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AUGUST 29, 2001 MBA JOURNAL: INTRODUCTION Drew & Megan Hess: Who We Are and Why B-School is for Us "We treasured our time at Washington and Lee University both academically and socially, and the thought of one of us being in 'student mode' without the other just didn't seem right." In most cases, careers, family planning, and financing make it very difficult for couples to attend full-time MBA programs together. Nevertheless, Megan and I decided several years ago on a long-term plan that involved both of us going back to school. We treasured our time at Washington and Lee University both academically and socially, and the thought of one of us being in "student mode" without the other just didn't seem right. After saving our pennies and earning scholarships from Texas A&M, we have found a way to keep this commitment to our careers and to each other. We hope that readers find our unusual situation as a married couple in the same MBA program and our distinct perspectives on this experience interesting. Drew Hess: When I was three, I dreamed of becoming a fire truck. While attaining an MBA may not bring me closer to reaching this childhood goal, I do feel that the Mays Program's formal learning process will enhance the skills I have today and empower me with the strategic training and quantitative skills I need to further my career. I made the decision to go to business school, because I had come to a junction in my career. After four years in the high-tech finance industry, I did not want to be pigeonholed as a commercial banker. Banking was my first job out of school. As I soon found out, being good at something and being interested in it are not necessarily correlated. I am interested in finance and technology, but I am not going into business school with a myopic view to an end, because to be honest I really don't know what I want to be when I grow up. Having had only one career since graduation, I am now looking forward broadening my horizons. It is my hope that the breadth of classes at the Mays Program will give me the opportunity to create and refine my long-term goals. "You're a long way from home. What brought y'all down here?" This is a question we hear regularly and an answer that deserves some explanation. Some quick advice for those about to start the process: Don't just follow the rankings. Yes, they can be a "quick and dirty" way to find out which schools a ratings agency feels are the best or worst; I, however, wanted nothing about my MBA experience to be "quick and dirty." My experience has been that the people are what make the program, not the name or the rating. I did not want to be a number, and unlike other MBA admissions staff, the people at the Mays program never made me feel like one. In addition, The Mays Program at Texas A&M affords me the opportunity to spend some time seeing another part of the country and maybe pick up some insight behind my wife's uniquely Texan outlook on life. My wife is openly affectionate, boundlessly optimistic, and she has never given less than all of herself to any venture, regardless of its size. I have come to realize that these attributes are common among Texans, especially Texas Aggies (a.k.a. Texas A&M students). Several years ago my father-in-law and I attended the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio. The football game was between Texas A&M and Penn State. I had no idea what I was in for. Just before kickoff, all of the Aggies in the stadium stood up, and they never sat down. The game was great, but for me, the real action was in the stands as 30,000 fans chanted in unison and swayed with arms interlocked throughout the game. The A&M football team never had a chance, but that mattered little to the Aggie fans. They remained as supportive and optimistic as ever. I am a Boston sports fan, which means you regularly boo the home team, don't make eye contact with the person in the seat next to you, and you leave well before the finish. Astonished, I turned to my father-in-law for some explanation. He shrugged and said, "Well, those are Aggies." I have a lot to learn. Megan Hess: When I was six, I started my own printing company. Using crayons, scissors, and my father's collection of National Geographic magazines, I created greeting cards and sold them to my family and friends for 10 cents each. When I was 10, I started writing and directing plays for the neighborhood kids. The reason I chose to go back to school for an MBA is that I hope to have a career that fosters these entrepreneurial and artistic talents, which have been languishing since my childhood. Like many of my peers, I felt stuck in a career path that wasn't satisfying, and I needed a way to expand my possibilities. I have spent the last four years working in sales for consulting companies, but I never imagined myself as a career salesman. Some aspects of the job are well suited to me -- I enjoy public speaking, meeting new people, and I am good at building others' confidence in my ideas. Nevertheless, I want a career where I have more management responsibilities and can carry projects through from start to finish. I suspect that marketing may be the right path for me, but I am keeping my options open. The beauty of business school is that it provides you with the core skills you need to succeed in any area of business, while exposing you to different business disciplines so that you can find one area in which to specialize. My greatest reservation about going to business school was that the classroom experience might not be as valuable as the lessons I could learn in the real world. In just the few years I worked in Boston, I lived through the emotional breakdown of one supervisor who was torn between her love of work and her young children and I watched a company that I loved get "this close" to an IPO before the stock market fell. I've made great friends and mentors who have never hesitated to steer me in the right direction. Still, I believe that in today's economy, we each need to be grounded in more traditional business models and management strategies. I cannot hope to succeed on instinct and experience alone. The MBA experience will build the right foundation of knowledge for me to draw upon as I progress in my career. Moreover, the Mays MBA program puts special emphasis on each applicant's work experience, so I expect that I will gain from both the curriculum and the combined experiences of my classmates. My advice to anyone considering business school is to really think about where you want to be in both five and 10 years. Are you building the right skills and the right network of peers to make this vision happen? What do you have to offer your present and future employer? B-school can fill a lot of these gaps, but you may have to make some short-term sacrifices to realize its benefits. I thought long and hard about where I wanted to go to school, whether I would get an executive MBA or attend school full-time, and I narrowed down my choices. Ultimately, I selected Texas A&M, because I thought it was a great program on its way up in the rankings. You can't beat the value of the Mays program, and I was impressed with how hard the staff worked to impress my husband and me. I did not see this type of attention to the whole applicant -- work experience, personality, and career ambitions -- among other business school programs. 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  | | [an error occurred while processing this directive] Learn about your online education options |
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