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OCTOBER 2003 MBA JOURNAL: INTRODUCTION Cintra Pollack: Who I Am, and Why B-School Is for Me "At Amazon.com, being "browse" developer...was a huge education, one so fascinating and intricate that it made me forget about the higher education I'd planned to pursue in literature." At first, it felt like a confession, and I always qualified my avowal with, "but I never plan to become one of those corporate types," as if pursuing business skills were a shameful thing. MBAs, I'd always thought, were the arrogant middle managers of the world, overstuffed with theory and their own importance, but lacking creativity or the ability to actually do anything. The world of business, I concluded before even entering it, alternated between being either stuffy and dull or corrupt and conniving. I certainly didn't belong there. What changed my mind? I'm not sure. I'm not certain yet that my mind has changed or that my preconceived ideas of the business world were so far off. I've decided, however, that I need to find out for myself, from the inside. I'll be starting a full-time MBA program at the University of Washington in Seattle this fall. At Davidson College, a tiny liberal arts school in North Carolina, I studied English literature and writing. My field of specialty was Modern American poetry. I imagined myself eventually becoming a travel writer or a professor of comparative literature. Fresh out of school, I headed to Seattle and took a job as an editor at Amazon.com. What could be more rewarding, I wondered, than being paid to write for an audience of millions? And Amazon seemed less like a corporation and more like a revolution. People wore whatever they wanted and brought their dogs to work. I didn't feel like I was selling out. In any case, I only planned on being there long enough to decide where I was going to pursue my Ph.D. in literature. After a year of writing reviews of electronic goods, I decided that I wanted to try something else. "Writing" in the platonic ideal sense was divine; writing descriptions of speaker cables had lost its luster for me. Still enamored with the Amazon culture, I switched to a more technical job there as a web developer for the group in charge of site navigation and organization. I constructed the navigable hierarchies customers use to "browse" through Amazon's many stores. I learned to build and maintain databases, use UNIX, and converse in the language of software developers, a vernacular that uses more straightforward grammar than I was used to but a whole lot more acronyms. In the role of "browse" developer I got to meet many people in other areas of the company who were affected by my work and I theirs. It was a huge education, one so fascinating and intricate that it made me forget about the higher education I'd planned to pursue in literature. Over the three-and-a-half years I worked at Amazon.com, the company changed a lot, and so did the types of people who worked there. As Amazon grew bigger, more stable, and more financially disciplined, a lot of the "old school" employees began grumbling that the place was getting too "corporate." Some could cope with the changes and others could not, so they left. People with institutional memory became harder to find and those of us who'd been around for a few years became the keepers and communicators of an ever-expanding, complex system rife with legacy issues. At the same time, Amazon started recruiting outside companies to sell items through our site. My group, in particular, was burdened with simultaneously keeping the Amazon site running smoothly and integrating third party merchants into our systems. Before long, I began spending less time clicking and typing in the safe, familiar, green glow of my monitor, and more and more time discussing workflow processes and resource allocation under the florescent lights of the conference room. I surprised myself by thriving in this foreign environment. As my responsibilities at Amazon shifted toward more managerial ones, I realized I had been letting skills I innately had go fallow. I also found myself frustrated that conversations between third party partners, the business owners, technical staff, designers, and editors always seemed confusing because we were all trying to talk about the same things with different vocabularies. I wanted to understand more of the business owners' perspectives. Maybe I could be the type of person who could bridge the gap between the different parties. I could gain a lot by staying at Amazon -- I'd already learned volumes over the years -- but without the credentials of an MBA it would be harder for me to actually advance from where I was in the company. It was at the higher levels in the company that conversations got really interesting. So I decided to apply to business school. Let me take a break from my story to warn prospective applicants that applying to schools takes much more time than you might expect. For those of you who, like me, never planned to use math beyond arithmetic, beware. You won't believe how much you've forgotten. I did fairly well on the math portion of the SATs and always had decent math aptitude, but I rally struggled on the GMAT quantitative section. Give yourself plenty of time for reviewing. Cramming the week before the test will likely not work well. Applying to schools became a second job for me (and I had to keep my first job just to pay for the costly process). Between researching schools, signing up for applications (most are online), ordering transcripts, requesting recommendations and the like, I spent most of my free time last fall either applying or preparing to apply. My friends barely saw me and I wore clothes directly from the laundry room--no time to put them away in my closet--for months. All of this, and I wasn't 100% sure I even wanted to go to B-school, I just wanted the option to go. Leave lots of time to write essays. The schools I applied to required as many as seven substantial essays apiece, and, contrary to popular belief, it was nearly impossible to use the same essays for multiple schools. Each school asked their questions just a little differently and they dictated vastly different word counts for them. By February, I'd completed all my applications and the months of waiting began. By the end of February, I'd left my job at Amazon.com to consult with an epilepsy Web site, a job I'll have until I begin my MBA program. I enrolled in an evening class at the University of Washington's extension program in fundamentals of business and administration. I figured that taking a business class, something I'd never done before, would make the final decision to go or not go easier. If I hated my class, I could save myself a lot of money and grief by not going to business school at all. It turned out I really enjoyed my class. The long wait for the schools to decide my fate began.
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