This is my second post on my business school experience at Yale SOM. I wrote earlier on the application and decision processes here.
Happy holidays! I write in December, near the end of my first semester of school. Here are a few key themes that have stood out so far. The most important one is at the end (a patented writer’s trick to make you read the whole thing, or at least scroll really fast).
Recruiting Early
Consulting and investment banking are the two most common outcomes for students at top business schools—at my school, these tend to combine for 50-60% of each year’s graduating class. These firms offer lucrative jobs, but they are also both some of the more rigorous and demanding places to recruit into.
One redeeming factor, however, is that these firms—which may hire dozens of MBAs every year—are just as interested in finding the right talent as students are in finding the right job. Because of this, many of them offer pre-MBA programs, usually occurring over the summer prior to the first year of the program. Some of these programs are purely “informational”, but they give students a chance to start learning about their options, networking in their fields of interest, and finding a fit a little bit early.
Some firms even offer programs through which candidates can apply early for an internship the following summer. Being part of a pre-MBA fellowship such as Consortium or Forte is also helpful, as it gives members some opportunities to get in front of employers earlier.
The career office at Yale SOM is always quick to remind students that finding an offer early is not normal—it happens to a small handful of folks each year. I did happen, however, to be one of them; I got an internship offer over lunch on the first day of school in August. It just felt like a great fit between myself and the firm—a place where my particular strain of nerdiness would be valuable, and where I could work on problems relevant to my skill sets and interests. Generally speaking, when you find yourself truly enjoying being interviewed, it can be a really good sign that things are clicking.
Although this isn’t a common case, it does happen, and it’s worth trying to get a head start on recruiting. If you find a company that’s a great mutual fit early on in the year, it gives you time to focus on so much else that the business school experience has to offer—and there is a lot going on.
Pseudo-Academia
I married into a long line of healthcare professionals, and I constantly hear wisecracks about “business” and “school” being an oxymoron. These jokes are funny because they are true. Allan Bloom mentioned in his critique of U.S. higher education that MBA’s were an example of “liberal-arts tourists”, a halfhearted expression of academic rigor that falls well short of genuine scholarship.
To be fair, this is not a complete picture. I registered for an econometrics class that I quickly realized was well over my head—basically PhD-level mathematics, using jargon to describe concepts for which I barely understood the layman’s terms—and I quickly dropped it. If you look hard enough you will find academic intensity in the business school…but you do need to look.
What business school does a better job of imparting is a “so what?” focus on why a concept supports a course of action. In this case, the scholarly laxity of business schools gives a clear course of action for students: de-emphasize the academic portion of your experience. Grades are immaterial. Your incremental hours are better spent recruiting and making meaningful relationships with your peers. Such a shift is easier said than done, since most top business school students are used to being good at school. But the marginal returns to academics diminish very quickly.
Life at Warp Speed, or The Ruthless Elimination of Mental Health
This one is really a combination of themes. The main takeaway is this: take care of yourself and your loved ones.
MBA programs go by incredibly quickly. I watched swaths of my class with no prior finance knowledge bust their tails to get internship offers at the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. It’s not that they didn’t deserve them: they sacrificed weekends, nights, and their well-being for it. It’s just that it happens so fast.
There is also so much to do. I remember listening to a podcast that offered advice for incoming MBA students. The key takeaway was that business school is designed to force you to prioritize. Doing everything is impossible. Doing something is imperative. Making tradeoffs is inevitable. Every day there are multiple options for events you can attend over lunch. There are more classes than you can possibly take, more events and clubs than you’ll ever get to be part of, and more people than you’ll be able to meet and establish rapport with.
If you’re the kind of person who needs to sit and think about things before making up your mind, this accelerated pace can make the MBA experience a highly anxious one. You’ll spend half your time wondering if you’re doing enough things, and another half the time certain that you’re doing too much.
Throughout these mental gymnastics, it’s important to remember that MBA students have incredibly diverse backgrounds and incredibly disparate goals. It is so easy for students to define success based on short-term measurables like compensation (or grades, for that matter). But the fact is that everyone has different skills and interests, and they are using the MBA to reach a different goals. Comparing yourself to your peers in this sense is almost ridiculous, and yet we do it all the time.
The phrase we have often invoked in discussing these differences as classmates is this: “We optimize for different things.” Or, as our professor would say, “We formulate the objective function values of our LP models in different ways.” Whether you say it in the normal way or the boring way, it still holds: business school is a puzzle with a thousand solutions, and yours doesn’t need to look the same as someone else’s.
Finally, a note on balance.
Bear in mind, I came to business school as a Christian, seeking to continue building my relationship with God, and with a wife and two kids, whom I love and do not want to simply abandon while I pursue my degree. Because of this, I have more “non-business-school responsibilities” than some others, but balance is important even without these additional concerns.
Our Christian group on campus recently read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, which is essentially exactly what it sounds like: a study on how to try and slow down, for the sake of our hearts and our relationships to God. Whether you are a Christian or not, you will likely find business school as an intensely hurried time. It is almost axiomatic that you must take breaks. You must stop, rest, and put school away from time to time.
Why do I use the word “axiomatic”? The computers at Boeing, where I used to work, come loaded with a software that tracks the intensity of your mouse and keyboard usage throughout the day. If at any point you are clicking too frequently (say, from using Excel like a novice) or typing too quickly (say, from using Excel like a banker), a reminder will flash on your screen, prompting you to take a break. You can select “Skip Break” if you dare, but do this enough times and your computer will essentially force you to stop for five minutes and sit with your hands in your lap, or, better yet, follow along with the ergonomic stretching demonstration now playing on your screen.
Life tends to play out in this same way. If you don’t find margins to rest, recharge, enjoy time with loved ones, and set school aside, life will dictate when your breaks are. Maybe you’ll get the flu for two weeks (from which I’ve just recovered), or your hair will fall out (haven’t recovered yet), or the people closest to you will sound the alarm that your pace cannot be sustained (happens often). Give yourself space to breathe. School does not need to run your life.
It is a constant struggle to find the balance between working hard and overworking. MBA students tend to be ambitious and competitive, and going full-speed toward their goals will come naturally to them. Most of my classmates are not the sort of people who need motivation or urging to get things done. But many of them are—including me—prone to overdoing it and burning out. Avoid this. Find the pace that you can sustain.
Take care of yourselves, everyone. Happy holidays!