into ever more senior and “customer-facing” positions. I earned a great salary. Life was OK.
Two years ago, I faced one of those unhappy decision points. My job was fine, so far as it went, but it seemed unlikely to get any better. I was on a career track, and that track didn’t lead anywhere that particularly interested me. 28 seemed like an awfully young age to have locked myself into unexciting future. My longstanding dream of being the first person to circumnavigate the globe with only a backpack and a handful of nonrefundable plane tickets seemed increasingly out of grasp. With all of these considerations in mind, an unpleasant boss was the final kick in the ass I needed to quit my job and hit the road. I purposely had no plan in mind for when I returned. I didn’t even have a return date. I would travel until I no longer enjoyed traveling, and then figure out my next step. Business school was not even a germ of a seed of kernel of an idea at this point.
Midway through my trip, I realized that it might not be such a hot idea to leave all the job searching to the very end. I returned to the States to organize a little career fair for myself, relying heavily on the kindness of a friend who works in international development. International development (which can be defined, roughly speaking, as trying to make poor countries less poor) had been a back-of-the-head interest of mine for a while. A Stanford professor recommended business school as an entree into the field. About four months later I was accepted at Wharton. I left the States again to pedal across Asia.
The primary appeal of business school is that 1) MBA programs are only two years long; 2) the degree is terminal, meaning I’m not expected to continue on to get a PhD; and 3) the degree is general — I’m not locked into any particular career path. So here I am, and I’ve got two years to figure out what comes next.
So that’s version 1 of my life story. Compelling, no? I come across as dynamic, driven, engaged? Stay tuned for version 2, the version that appears in my application essays, which I will save for a later date. This post is already longer than I expected, and, at 9:30 on a Friday night, I’m only halfway through the marketing case I have to write up for tomorrow…
