Stanford – Dispatch #2 – Fit
Hi guys. I am now back in Chicago, having returned from Palo Alto and the Bay Area with a fuller understanding of the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) and what my life may be like if I matriculate there. I’ve had my class visit (negotiations class – very game theory-driven, rambunctious class participation, intellectually satisfying and fun) and admissions session. I ate lunch in the GSB cafeteria (lots of local and organic choices on the menu and the ability to compost and recycle your “waste”). I spent a total of 3 days and 3 nights in Palo Alto and 6 days and 6 nights in the Bay Area taking everything in. I scoured the GSB website, had extensive conversations with my Veritas Prep Admissions consultant (who is a GSB alum) about the GSB, read the Stanford GSB magazine, and watched videos on YouTube made by GSB students about the GSB. I guess I’ve put in my homework. But why all of the effort? What’s the point?
The answer: fit. I’m a little obsessed with fit. I want to make sure that the school at which I will spend at least two years of my life, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and my energy and emotional investment is right for me. I’m not just trying to get into business school. I’m trying to get into the right business school. In fact, I’d prefer to not go to business school if I can’t get into the right one. I also want to make sure that I know the schools to which I am applying well enough to be able to demonstrate why I am a good fit for them. From what I’ve learned from my admissions consultant and reading the Montauk book, being able to clearly and convincingly articulate fit can really help you distinguish yourself in your admissions essays. The top schools, especially Stanford, want to hear you explain in specific detail why you belong.
Academic Fit
Everyone knows that the Stanford GSB is a top, if not the top, school. It has the toughest admissions standards (the average GMAT score is 730) and the lowest acceptance rate (around 7%). Its faculty includes multiple Nobel laureates and undisputed titans of business. The quality of its alumni is amazing and includes heads of Fortune 100 companies, successful tech firms, and leaders in social innovation. Certainly, all of that matters to me, but there are other aspects of the GSB that are even more impressive to me.
The GSB’s approach to general management: My long-term career goal is to start my own environmentally-sustainable and socially-minded real estate development business, so I need a program that will give me the tools to start and successfully run one. While I am impressed with the reputation of the GSB’s general management program, I’m equally impressed with the GSB’s view of general management as comprised of four main areas: leadership, entrepreneurship, global economy, and social innovation. Before learning about GSB’s approach, “general management” was a pretty nebulous concept to me. I had a vague sense that it was key to successfully running a company, but I couldn’t identify the specific components. Not only does the GSB’s approach shed a lot of light on what general management is, but it also strongly resonates with what I am passionate about.
Take leadership. I’m becoming increasingly convinced that mere intelligence, no matter how high your IQ, will only get you so far in this world. What’s really key to success is great leadership and interpersonal skills. The GSB takes leadership seriously, offering a number of ways to develop leadership skills, including a variety of classes, leadership labs, and even a tw0-quarter, intensive leadership fellowship. In a nutshell, what you get from the GSB are the best classes on leadership, opportunities to practice leadership under pressure, feedback on your performance from top faculty and business leaders, and a framework to deeply and constructively reflect on your performance and how to improve.
Entrepreneurship also really resonates with me. I think a lot of schools consider general management and entrepreneurship to be two separate things, but I appreciate how at the GSB, entrepreneurship is embedded in general management. What this signals to me is a general management orientation that seeks out innovative solutions and methods, isn’t averse to risk, will help prepare you to expect, deal with, and finally transfigure failure into a valuable lesson learned. And obviously, given my desire to start my own business, a strong grounding in entrepreneurship is critical.
The global focus is also valuable because even though I expect to do most of my real estate development Stateside, and likely close to where I end up settling down, I am also interested in doing real estate development work in the developing world and in emerging markets as those areas are most in need of good development and frequently offer the greatest opportunity for creativity, innovation, and sustainable design.
Part of the global focus is a requirement to get experience in a foreign country either through a study trip, international learning internship, an overseas service-learning trip, or a student exchange to China or India. At the application session, there were two current GSB students on the panel. One student did his global requirement in India, where he was able to meet and work with the top Telecom CEOs in India. The other student’s international trip to Scandinavia was forthcoming, but during his stay, he’d have the opportunity to meet the Princess of Denmark! Very cool! Not only does the international requirement sound like an amazingly stimulating and fun experience, but it will help prepare me as I work in non-U.S. markets.
Last but not least, I really appreciate how social innovation is a cornerstone of general management at the GSB; that is, doing business in a socially-minded way isn’t just the province of do-gooders, but seems to be inculcated into all GSB students, regardless of the actual career path. For those who want a strong social innovation emphasis in their careers, the GSB is second to none among business schools with its Center on Social Innovation, the opportunity to get a certificate in public management, fellowships and loan forgiveness programs for those entering the social sector, its course Design for Extreme Poverty, and its top faculty. There’s even an opportunity to serve on the board of a local nonprofit through the GSB’s Board Program. I’m really excited about this opportunity.
Emmet Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER): Through the E-IPER program, GSB students who really want to integrate their interest in the environment into their business, can get an MBA along with a Master in Environment and Resources. To get the joint master degrees, you must spend about a year longer at Stanford to get the necessary classes to fulfill the E-IPER requirements.
E-IPER program is what really drew me to the GSB. A huge interest of mine when it comes to real estate development is environmental sustainability. I want to not only construct my buildings and the surrounding built environment according to extremely high “green standards”, but also weave in food production through having an urban agriculture component on-site, including an urban farm, an edible landscape of food-bearing trees and shrubs, and even possibly chickens and other small livestock. All of this would be attended with a resident services/education component on green housekeeping, personal gardening, the benefits of fresh organic food, cooking classes, etc. My ideal is to have this green community accommodate a diversity of incomes and races who will be united in authentic community.
The E-IPER would go a long way in helping me reach my ideal as it offers 15 courses in Sustainable Built Environment and 19 course in Land Use and Agriculture. One of the classes I’m particularly interested in involves running Stanford’s urban farm, including learning how to do all of the plantings, composting, harvesting, etc. It also offers concentrations and coursework in Energy, Climate and Atmosphere, Cleantech, Oceans and Estuaries, Freshwater, and Human and Environmental Health. Through E-IPER, you have the opportunity to take classes with students from all over campus, including hardcore biological science and engineering folks, law students, medical students, and other graduate students. It’s truly an interdisciplinary experience. I once read one GSB E-IPER student say that the E-IPER program allowed him to be the business expert when he was with scientists and the environmental science expert among his business school cohorts. That’s exactly how I’d like to be positioned.
Highly Customizable Program: I love how at the GSB you have a lot of freedom to craft your own curriculum. There are no required majors.
Life Fit
In my previous dispatch from Stanford, I sort of intimated that the Stanford campus and Palo Alto, while nice, weren’t exactly electrifying me. I still stand by that statement. I like campuses that are more urban and better integrated into an urban context. I also noted that while I have no doubt that Stanford students are every bit as intelligent as students at any campus in the world, I didn’t feel the intense intellectual energy I felt at Harvard, MIT, Yale, or Oxford. I didn’t see a lot of independent bookstores or people from all over the world converging in one place giving you the feeling that you are in a big, brilliant, cosmopolitan melting pot. Perhaps I just missed it, but there’s no way you could miss it at the other schools I mentioned.
While I love the feel/energy of the schools I mentioned above and would ideally like to have it at my school of choice, Stanford offers many alternative attractions, chief of which is its climate. Sure it rained most of the time we were in Palo Alto, but the temperature never went below 50 degrees while we were there, whereas in Chicago it was somewhere in the 20s. In Palo Alto’s mild climate, I would have the ability to exercise outside every day. Throw in the fact that within an hour you can go from mountain to beach to redwood forest, and that there are many excellent farmers markets nearby, and I’m nearly ready to pack my bags. The ability to drive to San Francisco or Berkeley and quickly fulfill my jonesing for a gritty, urban, intellectually-vibrant setting may be all I need to rip up and throw away the applications for the other b-school I’ve been considering. Time will tell. My next school visit is to Columbia the Thursday before Symposium. I’ll keep you posted!
