Nostalgia Boulevard at Georgetown

"Business school flies by at lightning speed, but the beginning feels as far away as high school"

by Rachael Klein

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Rachael Klein
Georgetown
MBA Class of 2008

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Friday, 4 a.m. Alarm starts screaming at me. Faster than a hummingbird's average wing speed, I snooze it off. Hummingbirds. I know. Trust me—when you sleep as little as I did over the span of a week, you too will feel like little birds are flying in circles above your head.

Friday, 4:10 a.m. More screaming. I look at my clock this time and it says 5:10 a.m. In my stupor I tell myself that my train leaves in 50 minutes and I must get up. Must. 4:20 a.m. Clock says 5:20. I believe clock. I jump out of bed, throw myself together in 11 minutes, pack in three, print 15 pages of Vault and Yahoo! Finance information on the three banks I'll be visiting later that day, and I'm in my elevator by 5:40. Or so I think in my half-asleep, panicked state. Rushing through my lobby I glance at my watch to gauge how much time I lost in the elevator. One minute? Two minutes? At this point, every minute counts.

My fog clears as my watch says, "Rachael, get some more sleep, it's only 4:45." And since I'm such an optimist, I remind myself that this is why I didn't set my clocks back like everyone else.

B-School Just Chugs Along

The reliable 6 a.m. train leaves at 6:30, obviously, which is no problem since my first informational interview is not until 10:30. Informational interviews are meetings we set up with alumni at our target companies. The technical definition is something along the lines of an opportunity to find out more about the industry and the relevant company.

The reality is that it's our way of sending the message of strong interest, getting face-time with the company, and finding out exactly what we need to do to make that company want us. If you have a moral problem against kissing up, I'd get over it very quickly. Trust me, it's possible to maintain pride and flatter others in the same sentence. Should this confuse you, contact me regarding my seminar, "Suspend Disbelief, Pause Reality."

Our class has about 240 people divided into four cohorts. We all have the same core classes in our first two modules—each module is six weeks long, goes by in what feels like two weeks, and by the end, the beginning feels like a year ago. Business school flies by at lightning speed, but the beginning feels as far away as high school.

Fortunately for the smart people, the professors teach to the top of the class and then make themselves readily available outside of class for the students who are seeing z-scores and time value of money for the first time (gently termed "poets" by a favorite economy professor). Since we all have the same classes, we help each other. Touchy-feely perhaps, but trust me, it returns full circle.

The Common MBA Choice

Working with people we do not choose is a true exercise in patience, diplomacy, and management. This is where the MBA skills come in. This is where we find our own differentiation advantages. The level of maturity we must adopt in order to get along well and get the job done at a level not just of competence but of excellence requires a talented exercise and blend of soft and hard skills.

As we sit in our first class, we learn that the prior business experience runs a full spectrum. But everyone there has done one same thing: Each one of us went through the same hard, life-changing, and disconcerting decision that it was time to go back to school and that an MBA was worth the economic cost (thank you, Professor Macher). And when I voiced my uncertainty to these people who seemed more qualified than me, I realized that most people understand how it feels because they did the exact same thing.