Evaluating Career Choices

"The MBA is pretty hard. It's not astrophysics hard. … It's just a confusing, challenging-the-way-you-view-business hard"

by Larry Kao

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• Five Lessons Learned

Larry Kao
Oxford
MBA Class of 2008

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"Interesting," (nod of the head) … "Interesting," (another nod) … "Interesting," (still another nod). The Oxford MBA interviewer challenged me to questions, counters, and double-counters unparalleled to any of those I had faced from U.S. B-schools. Many of my fellow Said Business School students said they had felt like they had climbed out of a steel cage, hopped through a ring of fire, and still kept running even when the interview was over.

A typical MBA interview (in my limited experience) ranged from a generic resume/CV run-through followed by other details of what you did and what you learned from those experiences to an oral version of an MBA admissions essay. Some questions I must have answered a half-dozen times throughout my entire MBA process:

1. Why do you want an MBA?

2. You've been out of school for a while, how will you adapt to being a student again?

3. What was the greatest challenge you faced at your most recent company?

But an Oxford interview:

1. From reading your essay, clearly you are happy being an engineer. Wouldn't a master's degree in Computer Engineering be a better fit for you?

2. Tell me Lawrence, you have a very young face, which would give an impression to people that you have a lack of credibility. How do you handle yourself or persuade clients during a business meeting?

3. If I'm a VC, and I had $100 million, pitch to me why I should invest in your company.

With all this being said, what helped me the most wasn't intelligence, natural instinct, or luck (of course, all three of those helped me one way or another), but practice. Like anything in life, practice, practice, and more practice are the only suggestions I would really give to any difficult task one is presented. It can be rowing on the crew team, starting a business, or applying to business schools, the process includes tons of practice, tons of failures, and then loads more practice. And as a good salesman always does, he drinks his own Kool-Aid.

I tackled the MBA application process like any other project or daunting task: I took the medical school/law school approach. It's not unrealistic for future doctors or lawyers to apply to dozens of schools. Other stories have Harvard-trained lawyers apply to 100 firms to find the right situation. Although my case wasn't as extreme, I wanted to take no chances; I applied to 12 schools. This might seem like a lot for a prospective MBA, but I'm probably not a "normal" guy to begin with. I also wrote around nine revisions for each original essay. Further, I'd practice a few hours for the interviews, each and every interview, three days ahead—whether it was in airports, hotel rooms, or restaurants. I'd interview in front of anyone that would listen and received some real honest feedback.

My point isn't to scare people into thinking that I'm competitive, that B-school is incredibly difficult to get accepted into, or that I am an overly pessimistic person. I knew I had one shot to get it right, so if the investment was one-month's worth of sleep deprivation, I figured the lifetime's worth of connections and world-class education would return a decent dividend.

The Entrepreneuship Project

Whether the topic is on social entrepreneurship or old-fashioned for-profit models, Said's unique attraction lies in its ability to encourage students to practice starting companies now. The EP, or Entrepreneurship Project, makes Oxford one of the few programs that require students to start companies in order to graduate. What a great concept. An offbeat business school idea fits an offbeat business school student. With this in mind, I was excited to meet several other Me's. Where else can I find a crazy American who would pass up the plethora of brilliant U.S. business schools for a British school barely a decade old?

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