Daydreaming

All good advice on writing b-school essays includes a mention of the word 'introspection'. It means thinking about what you want to do when you grow up. Why is it necessary? Because admission committees are not impressed with people who want to get their MBA at this-and-that school because it 'seems like a fun thing to do'.

If you are like me, you didn't know what your life goal was. I still don't. And paradoxically, Mr and Mrs Adcom, my life goal kind of depends on whether I will be accepted to your top-10 school. If I get rejected everywhere, maybe my ambition to become CEO of GE one day isn't so realistic after all. But I don't know that yet, now do I?

The problem with all this introspection is that your life plan needs to --
1) necessitate an MBA,
2) necessitate an MBA from school XYZ,
3) be not too far divorced from what you have done with your life so far.

If it doesn't meet these criteria, you'll have explaining to do. If your life goal doesn't require an MBA specifically from Harvard, then what business do you have applying there? If you're a poet with an i-banking dream, what have you done so far to achieve that? Is this your first step?

As a result, most candidates stop dreaming about becoming an astronaut and start thinking about a goal that is not too far from reality, but above all is saleable to a business school. Pick a story and start living it. Write about it passionately in your essays, and speak about it passionately in your interviews.

Stanford's Derrick Bolton, like many admission directors, tells us that b-school applications should not be a marketing exercise, but an accounting exercise. Don't try to be someone other than yourself, we want to hear your 'true voice'. I can understand how b-schools don't want people bullshitting them, but I find it hard to believe that naked truths increase chance of admission. What matters to me most? Sex, money, and watching Seinfeld reruns. How's that for 'focused interests'?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not bitter about being rejected at Stanford, nor do I think the adcom world is evil. I just think b-school essays, like job interviews, like first dates, need a good amount of marketing to be successful. And that's OK. I just don't buy any adcom drivel that denies this.

Imagine meeting a successful H/S/W/K applicant at a birthday party. Ask him/her why he/she *really* wanted to go to b-school. Do you think they would recite their essays? How many times do you think the words "money" and "fun" would come up? Have they been 100% sincere in their applications? No. Did they pull off a successful marketing exercise? Yes.

Once you're in, nobody cares what your story was anymore. Most schools pride themselves on the 'transformational' nature of their MBA program, yet don't like it when candidates acknowledge this and conclude that formulating a post-MBA goal before b-school is mostly pointless.

Let's face it. Unless you've diligently walked the Lemming March that Robert Reid talks about in his book on HBS Year 1, you probably do not have your life plan figured out and are applying to expensive 2-year full-time MBA programs so that you can take full advantage of recruiting and networking, which will facilitate a career change -- in whatever direction.

I don't want to rub it in to any applicants reading this, but I am very happy about having passed that 'life story' hurdle, and can now daydream about all the new opportunities that will be coming my way. My "Why MBA", "Why school", "Short/Long-term Goals" stories were all nicely developed, but in reality I knew that this story was going to be just one of many possibilities.

And that is why this post is titled 'Daydreaming'.

Now that I'm in a top-10 school, I can (no -- need to) daydream about career paths that two months ago I thought may be well out of my reach given enough ding letters. I have since been flirting with the idea of becoming an i-banker. Why? Well, for the same reason a dog licks his balls -- because he can. It's nice to be reading up on career paths, average workweeks, and compensation averages at the top i-banking firms, because hey, I might just be interviewing with them for a summer position within a year...!

And no, that's not what I wrote in my essays.