Further to my previous blog posting (“What have you got to lose?”), I would like to offer one additional nudge to prospective applicants to MBA schools and to MBA students who may be considering a choice among two or more job offers. I hear a common expression as I engage both groups: “I’ll wait to decide because I want to keep my options open; I want to remain free to choose.”
Hanging loose and waiting to commit are hallmarks of the baby boomer generation and its successors. Economic theory might justify this: if uncertainty is resolved at a rate faster than any changes in the time value of money, it might pay to wait. But in my experience of watching MBA students make life decisions over the past 25 years, such theory is window-dressing to justify indecision. Simply keeping your options open is not freedom; it is chaos. It leaves you dangling, blown this way and that with the arrival of each new fact. As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.
Darden looks to admit people of reasonably strong determination. You do not have to have figured out every detail of your future; but you have to know why you want to attend Darden and be able to say so clearly. It is very hard to fake such sentiments. The indecisive person rather stands out in the crowd of MBA applicants.
Much the same could be said for the Darden student who can’t decide among competing job offers. To be sure, it is a big decision. But it is not irreversible. And the longer one waits to decide, the more one’s anguish builds–and perhaps the more the employer begins to question the wisdom of making the offer in the first place.
Harvey Cox said that not to decide is to decide ((He actually said, “Somewhere deep down we know that in the final analysis we do decide things and that even our decisions to let someone else decide are really our decisions, however pusillanimous.”)). What is really embedded in your decision to hang loose and keep your options open? Have you weighed the benefits of making a commitment and the possible costs of not doing so? I think that the benefits and costs of committing are, at their core, all about one’s identity. Perhaps Hillel said it best 2,000 years ago:
“If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, then what am I?
And if not now, when?”
What are you waiting for?