Often the lessons learned in b-school do not happen in the classroom but where least expected. The lessons can be surprising yet so profound. Our guest blogger, Rhonda Henderson, an officer in the Black Business Student Forum club, describes just such an experience.
Decisions, decisions, decisions. Courses in business school will teach you hundreds of ways to analyze data and make a decision. Finance: NPV, stock value. Accounting: Cash Flow, balance sheet. Strategy: Porter’s Five Forces. Decision Analysis: Crystal Ball, Decisions trees, StatTools.
On the front end of my business school career, I really wanted to learn how to make decisions using these tools. I was about seven years into a career in education, an industry that was not nearly as data-driven as it is now, and I thought all of these tools provided “the right perspective in which to view and operate in the world.” Jealous of people who tossed around phrases like “modeling worst-case scenarios” (Ooooh, what does that mean?) for the year before b-school, I was a Harvard Business Review-reading fool.
Business school is described as a transformative experience, a bridge from your unfulfilling post-college professional landing pad to your well-paid destiny. I had hoped to be transformed from “feel-good” teacher, to “hard-charging”…education strategist. (I did plan to return to my field, just with killer spreadsheets.) And the first year curriculum did not disappoint. The courses were a vigorous exploration of all the ways one could harness, critique and package data into a succinct set of comments that earned high marks for class participation. I felt much more confident in my ability to analyze my way in and around any situation. The elusive “certainty” was just that much closer…
I saw similar transformations in my classmates. Midway through the first year program, and certainly once our class received summer internship offers, we were walking with a bit more MBA-inspired swagger, speaking in the language of assets, ratios, and currency risks.
I was in this mindset when I had a distinct business school moment while “networking” with a Darden alum over free-flowing (but soon to run out) glasses of Virginia-harvested chardonnay. The story she told was fairly standard—attended Darden to transition to a career in consulting, did weeks of case prep with classmates, went through rounds of pit-diving at events… all very usual stuff. Then she decided consulting wasn’t for her. Okay, that’s interesting. Then she accepted an internship at a firm completely out of her field. More interesting. Finally, she said she took a “leap of faith” and decided to accept a full-time offer where she would be the “only” of many categories… She described how she felt at the firm during the summer and what she believed a career could be at this company.
To use the phrases “I feel” or “I believe” in a business environment or the preparatory-business environment that is business school, is practically declaring “I can’t think.” You just do not say that…in public. Yet, here I was listening to a very smart, very confident woman explain how she made one of her most important life decisions based on her intuition.
Her story opened up for me a range of questions that I am exploring through a new series called “Leap of Faith.” Sponsored by the Black Business Student Forum, “Leap of Faith” seeks out and profiles Darden alumni who have turned away from the model, powered down Crystal Ball, and relied on an intangible strategy to make a decision: their instinct, their faith, or their promise to themselves about who they really are, or are striving to be. The early interviews introduced me to an alumnus who literally redirected their entire life and career path in the month before graduation based on one conversation and another who had two conflicting dream opportunities arise simultaneously. Given the gravity of these situations and the possibility each offered, a cost-benefit analysis was an insufficient tool. Visit the BBSF website in the next couple of days to read our first story.
As any transformative experience, business school can upset your notions of who you are, what you can do, and who and what you will be. Stressed from trying to boil the ocean of cases, recruiting, networking, and sleeping, we cling to the life-raft of our rational minds. Yet, I invite you to read stories that suggest rationality isn’t everything. At the end of the day, in the middle of the night, it may be nothing at all. My hope is that these profiles will help you begin to reconcile the two decision-making frameworks that exist within each of us: what we think, and what we believe.
Rhonda Henderson, Second Year Student
