一年级学生谈why mba (Washington, Arizona, Cornell, LBS, Wharton)

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Anne Turchi: A Jump Into B-School (University of Washington)

"I'm taking this leap because I am shocked and amazed at the impact and growth that private enterprise has had on our culture, and I'm angry that the non-profit and public sector hasn't kept up."

My first risk was even considering business school at all. Six years ago I was an arty smarty undergraduate at Emory University with a mild contempt for our campus business school: a brand-new monstrosity that cast a long shadow over the adjacent rickety theater building I liked to frequent. I stayed far away from this long shadow, with its rumored remote-control mini-blinds, three-day weekends, and free keg parties. Not my thing.

After graduating, I entered a career I perceived to be on the opposite end, first as a social worker and later as a program director for a large non-profit (YMCA). I began to realize that maybe the public and private sectors weren't as different as I'd thought. I noticed the people I worked with were all, like myself, more passionate about the "cause" than about creating organizations that could serve their missions efficiently. Pretty soon I began to think that maybe, just maybe, business-trained folks might be able to deliver some valuable benefits to the non-profit world.

When I was admitted to the University of Washington, I took another risk and posted a message on the University of Washington's New Students' Discussion Board, my first experience participating in such a high-tech instant friendship tool. I tried hard to sound friendly and comfortable. Here's what I wrote:

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BESTING THE BEAST.  As for applying, begin early, know what you want, and be very ready to answer the question: Why MBA? Why now? Why our school? You need to have these questions down. Yes, you need to knock out the GMAT, get your recommenders prepped to say wonderful things about you, and write about the time you saved XYZ Company from impending disaster while in your ample spare time leading the construction of an orphanage in Zaire. (Of course, you run and win marathons and paid your way through Yale, too, running a hedge fund on your laptop.)

Seriously, the messaging is crucial. You have to sell yourself as a low-risk admit who is self-actualized (not just type-A) and able to get the most out of their specific program. You need to really add to their community. So, know what makes you unique. I thought at first as a Caucasian consultant with an engineering background and scattershot extra-work leadership, I was bland. I then invested considerable time highlighting my uniqueness (work overseas building churches, founding a cancer advocacy nonprofit with my physician father, you get the idea), and saw my unique story begin to bubble to the surface. Only one of my core essays discussed work.

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BESTING THE BEAST.  As for applying, begin early, know what you want, and be very ready to answer the question: Why MBA? Why now? Why our school? You need to have these questions down. Yes, you need to knock out the GMAT, get your recommenders prepped to say wonderful things about you, and write about the time you saved XYZ Company from impending disaster while in your ample spare time leading the construction of an orphanage in Zaire. (Of course, you run and win marathons and paid your way through Yale, too, running a hedge fund on your laptop.)

Seriously, the messaging is crucial. You have to sell yourself as a low-risk admit who is self-actualized (not just type-A) and able to get the most out of their specific program. You need to really add to their community. So, know what makes you unique. I thought at first as a Caucasian consultant with an engineering background and scattershot extra-work leadership, I was bland. I then invested considerable time highlighting my uniqueness (work overseas building churches, founding a cancer advocacy nonprofit with my physician father, you get the idea), and saw my unique story begin to bubble to the surface. Only one of my core essays discussed work.

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Wharton is major-based and aggressively academic (though not nearly as much as, say, Chicago, I think), so you really have the opportunity to learn more from a skills perspective than you would in a purely case-based environment. Wharton prides itself on substance, navigating the fine line between textbook skills and the real-world experience that I think this is crucial to attaining both the "CEO perspective" and the operational know-how to control details and be successful at all levels of an organization.

Wharton has also impressed me with its driven community. To a high degree, students mold the experience, driving curriculum change, club formation, career development, and a very full social life that always has you going, talking, drinking. I think our next event is Walnut Walk, where the school goes bar-hopping wearing formal business attire up top and bedtime apparel (boxers for guys, for girls I don't know what) down below.

More dramatic than this re-entry into such a collegiate social life, though, has been re-entry into an academic environment as immersive as Wharton's.

Missing the occasional class is not an option and case preparation is prerequisite; pity the fool who gets cold-called in marketing without adequate analysis in paw. And then there's the equally odd-feeling transition which I can already feel sneaking up on me of re-entering the "real world" this summer and then after school. Assuming an entrepreneurial tech or private equity firm doesn't nab my interest, I'll be moving back into consulting (yes, more case interviews come February!). Ideally, I'd then move into an internal strategy capacity to gain greater operational exposure. My long-term goal is to get into VC and start my own technology company focused on wireless software and emerging applications, but not necessarily in that order, while also keeping up my nonprofit involvement.

Getting my MBA at Wharton is an integral piece of this career jigsaw puzzle. From my $135K investment, I hope to gain a sound set of management skills, a grounding in finance and marketing, a diverse and successful set of lifelong peers, plus personal branding that will follow me as I move from consulting into private equity, business ownership, and wherever else I want to go.

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In 2000, I accepted a full-time offer from a young firm in Boston named Nextera (also now defunct), where I "helped build a beta site for an incubated financial services dot-com," among other things. Mostly I played foosball. The whole experience was so 2000 — the Aeron chair, exposed brick, leverage your core competencies rigmarole. And, yep, I'm 22 and never had a real job, so you better listen up.

To the surprise of everyone except everyone, we were all soon laid off. I spent the next two-and-a-half years in multifarious roles: project manager for a Delaware IT firm, helping with a faith-based philanthropy group in Cambodia and Vietnam, waiter/bartender in Boston's Beacon Hill, and working with high-powered attorneys and Ph.D.s down in Washington developing epidemiological damage models in support of nine-figure asbestos bankruptcy settlements.

I thought about applying to B-school, but I decided I needed (and wanted) a broader consulting experience beforehand. In 2003, I moved to a 60-person strategy consulting firm in northern Virginia, Dean & Company, where I worked as a generalist strategy consultant for telecom, banking, and even weather forecasting clients. "Typical" projects there were not, but Dean's consulting practice does skew towards data- and operations-focused cases. I traveled about 25% of the time, and, generally, the people were mind-bogglingly intelligent and quite quirky, but I guess those go hand-in-hand. The experience certainly lived up to its educational expectations.

THE WHARTON WAY.  So that's it. I still consider myself a consultant, going so far as to interview for and get a paid MBA consultant position with Wharton's Small Business Development Center where I'll be working with sub-$10M firms looking to grow or change their business (stay tuned for more on SBDC). As far as my in-classroom experience, I'm looking to build my hard skills, especially in finance, hence the decision to attend Don Trump's "School of fin-ANTS." Like Duke, though, Wharton is so much more. I'm actually planning on steering clear of all the intense finance classes with the Gordon Gekko wannabes, instead getting my quant base out of the way quickly and shifting focus to marketing, entrepreneurship and general management.

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Specifically, I've decided on Wharton. I started August 3 so there was little time for far-flung, post-work summer trips to Southeast Asia or fantastic KAOS gigs like they have at Kellogg. Penn instead has a mandatory pre-term where you brush up on math, stats, and microeconomics, attempting to close the skills gap with the Wall Street wonks in accounting and finance. Except for the math test you must pass (the hurdle is a 55%; surprisingly, folks still failed), Wharton Pre-Term was in reality a month-long happy hour meant to coalesce the class and introduce everyone to Philadelphia, cheesesteaks, and college (again!). It was an absolute blast.

ME IN AN AIRLINE PEANUTSHELL.  Some highlights from the G.R.A. resume: I graduated from Duke in 2000, where, according to Tom Wolfe, "the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns" play backdrop to a jock-obsessed, anti-intellectual climate. Hogwash. Yes, basketball's big, but Duke's much more. I was a civil engineering major but eschewed my formative passions of art, architecture, and design in exchange for a promising and hopefully lucrative career in Internet something-or-other . . . maybe start my own sock puppet online pet store or better.

In 1998, I founded a Web design company, A-k Presence, and was immediately haranguing clients, building Web sites while abroad in Australia, and developing managerial skills shepherding programmers at Duke and MIT. I also interned with a "Big 5" e-strategy outfit and oversaw marketing for OnCampusRecruiter, a now defunct dot-com.

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Grant Allen: Who I Am, and Why B-School Is for Me (Wharton)

"From my $135K investment, I hope to gain a sound set of management skills, a grounding in finance and marketing, a diverse and successful set of lifelong peers, plus personal branding..."

CONSULTING TO PHILADELPHIA.  As a thus-far career consultant, it continually amazes me how much time you devote to logistics. Meetings, deadlines, deliverables, travel – they define your life. Who's interviewing Ms. Soanso and Mr. Bigswingin'? That pack's due when? Who's finalizing our flights? And which airline has the prime frequent-flyer program? (Answer: Continental.)

Winding down my job this past June, I remember sitting in my Cleveland hotel room at 11 p.m. sketching out an agenda for the next day's client meeting, idly wondering if I made the right choice staying at the Ritz Carlton when the outmoded Marriott was so much closer to the client. My thoughts were thick from the molasses politics of the day's meetings and the client's oracular business jargon . . . "Vision Meetings" and "Domain Capabilities" . . . Let's throw it up against the wall and see what sticks, then we can get down to brass tacks. It was a too-real case of b.s. bingo gone acutely awry.

This is an admittedly clichéd example but, as with reputations, clichés usually have some basis in fact. Mostly, though, I found the industry to be exciting, inherently varied, and quite rewarding. Yes, arduous travel can be part of the equation and client inertia can boil your blood, but that's the job and it requires patience, leadership, keen communications, and mental dexterity to tender value and succeed. I loved it.

For me, consulting provided a broad business education rather quickly by letting me "have at it" with a slew of business problems across a broad industry spectrum. These often enervating, sometimes migraine-inducing problems provide variety (I get bored fantastically easily), creativity (I used to oil paint, now I get paid to think), and challenge. Gaining the necessary hard skills so I can continue business leadership and problem-solving at a higher, general-manager level is the major impetus behind my decision to attend business school.

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The way I see it, technology development is increasingly dispersing overseas. Software is inherently fluid. We can argue about how long this phenomena will take to become wide-scale, but it's a clear long-term trend in the industry. There have been an explosion of articles describing the Indian, Chinese, and even Eastern European talent pools. All these markets have some comparative advantages over the U.S. (although some clear disadvantages as well).

I'm not sure how many individuals like myself, who have a good grounding in technology and an interest in international business, exist. My feeling is it's a small number. I'm hoping scarcity is on my side. Partners at funds whom I keep in contact with seem to think I'm making a sound move. My fingers are crossed.

As far as school goes, John Mullins, a professor at London Business School who holds a Stanford MBA, put it best. Twenty years ago, Harvard was the top dog and Stanford's reputation was being established. People raised an eyebrow if you chose Stanford over Harvard. Today, Stanford's become the pre-eminent business school for entrepreneurship and technology, and is pretty much on par with HBS. There is something about London Business School that feels very much like Stanford did back then. For a 40-year-old program to rise to world-class status in such short period of time only portends well for its future. I think London's emphasis on international business will only work in its favor long-term.

I know I'm taking a gamble. I'm making a bet on a school that's largely unknown in the United States, passing on my alma mater, and moving to a country where technology seems to mean individual taps for hot and cold water.

I'm not worried. I guess it's because I'm such a big believer in serendipity. Sure I fret over financing, readjusting to student life and lost salary. I know I'll always wonder if I'm sidelining myself in an ever-changing industry. But I have faith.

Years ago, when all my high school classmates found themselves applying to the same set of colleges in the Northeast, I decided to be different and go to a school 3,000 miles away. At the time, all I knew about Stanford was that it wasn't Harvard, it wasn't Yale, and it was supposed to be just as good. I may have had a grand belief that I could lie out in the California sunshine and work on a tan while my classmates were slogging through another New England nor'easter. (Nobody ever told me about Bay Area rain.) What I never expected was for Stanford to introduce me to high technology and Silicon Valley. That made attending it one of the best decisions of my life.

I like to take risks. Going off the beaten path works well for me. It's the same attitude that took me to Yemen (another story, another time) and it's what is leading me to London. I'm excited. This is going to be a brand new adventure. I can't wait.

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One friend, who sold his company for a quarter-billion and made the cover of this magazine, has been stalwart in his advice. Return to entrepreneurship. Start a company. My old boss, a former vice president of Microsoft, still gets a kick out of recalling that every recommender I turned to — including himself — sat me down, delivered stern caveats about why not to do an MBA and told me to go think about starting a company before handing me my recommendations.

In the end, though, everyone understands.

All this may explain the desire for an MBA. But not necessarily my choice of school. That's usually the next set of questions I get.

Why London? Why not Stanford? Or Harvard? Do you really want to live and work in Europe? (I'm not sure. It depends.) Stay in technology? (Definitely.)

Wouldn't Harvard or Stanford make a much better fit then? After all, if you really love high-tech, they say, you're far better off at Stanford. It's right down the street from the epicenter of venture capital. Why pack up and move to another continent just to attend business school?

Earlier this weekend, I read an interview with Jeffrey Garten, the outgoing dean of Yale's School of Management, in The New York Times. Garten asserts that schools are not doing enough to prepare students to operate in a global economy. That may be true of American schools, but I don't think the same could be said of the European schools. Schools in Europe are forced to operate in a far more global climate.

As much as I want to play to my strengths, I think school is all about the chance to plug weaknesses. I grew up in cosmopolitan New York, spent a year abroad in the Middle East and worked for the world's largest technology company, but the truth is I don't know much about business overseas.

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So why pack up, move to another continent, and attend London Business School?

Two reasons.

I had my career eureka a few years ago in the midst of raising a first-round of financing for my startup. Up until that time, I had always thought of myself as an entrepreneur. But as I began to work with the venture capital community, a thought struck me: Should I be considering early-stage venture capital as a full-time profession?

I was bitten by the startup bug early on. My freshman year at Stanford coincided with the birth of Mosaic Communications. Mosaic, of course, became Netscape and one of the Web's first success stories. In the wake of its IPO, I began to juggle a typical set of college activities — classes, writing for the school paper — with a more peculiar set — advising local startups, being a founding employee of a Web startup (which sold to KPMG), joining Sun Microsystems' strategic technology team, etc. All of this culminated in my attempt to start a dot-com in 2000, which ended when my founders and I decided not to take the money we were offered (for a litany of reasons).

It also sealed my decision to want to enter the venture-capital industry. This decision still catches some people off-guard.

Given the interest in venture capital, however, most understand. An MBA is pretty much de rigueur for the venture profession.

There are still a few holdouts. I still affectionately get "the lecture." Technology entrepreneurs don't need MBAs, I'm told. Look around. Does Steve Jobs have an MBA? Larry Ellison? Bill Gates? Entrepreneurs should start companies, not dilly-dally at venture funds or at business schools.