Hi Readers! My name is Barry Zhang. My background is a bit hard to follow, so I'll blow by it quickly so you can get to the business school stuff you really want to hear about. I was born in China in a village with the honor of being in the third poorest province on the mainland. I moved to upstate New York when I was six years old. I grew up not knowing much about my own heritage or ethnicity. My parents were busy putting food on the table, not teaching me Chinese lion dancing. I was one of only two Asians in my school, so in many ways, I knew more about being a Jew or a Puerto Rican than I did about being a Chino.

When I went to Yale, my eyes saw for the first time that Asian Americans could be integrated, leading members of society. That's when I realized I had a wide-open chance to see what I could achieve in life. I have since worked at the White House, on Wall Street for a large investment bank, and most recently, I spent two years in Boulder, Colorado, working in a telecom company's acquisitions group.

Admittedly, the early part of my life – not to make myself sound like Hemingway in his autumn years – was geared towards collecting trophies. I wanted to be the best at whatever field I chose – so naturally that meant seeing what metal the best were made of! Once I had Yale and Oxford schoolings behind me, I had so many options open to me, and so few impediments. My self-confidence was flying high.

So I applied to business schools with the same mentality. Harvard, Stanford – I am ready to accept your offer! I always knew I wanted an MBA – to increase my attractiveness to future employers (or at least not take second fiddle to MBAs when promotions get handed out) and to meet cool people, like I did at Yale. But wait! I applied in 2001. The economy nose-dived. MBA applications soared. I had just finished my investment banking analyst program and was ready to move on to business school, but things didn't work out as planned.

What happened!?! I did a lot of thinking about what went wrong – putting on my crime scene investigator hat. My impeccable resume had also put me smack center of the largest segment of applicants: former investment banking analysts. We were a dime a dozen during the frenetic hiring days of the Internet age. Now, we were fallen pennies from heaven seeking by the thousands to avoid blemishes on our resumes. The top business schools were our refuge. Of course, business schools could accommodate some but not all. They have their own criteria for professional, ethnic, and geographic diversity to maintain.

I was swimming in self-doubt after rejection from business schools. I had worked hard in banking because I thought it would open doors for me – not close them. It took months to even figure out my next step, because I was so used to doing what my peers did. Now, "my crowd" had left me behind.

I found solace in speaking with an old mentor at Salomon. He said most people – himself included – have two to three periods of extended unemployment in their lives. Those periods are unnerving but also can help you mature faster as a well-rounded professional.

He was right. I realized that our demand-supply driven economy does not reward those who move in herds. It rewards those that are unique, that take individual paths, and that are able to ignore condescension from peers for doing so. Just look at the people that did get into business school when I didn't. Sure there were bankers and consultants, but there were also corporate managers and nonprofit people that many of my classmates looked down upon in college. The latter failed to land the high paying Wall Street jobs. But the joke was on me. They worked half the hours I did, had time for friends and hobbies, and now they were going on to business school.

So, I decided to follow passions I had for telecom and M&A. I moved to Boulder – as far as you can get from "my crowd" in New York City and the Bay Area. I found my work much more rewarding. The better lifestyle even allowed me to maintain a long-distance relationship with a girl I had met in Palo Alto while I was unemployed. Ironically, it was easier to fly every two weekends to see my girlfriend now than to be in a local relationship during banking.

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