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AUGUST 29, 2001 MBA JOURNAL: INTRODUCTION Scott Anderson: Who I Am and Why B-School is for Me "Most people don't go to business school to find themselves. At least that's not what they say in their application essays." Unfortunately, I didn't take that journey of self-discovery until this past fall (four years after graduating from college), and I think I was searching too hard. So I'm going to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (GSB) next year to find myself, or at least to find my career vocation. This just happens to be exactly what everyone I've talked to told me not to say in my applications. The main criterion for acceptance at a top business school seems to be having a well-defined plan for how that particular school will help you accomplish very specific career goals. But I think the person (like myself) who is excited about considering new potential career paths can benefit and contribute just as much as the planner. Nonetheless, I feel the need to explain why I don't have a plan. I've thought about this a lot, partly to justify the time and financial commitment of business school, but partly to convince myself that I have potential as a business leader. I graduated from Princeton in 1996. Most of my fellow economics majors went on to work in investment banks and consultancies. Did they know anything about what a financial analyst did? No. Did they enjoy their econometrics and corporate finance classes (the two classes that most closely previewed the work of a financial analyst)? If they did, they certainly did their best to pretend that net present value calculations and regressions were pure torture. My impression was that my classmates went to Wall Street because that's where the majority of the previous year's batch of liberal arts majors had gone. (It wasn't just economics majors who flocked to Wall Street -- a healthy portion of graduates in majors ranging from art history to engineering also went on to work in banking and consulting.) I actually enjoyed the few finance-related classes I took in college and was tempted to join the herd, but I also wanted to pursue a running career. A 4:20 miler in high school, I joined the Princeton program with modest hopes of making the top seven on the varsity cross country team and eventually scoring points at the conference track meet. To my surprise, two years later, I was a Division I All-American in track. By my senior year, I was one of the top middle-distance runners in the country: I had qualified for the '96 Olympic trials and was on the verge of breaking the 4-minute mile. I knew I had not reached my full potential and that with the right training environment, I could keep improving and maybe even make the 2000 Olympic Team for Sydney. But I also knew I would have no chance weighed down by an 80- to 100-hour work week in a finance job on Wall Street. So after competing in the '96 Olympic Trials in Atlanta, I moved to Washington, D.C., to train with the Reebok Enclave, one of the top track clubs in the country. I've been here in D.C. ever since. Up until this past year, I worked as a researcher at the Urban Institute, a public-policy think tank. The flexible hours and relaxed culture of this nonprofit organization allowed me to leave work for afternoon workouts at the Georgetown track and return to work in my running shorts. It took a while for my co-workers and other non-runner friends to get used to the idea that I was not training for a marathon (how could someone run 80 miles a week and have no intention of ever running a marathon?), but I was surprised at how supportive and respectful most people seemed to be of my running ambitions. Although I took the job at the Urban Institute in large part because of the flexibility it afforded me, the work itself was actually fun. For the most part, I analyzed and mined demographic data for senior researchers at the institute. Not exactly the sexiest job-description to give someone you meet at a bar (I usually opt for "professional runner," which ranks somewhere below "professional snowboarder" and above "I work on the [Capitol] Hill" on the coolness spectrum for different professions), but for a self-confessed number-cruncher, it was a dream job. I loved the problem solving and the challenge of trying to generalize my solutions to fit co-workers' puzzles. But as I started following current events, I was intrigued by problems relating to capital allocation, and began to wonder about a career in finance. This is not to say I regret my senior-year decision to forego a career in finance in order to pursue my running career. Au contraire. I have a great group of friends from the club I trained with, and though I failed to make the Olympic team last summer, I've improved steadily over my post-collegiate professional career. Last year, I broke the 4-minute-mile barrier and I was the 10th-fastest American in the 1500m (the metric equivalent of the mile). It would have been much tougher to live with "what if" scenarios had I foregone the running career. So why, five years out of college, have I not figured out the precise career path I want to take? Just as there are no successful CEOs who fantasize about what they are going to do in their retirement years, there are no successful runners who are constantly thinking about what they're going to do when they stop competing. Now, at age 27, I'm at the twilight of my career as a professional runner, and I've finally been able to think about my post-running career path: I've concluded that business school is the first step in that path. Why not just start over and get the same Wall Street job I would have applied for coming out of college? First of all, I feel like I'm too old to make the same type of uneducated guess about what kind of job to take that I feel my classmates made when they were graduating. It's fine for a 22-year-old to try investment banking when he doesn't know the difference between an IPO and an LBO, because if he doesn't like it, he can quit after a year or two and try something new. In a couple years, I might be married -- I don't want to have to worry about career changes at that point. I'll learn about potential career paths in business school. Second, I wouldn't want to start in an entry-level position. Though I have no work experience in finance, I am confident that my analytical skills and ability to work with a team are far superior to what they were five years ago. In business school, I'll learn how to apply these skills to problems I'll face in the for-profit sector. And finally, I am an unknown quantity to Wall Street firms. Most banks hire their analysts either directly out of college through an on-campus recruiting and application process or from another financial institution. Why take a risk on some guy who has worked in the soft nonprofit environment for several years? Going to business school seems like the best way to make the transition to the financial sector, as an MBA and a good summer internship will give me credibility for a future employer. So why Chicago? Because they accepted me and because I'm interested in finance and quantitative analysis, and the GSB is ranked highly in both. I also like the reputation and accessibility of Chicago's faculty. One of my biggest regrets about college is that I didn't get to know my professors better. I have become much more intellectually curious since college and I look forward next year to learning from and interacting with my professors. But I expect the biggest resource to be my fellow students. I'll hear about their job experiences and get an idea about which branch of finance I'm best suited for. Or maybe I'll read a case study about HMOs, talk to someone who has worked with a pharmaceutical company, get an internship with a health-care consulting company, and come up with a business plan to develop some niche service for health-care providers. I am going to business school with an open mind. Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | Learn about your online education options |
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