[Part I] How I decided about MBA and Masters

Change is scary, and so is staying the same

[Part I] Change is scary, and so is staying the same

Part II: Live your best story

Part III: The decision

Earlier this year I chose whether to go back to school for a master’s degree. I decided to write down my complete thinking process to help me document and deepen my backing for this decision. This is a story, not a guide on how to choose whether to get a master’s, but it could be an example that inspires you, just maybe. Read on for the journey. It was a long one.

Chapter 1: An Awakening

The choice of whether or not to go to grad school isn’t one that I’m unfamiliar with. This is actually the third time I’ve forced this kind of decision upon myself.

The grad school story starts when I was a senior in college. Before that, I never seriously considered it, knowing I wanted to enter the “real world” as soon as I could. But as a college senior, I applied to chemical engineering masters degree programs because I identified as “wanting to know things” and I didn’t know if I would get an interesting-enough job post-graduation.

As things turned out, I was offered a job that was interesting-enough, and I pondered whether knowing the things I would learn in the masters would be worth it. Ultimately, I decided to defer the grad school acceptance, saying no for now but giving myself the option to revisit the opportunity 1 year later.

A year later, I was in a totally different place. In that span of time, Covid happened, and I wasn’t working in chemical engineering anymore. I thought about getting the masters and using it to go back into chemical engineering, undoing the derailing of taking an unpaid internship at a food delivery startup.

The dubious future the derailing granted was admittedly fun. Unexpectedly, I landed myself in a situation where I was baking cakes during company all-hands meetings, sledding down hills on spontaneous afternoons blessed with snow, and helping a start up build up its entire data infrastructure in between all that. I didn’t know why I would go back to chemical engineering and work in a corporate office or a chemical plant. Sure, it sounded pretty cool to go work on grand challenges like turning silkworm excretions into plastic alternatives or reducing the emissions of hydrogen production. But, I knew that although it was cool, there was a better fit for me out there, occupationally. When the second time to decide on the masters program came, I said no.

This decision not to get my masters in chemical engineering cemented my pivot into the tech industry, and it felt like I was treading water and searching for the sand beneath me for a while. I wondered if I could make it in software engineering when I studied chemical engineering in undergrad. I was figuring out how to match what I was good at with what I was doing and what I wanted to be doing. To this day, I’m still figuring that out. The only difference is that now I have more experience and AI has entered the picture, making the potential futures even crazier to imagine.

5 years have passed since I took the GRE and applied to that chemical engineering masters program. GRE scores are valid for 5 years. That expiration date has dawdled in my mind for the past couple of years, as I again deliberated going to grad school.

I saw job posting after job posting that said Masters degree preferred. I worked in a team of engineers who all had a Masters or PhD and felt bad after asking them to explain to me how encoders work, my footing in machine learning evidently much less solid than theirs. My professional standing is a blurry line between early-career and mid-career, and I reflected on my lack of confidence that may be explainable for early-career professionals, but that needs to get resolved before I advance.

School would be one way to gain that confidence. Also, I knew subconsciously that I wanted to be a student again. I knew this because I had a dream one day.

Dreams are nonsense, but they are also reflections of your subconscious. This time, I dreamed that I had won the lottery. I was crushed when I woke up and realized that I wasn’t, in fact, a millionaire, but I was lucky to have had this kind of dream because it gave me the answer to the classic question: “what would you do if you won the lottery?”

In my dream, I had made a plan. The first thing I would do with the 100s of millions I received after splitting the winnings with my siblings was get a masters. I would spend my days learning about whatever subjects interested me. I would have way more autonomy than I had in a full time job where my focus was decided by my employer’s bottom line. During my masters I would try to discover impactful technologies and choose what companies and ideas to invest the other millions I had into.

This dream happened in early 2023. It eventually got buried as another distant memory, but I ran into a former classmate, Helen, who was now getting her masters and MBA in a dual degree program. That sparked exploration into data science, computer science, and MBA degrees. I called a few people about their experiences with the program, thought about online degrees, went to an MBA fair that was happening in my city, and in the end, didn’t feel compelled to apply to anything because I didn’t have a compelling “why” for more school when I could learn through experience. In 2024, during the most recent grad school application cycle and the last one my GRE was valid for, my exploration went deeper. (Note how I’m shaping my actions based on how much I don’t want to take the GRE again).

It started the summer before applications opened, I pondered my deepest wishes while watching the palm trees sway in the Balinese wind, I heard my family friends mention grad school degrees like they were the latest must-have after an Apple watch and a Trader Joe's bag when visiting them in China, and I thought about how my career has been changing while working in my company’s Japan office for a couple weeks. Whenever I thought about going back to school, only one feeling came up: “Nope.”

Shortly after I came back to the States, however, I woke up from another dream. In that dream, I was applying to grad school. Even in my wakeful state, an urge to go back to school lingered, and I told everyone around me about it.

A couple days after I woke up from that dream, I joined a Zoom meeting I had with a mentor of sorts. Lauren was practicing her coaching on friends and when she offered to coach me I immediately said yes. She was looking for people to guide on their journey to self-actualization, and I needed all the help I could get with figuring out a direction in life. When I clicked on the Zoom link on my calendar, I had my side of the deal prepared.

“I’m thinking about going to grad school,” I told her, “but I’m not certain about it yet.”

Lauren asked me about my reasons for and against going to grad school. I’d realized this after a couple times talking with her, she falls heavily into the camp of “listen to your intuition.” In the middle of me listing some reasons against going to grad school— “it's expensive,” “I don’t like exams”— she asked me to pause.

We proceeded to go through an exercise. Lauren asked me to stand up. She said to stand in the posture I have when I feel scared and unconfident, and told me to allow my fear to speak. Obliging, I hunched and folded my arms and told her my fears about going to grad school, all the practical concerns and opportunity cost associated with it. Then she told me to stand in a more powerful stance, hands on my hips, and tell her how I felt about grad school. I told her things that contradicted those fears, namely my ability to problem solve and pivot if things turn out wrong. Finally, she asked me about my favorite food, and how I feel when eating it. The question caught me off guard, so it took a moment for me to answer.

I remembered walking into a Japanese cafe in Richmond, Virginia two years ago on a solo trip. I always get some jitters when traveling alone, but late one afternoon, when the sun was streaming down in golden beams on an area of town I was exploring, I walked into a Japanese bakery/cafe. I sat in the window seat and sunk my teeth into onigiri for the first time.

I felt a rush of being where I should be in that moment. I had never tried onigiri before, but they reminded me of the rice balls my grandma makes. Enjoying them and the red bean kakigori I ordered with it fulfilled a deep longing. And so, in a town where I had no identity, I found a piece of myself in that cafe, wrapped in a plastic onigiri sleeve.

“Onigiri,” I told Lauren, “eating it feels zen.”

“Imagine eating onigiri,” she said, and I pictured the dark green seaweed giving way as I bit into sticky rice.

“Now tell me how you feel about going to grad school.”

“I think I’ll at least apply.”

Chapter 2: Unearthing the Past

I’ll unpack the fear I was feeling. Those practical concerns—where did those come from? I’m aware that I only have a few years of my twenties left, and I’m someone who has liked to streamline life. Another one-and-a-half-to-two years of school was not efficient.

Then there’s money. Salary sacrifice. Tuition. I thought about the regrets I had in the past where I committed to something, kind of ignoring the gut feeling that I didn’t want to go, and felt like thousands of dollars just got burned. The first of these happened when I was in eighth grade.

My parents got a letter in the mail from some youth leadership academy that sold a weekend long program where they taught “promising” kids leadership skills. It was supposed to be an honor, and I was told that a teacher of mine had nominated me. I should have known there was something up at that point, because I was one of the shyest kids in my class and the fact that I was selected should tell you something about the caliber of the kids they chose for their “demonstrated leadership potential.”

I ended up hating that weekend program. I remember going into a room in an old house with shared bunk beds—where I would stay for a night—and panicking about how I would function in this place where I knew no one. I wanted to make a friend or two to cut through my boredom, but I also avoided talking to people, and I felt like they were avoiding me.

The worst part of the weekend was the lectures on communication and leadership we sat through. It was fun when we broke out to debate GMOs with other kids and I will forever try to use “I” statements, but still, I felt bad that my parents spent some ridiculous amount on this.

I really don’t have a good experience with paying to develop leadership skills, and that’s relevant because 2/3 of the programs I applied for were dual-degree programs with an MBA component. The third one also is management related: a M.S. in Management Science & Engineering.

Chapter 3: Applications

Lauren left me with an assignment: pick five programs (I negotiated down to three) that you would like to apply to. I completed my task in the following weeks. After, I worked on my applications throughout the fall, sending the schools the GRE scores that—had I taken the test just a week earlier—would have been too old to use for that application round because of the 5 year expiration date.

Here are the specifics of where I applied:

Berkeley MEng CS + MBA dual degree

• 2 year program

• 4 technical courses

• MBA required courses (several you can test out of)

• Semester long capstone project

MIT LGO : MS CS + MBA dual degree

• 2 year program

• LGO summer program

• 4 technical courses

• 6 month internship + thesis

• Core MBA courses

Stanford MS Management Science & Engineering degree

• 1 or 1-1/2 year program

• Core requirements (Introduction to Optimization, Stochastic Modeling, Strategy in Technology-Based Companies)

• 4 concentration courses

• 1 project course

• Electives from any department

Why did I choose these programs?

Ask my applications:

Participating in LGO will be a stepping stone to becoming a technical leader who makes decisions grounded in rigorous math and engineering principles. I aspire to take my studies to the EECS department where I may continue deepening my understanding of machine learning. I plan to learn more about the underpinnings of deep learning to round out my knowledge across the machine learning stacks commonly used in industry. I would also enjoy learning about statistical learning theory, which fits into my goal of helping companies innovate faster by applying data and AI to decision-making and automation.

I aspire to be able to communicate with other data professionals and machine learning engineers on a detailed level while also looking at the big picture of why companies need data for their everyday operations and future vision. With a Berkeley MEng, I will have the expertise to bridge technical insights and high-level strategies. I would apply this to engineering systems that are efficient and safe enough to improve the foundations we build our world on.

I aim to leverage my background in data science and engineering to help companies make smarter, faster decisions grounded in rigorous foundations of math, science, and engineering. Courses such as Economics for Business Decision Making at Haas will prepare me to be a leader who is able to make tough decisions and collaborate with executives on deciding the path forward.

I am aiming to excel in the M.S. in Management Science and Engineering program at Stanford so that I can balance out my skills in data science with a greater understanding of decision making in large organizations. My career thus far has centered on applying insights from data to improving decisions and increasing efficiency. Meanwhile, it has become apparent that applying data science to solving critical organizational changes requires an understanding of how people think and steer their choices.

The gist is that I wanted to gain sturdy foundations in machine learning and data science, since I haven’t formally studied them to a large extent. I also want to learn how people make decisions, how to structure teams, and how to influence people.

Chapter 4: Informational Interviews

The new year arrived. I wrapped my applications up with Berkeley’s Round 2 deadline. Then, mid-January, I completed an annual review and wrote up my first draft of my 2025 plan. Q1’s goal was to decide on what to do if I got into grad school. I realized I needed to get it together and reach out to people so that I could figure out my life.

3 months were going to go by fast. Fortunately, my friend was having a wedding the next weekend.

I flew to Boston, and between the morning flight and the afternoon wedding, I took the silver and red line to Central Square and walked to a french bakery, one of several on that street that have popped up since I graduated. I guess that businesses are capitalizing on my soft spot for decaf cappuccinos and flaky croissants —simultaneously soul-nourishing and a necessity for meeting with people I reach out to for career advice.

Bruce was kind enough to respond when I asked a friend to post my plea for a coffee chat in the LGO students’ Whatsapp group. He happens to share my interest in generative AI and also lived in the Bay Area before going to LGO. We chat for over an hour and is very generous with his time, which contradicts my belief that students are too busy and impatient to really talk to you. He also contradicts an earlier belief I got from talking to a graduate of the program a year ago. Yes, the dual masters/MBA is a good program for people looking to go into technical job functions. It’s actually harder nowadays for people to go into product management, which before was what I thought most people went into. Bruce’s submitting a paper to a conference and has learned more about how deep learning works, one of his goals from the program. He warns me there is some luck involved with regards to what internship you get during it, and he tells me that the job market is still difficult for MBA grads. He says the ROI in terms of salary is questionable, but that the program has added color to his life in a worthwhile way. We chat more and I nod when he says that the curriculum doesn’t keep up to date with how quickly the world of AI changes. Two years out of industry feels like a long time.

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Over the next few months I chat with more people, gleaning as much information I can. I talk to 20ish people including analytics engineers, product managers and engineers at mid-to-large startup-y companies, data analytics managers, data scientists, MBA holders, startup founders, and students. At first it felt like everyone was leaning towards one side, but then I got a good representation for alternate perspectives, which was good. I’ll summarize my notes into some themes below.

Why get a Masters or MBA

1. Stay in the US: You want to get a visa to stay in the US

2. Switch careers or industries: You need the degree to enter a different career or different industry. For example, many engineers go into MBA programs to become product managers

3. Build a powerful network: You want a network you can call up to give you jobs or VC money, or you just want to make friends

4. Go for the environment: You want to be in an ecosystem of idea exchange, have time to reflect and focus on yourself, and do things you would never do otherwise

5. Gain credibility as a leader or engineer: If you want to manage people with an MS or MBA, it’s useful to have one yourself. Knowledge you gain from the degree might help you communicate better. Also, some people are skeptical of machine learning engineers without a degree in CS

Reasons not to get a Masters or MBA

• Technical career focus: Ask yourself if you want to grow on the technical or managerial side. If technical, and you have work experience already, MS is probably not necessary

• Technical skills are portable: Technical skills are flexible—you don’t need school to switch sectors. It’s likely that all the domain-specific, nontechnical, business and supply chain knowledge you need can be learned on the job.

• Questionable ROI: Hiring managers will recruit you based on your skills and experience not your degrees

Decision Making Advice

• Ask yourself what you do if your life were a blank canvas - don’t just continue down the path you were on

• Don’t cover all your bases, lean in on your strengths

• It’s hard to decide if you don’t try things

• Don’t not make a decision

• Good execution is better than good decision making

• The sooner you make a change the more immediate the benefit

• If you don’t have enough information to make the decision, you need to be very intentional about getting that information, or just go with it and move on

Careers

• The best way to grow is to find people who will help you grow (a good leader, a good mentor)

• The most important knowledge or skill set to be successful at a given job can be learned on the job, not studied at a college

• Early stage startups often hire people to be “overpowered ics” - people who are overqualified for their job and thus can cover a lot more breadth than what their job entails

• Data engineering and analytics engineering are described as “not the sexiest job” by many people, but they’re also chilling and making money.

AI related hot takes/facts

• People who can do a little bit of everything are in a good position when AI is here (could also see the other side, since AI is good at doing a little bit of everything)

• Not a good time to be an entry level data scientist since that will be easily automatable

• With the proliferation of GenAI and LLMs, classical ML is dead

• The bar to build products is slowly decreasing because of cursor which means that you don’t need to study that much CS to get an MVP working

• If looking to switch job functions, beware that the entry level job market is rough and you need to go beyond what is automatable

Miscellaneous things I learned on this journey

• People getting MBAs are more likely than the average person to describe themselves as “people persons” (people people?”) and “generalists”

• Lots of people, even people without MBAs, know the “three reasons to get an MBA” (the first three I listed above) although sometimes they disagree on what the third reason is

• I define impact in three ways: helping an organization with a positive mission, having an indispensable role in something, changing the lives of people near to you. Whenever I told people this they would respond with “for me I care about the second one” or “I care about the first two more” when the point I was trying to make is something is missing for me if I don’t fulfill all of them—I don’t think it has to be a choose 2/3 thing

• Talking with people 1-1 goes much deeper than asking people on a panel questions. With panels, you ask a well-thought-out question and the speaker almost always derails because unless you asked for a subjective answer, the question is probably one that requires a discussion and it’s impossible to answer in one shot

No one I talked to regretted getting a higher degree in the programs I applied to or knew anyone who did. This could easily be because of our tendency to rationalize our decisions to make sense of our life. What people do say is that while they got the degree for reason X, they would not have gotten the degree for reason Y. Less often someone might say “I’m glad I did X degree, but I thought Y would have been better.” “No bad options” I heard a lot, which is true, in this case.

Chapter 5: Life Coach

Around the same time that I was setting up my first coffee chats, I read an essay someone wrote in a magazine and found the email of the author. I sent her an email.

Jan 10

Hi Sarah,

I read your piece on “flourishing” in the xxxx magazine that was recently released. I wanted to say it was beautiful and resonated with me a lot!

I have a question as I navigate my own path to flourishing. How do I understand who I am more deeply? I have many inklings and I started writing more, but I feel like I’m not doing enough.

Best,

Kaitlyn

Jan 16

Hi Kaitlyn,

Aww I appreciate the reach out and it's so lovely to hear how much the piece resonated with you!

Ahh this is quite the deep question, with lots of layers going on here. I'm curious -- what is motivating this question? What is making it challenging for you to answer? And what have you tried so far?

I'd love to hear more :)

With love,

Sarah

Jan 21

Hi Sarah,

Thank you for the questions! What motivates this is that I’m feeling lost in my career without a clear direction of what I want to be doing. I’ve felt this for a while and my ex told me that even though I spent a lot of time reading books on life design and writing in response to reflection prompts and talking with people I still haven’t made any progress and that hit kind of hard....

The piece about understanding myself comes in here because I need to know how ambitious is ambitious enough for me and what kind of good is meaningful enough for me. Then I’ll know when to stop searching.

Any thoughts on how to figure out how to be ambitious in a good way?

Best,

Kaitlyn

Jan 30

Hi Kaitlyn,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts so clearly and openly -- you've clearly done a lot of introspecting on yourself, and that sort of work is not easy.

The biggest thing that strikes me from your email is the belief that if you know once and for all what your north star is, you can begin moving forward to making it happen.

What I've seen in my life and from the people I've coached is that north stars are seldom static. They shift and change over time as you also shift and evolve as a person.

Rather than wait for your north star to become crystal clear, what actions could you take today to learn what feels fulfilling for YOU? I've found that learning about yourself and what you want works best when you combine both internal reflection with external action that gives you more data about how you interact with the world.

I'm actually a life+career coach and these questions you're thinking about are ones that I think about often. Would you like to do a coaching call together on these topics? If yes, we can schedule some time. If not, that's perfectly okay too :)

With love,

Sarah

Feb 1

Hi Sarah,

Thank you for your rich response! It's an interesting concept that north stars shift over time. I'm curious about how I can approach life in a way that helps me learn more by doing more.

I'm also starting to think that now's a time where having a life and career coach would be good, so if we could arrange a coaching call, I would be so grateful!

Best,

Kaitlyn

I called Sarah later in February, and the experience was very valuable. She sent me a recording of our zoom meeting, which I’ll look back on and treasure for all the cringeness of my speaking.

The takeaway I got can be summed up here:

“I think the people I've seen thrive the best in grad school are those that are going not just for the opportunity on the other side, but because they actually enjoy the process. Because they actually want to be surrounded in that school environment. If you're going into it not sure exactly how it might fit into your life, or if you're only doing it for what's going to happen on the other side, but you don't quite know if that's what you want, that's a really hard investment to make.”

“What if it wasn't just, does it help me do what I want to do in life, but is it what I want to do? I think a lot of times it can actually be pretty hard for us to figure out how pieces will connect and where they'll lead us.”

Learning about grad school programs through current and former student’s eyes, I had slowly started to think about higher education differently. Before, I was looking at it as a stepping stone towards something: a career I knew was a fit for me, confidence when I submitted a resume, knowledge I used on the job. But after talking to people who went through it, I saw the value as something else: a container where you had an overwhelming number of avenues to explore and people to talk to, where you could choose your direction and live in a way that is >60% focused on finding and following your passions (with some % focused on recruiting activities and fulfilling degree requirements, but still, how much you focused on that was decided by you). People talk about the amazing access they have to PhD students and professors working on novel ideas, and about the high number of people working on starting companies. School is simultaneously a destination and a means to an end.

Sarah told me that north stars will change and that I shouldn’t get caught up with figuring out what that exact goal I wanted was. But still, there are two criteria I knew I truly cared about:

1. Where would I feel deeply rooted in a community?

2. Where would I wake up with a strong motivation every day?

Chapter 6: Envisioning the Futures

A coach friend offered to coach me for an hour when I told him I was considering grad school and what to do in life. I took him up on that offer shortly after I talked with Sarah.

Speaking with him was special because he knows me more than a stranger does and so he helped me see myself in a different light. With Marcel, I started thinking about another way of looking at my situation. “What would you do if you won the lottery” was a hypothetical situation, but here’s one I actually had on my hands: “what would you do if you were free from your job for two years and had “$50k to spend,” which is on the order of what my grad school tuition would be. Would I go to grad school, or would I do something else entirely? I walked away with an assignment: write the story of the next two years of my life.

At first, it was easy, because I know what I want to be doing right now. I want to be cooking pancakes over a campfire stove in the woods. Writing about the rest of 2025 took some effort, but it was mostly continuing what I am doing now, things I’ve been planning already, and a couple vague, typical goals. Looking back on the story now it feels a bit forced. Writing the story of 2026 was impossible, and so I ended on a cliffhanger.

I knew this exercise was important, but it’s very difficult to predict what future you will want. The next five years are unpredictable because of how the world is changing, sure, but personally, I also find it harder than it should be to imagine any course of events. It’s much easier to envision a state than it is to envision how to get to that state, or even, what a day would look like in my life if it’s different from how it is now.

I kept trying to imagine. I drew decision trees and timelines and quadrants. It was fun. But then I realized something.

Chapter 7: The Fear of Not Changing

Fear tickled the back of my neck as I looked down at the tree diagrams I just drew. Every branch ended somewhere, every story trailed off, and it felt as though each branch hit a point of stability where life just felt kind of stagnant after.

In chapter 2, I unpacked my fear about going to grad school. Now I realized that I also have a fear about not going to grad school.

The potential future timelines where I went to grad school were fairly straightforward. I started grad school. I got an internship. Graduated. Moved into a senior role at some company. Seems like a totally reasonable path. Conventional, yes, but it would feel good to know what I was doing.

The other timelines where I didn’t go to grad school started off sounding fun, but then they felt more vague. They lacked milestones. I wasn’t certain whether I could navigate a path toward purpose and impact.

It’s really hard to imagine the opportunities that can come your way naturally, especially if you’ve been in ruts before. The no-grad-school path was filled with unknowns and uncertainties, and my lack of imagination made it feel like I could stagnate fast or just feel lost the whole time. To be fair, it’s also hard to read into the meaning and value of life when you’re treating it like a state diagram.

Not going to grad school would be letting go of opportunities. I wasn’t certain about what opportunities would replace those if I turned down grad school, so it feels like pruning down the possibilities and setting myself on track for stagnation.

Talking to a friend about this, she advised me that I needed to find my passion as quickly as possible. If school is the way to do that, I should do that. If it’s a different thing, I should do that thing. It’s solid advice.

I know that you usually don’t find passion and meaning from thinking. You need new inputs, new experiences, and new ideas. For that, you need change.

I only resist change because I’m pretty happy with how my life is, despite its imperfection.

To my future self 5, 10 years into the future, the happiness I feel now might be meaningless. I’m trying to be intentional about doing things beyond adding joy to my life in the near term. If I want to end up working a good job in my thirties, shouldn’t I try setting myself up for the best stable job possible? I used to picture my future self looking back and thinking “don’t worry so much, enjoy your youth while you can.” I’ve started to imagine my future self looking back and thinking “I wish you would have focused more on your career.”

Chapter 8: Cassie Kozyrkov

I have a hero, a role model I look up to as someone I hope to be like when I make it in my career, and her name is Cassie Kozyrkov. Contacting her had been in the back of my mind for a while, but it wasn’t until March, after a friend encouraged me to do it, that I tried. I sent her a LinkedIn request with a thought-out note. She didn’t respond to it. Cassie’s one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices, and I follow her, so I remembered a post I saw a while back about a class she was involved in called: How to Get into AI. It’s essentially a career advice course for people who want to work in AI. I looked up the schedule of this live/hybrid course. They were already in the last week of this five-week-long course that brings in a different speaker each week. In this grand-finale week’s class, Cassie was the one presenting. I signed up last minute and dished out a hundred dollars for the full course, just so I could catch Cassie speaking in this last segment and maybe, just maybe, get her email address or ask her a question.

The course started out slow.

No, I don’t need to hear an introduction about who Cassie was-- I already knew that. The host turned it over to Q&A way past when they were scheduled to, and so they were going overtime. I was the first one to type a question into the chat, but that was earlier at a relevant point during Cassie’s talk. The Q&A facilitator completely skipped over it and asked a question he made up himself. I copied and pasted my question into the chat again.

The main host told the Q&A facilitator that he had time for one more question, and he actually suggested reading out my question, which was why I am forever in Brian Evergreen’s debt. I almost couldn’t believe it was happening. And then there I was, indirectly communicating with my hero Cassie Kozyrkov via a Q&A facilitator reading my question aloud.

And I still treasure the class recording like it’s a precious artifact.

The question I typed was: “How would you go about the decision of whether to go back to school for higher ed (mba or masters)? Especially for someone starting on the path of Decision Science and Leadership for Data or AI”

This is a transcript of how she replied:

“Having done grad school twice is your perfect advice that I am bad at decision making....But here’s what I learned by having too much grad school in my life. Ask yourself what you think you need in grad school that you’re not going to get if you just naturally allow yourself to do whatever it is that pulls you. If the answer is that you need other people who are trying to get their skills to a very very high level and you need to have constant access to them so that you can work on ideas together, and that unless that is going on in your life you are wilting, that’s the formula that says go to grad school for something scientific. You have to know there’s no way to do it except through grad school. MBA is a different sort of thing. MBA is a great way to build a network if you don’t have one. But MBA programs are expensive. Networking as in taking yourself to the right part of the space time continuum and then making friends is not that expensive. So you might also want to weigh those. How much will someone care that you’ve got this or that degree? I haven’t been asked about my degrees except in this forum for a long, long time. Nobody cares.”

The way to be successful is to be helpful. Being a person people want to work with (based on personality, helpfulness) is more valuable than being a 10x engineer who can grind and push things out quickly but veers the team off course because they’re going in completely different directions. It reminded me of a quote I read 5 years ago.

As a graduation gift, my dad gave me a pen with this quote on it attributed to Einstein: “Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.” And, digging through my desk drawer I found the little note that came attached to it:

“The quote is a reminder of how to become successful, by being the person you already are”