Opinions on business school at Stanford
What I wish I knew before my first year at the GSB
I have a lot of opinions, and here are some regarding the GSB after my first year.
Even if the idea of business school is anathema to you, there might still be some useful thoughts to consider here.
Figure out what you want and design for it
The GSB is an incredible place, with a concentration of incredibly ambitious people from all walks of life. There are world-class talents in your class, in the faculty, and in the events hosted at the university — there's a sense of limitless possibility on campus.
You have a unique status as an MBA student: you're a student, which means that people will be much more willing to talk with you than if you were a working professional. You're also an MBA student, which means that people will take you more seriously — rightly or wrongly — than if you were an undergrad. Doors will open for you where you didn't even know doors existed.
As a result, the GSB is a place where FOMO (fear of missing out) runs rampant. Everyone wants to go on amazing trips with their classmates, everyone wants to do coffee chats and lunches with their interesting classmates, everyone wants to be known for something — everyone wants to do everything. But life is not so gracious: you'll have to eventually choose.
Importantly, I think a helpful reframe of this is from "Figure out what you want" to "Understand what you are willing to suffer for". By inverting the question, you arrive at a more powerful and useful framework: What pain do I want in my life? What am I willing to suffer for? And if you're able to answer that question, you can turn your FOMO into JOMO — the joy of missing out. Ultimately, you will enjoy missing out on the next hot event because you have found other activities and people that mean more to you.
Constrain your search frontier
People commonly go to an MBA program with a broad mandate of "exploring." While I think that exploration is a good thing, there is a "paradox of riches" at a place like Stanford: there's such a wealth of events and opportunities here that people get pulled equally in infinite directions, which means that you incur zero net displacement. Said differently, pursuing too many different things at once often leads you nowhere. (For those more mathematically inclined, you'll know this as the exploration versus exploitation tradeoff.)
I think it's best to think like a researcher: come in with a few, specific hypotheses ("I am interested in operating in the fintech space" or "I want to figure out if the consumer gaming space is for me"), and focus on proving and disproving these hypotheses. This is an information gain maximization framework, and I think it helps mitigate the common failure mode of overindexing on exploration. Generating these ex ante hypotheses is a way of giving you an anchor for a more disciplined exploration.
Energy, not time
Time is not the finite resource you want to manage, but it's energy. There will be so many people to meet and events to go to, that your default approach might be to continue stacking activities and running yourself ragged. We all know the feeling of being physically and emotionally drained, and how it often creates a state of anxiety and ennui that can last for days.
The short-term tradeoff is rarely worth the long-term one. Make sure to make space for whatever you need to recharge — exercising, eating properly, sleep — and to protect that even more fiercely than anything else. The quote from Greg McKeown’s Essentialism holds: "If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will."
Spend time with people you admire
I think it's a given that we tend to adopt the behaviors and values — both good and bad — of those we spend a lot of time with. This much is evident in aphorism (“You are the average of your five closest friends”), through biological mimicry, or sociological explanations like Girard’s mimetic theory of desire. Therefore, choose your environment carefully.
Find people who are "forces of nature" and share your values, and spend time with these people. The current environment programs the brain, but the clever brain can choose its surrounding environment — be the clever brain.
Introverts at the GSB
For the purposes of this discussion, I define an extravert as someone who gains energy from large gatherings of people, whereas an introvert is someone who gains energy from individual time or small groups. While it may feel like the GSB is full of extraverts, they are merely the most vocal or easily-recognizable individuals in the class. If you're an introvert, know that you are surrounded by many like-minded individuals — you just need to make the effort to find them!
Technical classes versus non-technical classes
I generally classify coursework at the GSB into two buckets: technical classes (finance, accounting, OSM, etc.) and non-technical classes (LeadLabs, communications, negotiations, etc.).
While there are notable exceptions to this rule, I have generally found the technical classes at the GSB somewhat underwhelming (especially considering the caliber of Stanford as an educational institution). Lectures are never the best way to engage with material, neither from an efficiency standpoint or from a learning perspective. The GSB has a world-class faculty, each of whom is extraordinarily ready to engage with curious students in their field of study. Read your professors' research and find time to ask them questions and explore — this is a tremendously interesting and more engaging way to learn!
On the other hand, I think there's tremendous value in the non-technical or "soft" classes at the GSB. These are timeless skills that deal with life's only constant: humans. While the principles in these classes are philosophically simple, they are certainly not easy. Unlike in everyday life, these courses allow you to practice and experiment with many of these skills in different controlled environments, complete with instantaneous feedback from your instructors and peers in a judgment-free, low-stakes environment — this will most likely never happen again in your life. Don't limit your skill practice to the classroom either; you can potentially use every single minute and every single interaction to hone your craft. Take a hypothesis-driven mindset in the development of your learning, and use the entire GSB as a learning laboratory.
Vulnerability
In my first year at the GSB, I've developed a model for approaching conversations which has helped forge closer relationships — I call it the “bid model” for conversations and developing relationships. The tldr version is that you need to take the first step in conversations and offer a few "bids" of vulnerable personal topics. Otherwise, you're just peeling the first layer of the relationship onion with the same people, over and over again. You can't wait for the other person to broach sensitive topics — be the first mover and offer a few nuggets of more personal topics. It won't guarantee a great and deep conversation, but it's the best way that I've found. There's definitely some sort of market-making/liquidity analogy to be made with this bid model too, but I'll stop myself.
Reflection and introspection
One of the most harrowing ideas that I encountered early on in my life: Twenty years experience is often one year of experience repeated twenty times. Learning is driven by the number of iterations, rather than the number of hours spent. Frequent introspection and reflection is what allows you to create tight feedback loops to drive your learning and re-formulate new hypotheses to explore. In the hectic environment in the GSB, it's too easy to forget this crucial learning step of proper reflection. There's a peculiar time dilation at work at the GSB: the individual days feel quite long, but the weeks and quarters are tremendously short. Write down your objectives, reflect on them, and then dynamically update them. Carve out time to reflect and religiously adhere to it — your future self will thank you.
Assorted tactical advice
Summer academic survey: there's some survey about your experience pre-GSB. Don't be conservative in stating your experience, particularly in your marketing experience (this allows you to be placed in the advanced marketing Product Launch class, which I thought was a great class).
Placement exams: Make sure you do the placement exams, which happen during Week 0 and are the only way you can go into Advanced D&D and Advanced Microeconomics (both classes in the winter). I'd recommend doing a bit of cursory studying for any placement exams, but please don't do more than a few hours at most.
Advanced courses: Generally speaking, advanced courses are more interesting and less full of busy-work compared to base or accelerated courses.
Course registration details: It's honestly excessively complicated, so when course registration time rolls around, talk to an MBA2 (I'm happy to chat, since I guess I’m an MBA2 now…) and have them show you all the resources (Explore Courses, historical course reviews, etc.). I'd recommend spending some amount of time researching what classes are actually interesting to you, as well as garnering a basic understanding of how the class allocation algorithm mechanics work (videos are on MyGSB).
Personal Leadership Coach: Sign up for it in the fall! It's the opportunity to work one-on-one with an Arbuckle Fellow on anything personal growth related that you want — it was one of the best experiences in my first year!