[Part II] How I decided about MBA and Masters
Live your best story
Part I: Change is scary, and so is staying the same
[Part II] Live your best story
Chapter 9: Experiencing It
It’s hard to decide what you want without experiencing it. Grad school students will tell you the highlights of their time in school, namely the travel opportunities. But those are short-lived experiences. I wanted to see first-hand what the day-to-day of a grad school student was.
Shadowing Berkeley Haas/ IEOR Students, April 3rd, 2025
I emailed the professor in charge of the MBA/MEng dual degree program and asked if she knew any students who may be willing to let me shadow them. She gave me a whole agenda, including the time and place to meet her the following Thursday.
I leave the door early, arriving in downtown Berkeley at 7:30am. The walk to the business school is a nature walk. I see a squirrel dancing in the canopy of trees. Small birds don’t flinch when my feet step just inches to the right of them. I pass the faculty glade, which has a brown log cabin like building. I hear the clock chiming. I feel a glimmer of something, similar to the feeling of the first day of school. Students are walking around me and I imagine a life where I’m also going to class.
I arrive at the cafe I’m supposed to meet the professor at and I sit by a window filled with mossy vegetation and muted sunlight.
The professor arrives and I’m happy to see her in person. I talked with her over Zoom once back when I was still researching programs to apply to, and her input helped guide me down the dual degree track. We shake hands. She tries to sell me on Berkeley.
I smile when she talks about close friendships people make and the unique Berkeley culture. She’ll casually mention “an automaker” or a “social media company” that students are partnering with on capstone projects. She says lots of good companies recruit from Haas and calls LGO, the other dual degree program I applied to, a “very different program.”
I’m very impressed by the generosity she shows me as she walks me around Chou hall and to the first lecture she chose for me. I ask her what qualities she sees in the most successful students in her program, and she tells me that they have some idea of an interest and they use the resources associated with it, for example they do research in Berkeley’s labs. I lock onto that and the idea of conducting research at school, as part of independent study or a lab, starts to interest me.
In the first class I attend, everyone welcomes me and seems nice. I say hi to the girl next to me who happens to be another MBA/MEng whom Prof. asked to have lunch with me later that day. I go to the next class with her. In between, she gets a coffee and I get a soda, and we chat a bit. She’s an international student and went to MBA school for a visa and for the opportunity to switch to product management.
I find out what the coffee is for. I can barely pay attention to the next lecture which is about attention, of all things. While the instructor goes through slides on LSTM and key value databases for deep learning, I get the sense that lectures are a very inefficient way of knowledge transfer.
I didn’t really learn much from the final class I attended, either. It’s a seminar course where speakers come in each week and give a talk.
A lady with a slideshow mentions CAGR like everyone knows what it is. I feel like there is little substance in all the words she says. I question whether I care about business enough to go to business school.
On my way home, I reflect on how quickly I learned about the Haas MBA through a day spent shadowing students. I wonder if going to one school is sufficient—that is, if the learnings at Berkeley will generally apply to all business schools. I take a guess that the answer is no, and that I should give MIT a fair shot.
MIT Sloan Admit Day, April 10-11, 2025
I walk into an MIT business building and take the elevator up to the sixth floor. It’s a similar process to the Open House for prospective students I went to back in September.
I pick up a name tag from the check-in table. This time it says “LGO AdMIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science” under my name. I stare at it. It feels weird seeing myself in the EECS department. I feel like I have no business there, since I used to be the ChemE major who felt like she couldn’t even talk to the CS majors, whose conversations would include tons of jargon that went over my head. Things like “microservices” and “FAANG”, I didn’t learn until after I graduated. And when my career took a hard turn, I was the ChemE major who wondered, time and again, whether a CS degree would have let me get past more resume screens. Now, finally, I see MIT EECS next to my name and it feels like encountering another version of myself. One that I had envisioned before but didn’t believe was possible. It’s a strange feeling and I know that labels shouldn’t matter this much.
I sit down at the first open spot at a table that I see. This feels like the Open House, except this time everyone is an admitted student. I’m surprised that I only recognize a couple of faces from September. “Congrats” I say mentally, and “I’m sorry” to the people I remember at the Open House really wanting to come to LGO but who aren’t here.
It irks me a bit that most of the women I meet that day are significant others of admitted LGO students. They’re really nice people, but I wouldn’t be taking classes with them, and it seems like the representation of women among the admitted students is pretty low. One of the significant others, a beautiful, down-to-earth girl with soft highlights in her long brown hair, talks about how she started dating her husband just days before he went down in a submarine for three plus months and I glanced over at him, shocked at how lucky he got.
I learn some details about the program over the next three hours, as I doodle on the notepads they handed out. I hope no one notices that or my stream-of-consciousness notes that I sporadically jot onto the paper. “Don’t love seminars - is attendance mandatory?” “LGO students fungible.”
Afterwards, I go to an Italian restaurant where I meet some current LGO students and other AdMITs. I avoid sandwiching myself between two couples and sit on the other half of the table. It’s a good call because whilst talking to the guy sitting diagonally from me about the internships the program sets you up with, he lets me take his phone and scroll through the projects listed on their internal website. It’s very informative, and I read a sample of project descriptions. Some are vague (using generative AI to streamline operations). Others are more specific and research-y, involving simulation or aligning AI with human preferences. These sound like great projects I would want to get involved with as an intern who could convert to full-time. It’s a definite plus to going.
The next morning, I wake up at 8 and try to grab breakfast at the Sloan building before too many people arrive so that I can skip the beginning of the event without anyone noticing. Unfortunately, fifteen minutes past the start of breakfast, a lot of people are already there, and when I sit down at my assigned table, I introduce myself to several other admitted business school students. Then I brace myself for sitting through the selling of MIT Sloan to me.
I did fly out to Boston and go to this event for a reason other than the free food, and that was to learn some things about the MBA program. However, I feel discomfort in my throat when the career services team gives their presentation. Later, I hear about people’s experiences in a self-discovery class where people do therapy-like exercises paired with executive coaching to define who they are as leaders. I’m glad that people get a lot of clarity from these things and figure out what they want to do and become more themselves because of it. Those are all things I want to do as well, it’s just that the thought of paying an exorbitant tuition to do that was nauseating to me.
After skipping the afternoon of AdMIT day activities so that I can attend Stanford’s MS&E virtual admit day, I walk into dinner a bit late.
It felt meant to be that the last remaining chair at the table was next to the organizer of the dinner, Fiona. Fiona’s a current MBA student who told her story earlier at an admitted students’ event that I missed. Fiona underwent treatment for cancer, and she at one point didn’t know how much longer she had left to live.
She told me that she wanted the audience to take something away from the story: in the end you won’t care about what credentials you have or how successful you became. In the end, the thing that you’ll really care about is the relationships you made.
Stanford MS&E Virtual Admit Day, April 11, 2025
This was a three hour long Zoom meeting where I was just absorbing information about the program. They wouldn’t send out a recording or slides because they wanted to stop information that they know will become outdated from leaking out into the abyss of the web. Not only are the details always changing, the degree is very flexible. Midway through, they said something that immediately made me feel more in favor of this program. If I commit to the program, I have until August 31st to decide whether I want to go this year or defer and go a year later. I could also alternate freely between full-time/part-time/online and it wouldn’t impact my degree. The ability to decide later is such a powerful feeling. They announced an unfortunate 10% cut in TA positions this year as well. People who do get a TA position would get free tuition, health insurance, and a small salary, but fewer will be able to benefit this year due to planned reallocation of budget, less federal grants, and taxes on endowment.
Four faculty members gave a fifteen-minute long presentation on their research. I asked the first one whether masters students could get involved in research, and he said that his lab was at full capacity with PhD students. It was only the last talk that I really was interested in, which talked about AI adoption in the workplace. I went to the website of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) and started looking into ways to get involved, and this did allow masters students to participate.
After finding HAI, I was tempted to say Stanford’s research was more interesting to me than either other school. Honestly, I had very little clue what was happening in AI research in labs at MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford. I turned to ChatGPT to give me summaries and clicked the hyperlinks to various websites. It made it seem like MIT and Stanford were fairly equal, but in real life I think there is a distinction.
Much later, I met a person who was a researcher associated with HAI at a conference in the Bay Area. It happened to be that he was affiliated with both MIT and Stanford, and so he was the perfect person to ask which school had more research on the topic of AI-augmented decision making. “Stanford, that’s why I’m here.”
Shadowing an MIT LGO Student, April 14th, 2025
On my final day in Boston, I arranged to shadow a student in the LGO program. I woke up a few minutes past 8am and ate a slice of toast and peanut butter with my former college roommate, now room-sharing host. We hugged goodbye and at 9 I headed out the door. I walked towards the Citgo sign, past Fenway park, past the frat houses on Beacon Street, across the smoot-demarcated bridge, and I made it to MIT. It always feels odd walking past the lawn which was the same one I walked across when I graduated with my bachelors. I ask myself, what am I doing back? IHTFP. I hated and loved and moved on from it.
I walk into the first lecture of the day at 9:30. I have no idea what biomolecular feedback systems are, but with a quick google I find out that the woman who wrote the book on them is standing in front of me with chalk in her hand. She seamlessly switches from slides to the blackboard, where she writes on all 8 of them to help the students take notes. I remember sitting in classes like this ages ago—with variables whose definitions I can’t find anywhere, and the good old chain rule on the board. It’s satisfying to watch the step by step derivation that reveals some law at the end. The professor talks about interesting effects that scientists see when knocking out genes. Thrown into the middle of this class, I still wonder what retroactivity in genetic circuits means and how any of this will be applied. I ask the girl I’m shadowing, Susan, why this class is relevant to her and I find out it’s more about a way of understanding biology than about something you apply.
I walk with Susan to her office hour, where she asks a professor sitting in his office some questions about the homework. Then we walk to the library where we eat lunch and talk about the difference between finance and accounting, since this is an MBA program she’s in. I sit while Susan joins a call with a recruiter in one of the meeting pods.
Next we go to a class called Money for Startups. It’s about understanding venture capital and I worry that it will all go over my head like biomolecular feedback systems. We enter the classroom, which is where I used to take fluid mechanics as an undergrad. Money for Startups is a more popular class because all the seats are filled. I sit behind Susan and a couple of other LGO students. They’re really friendly. When I tell them I’m not sure if I want to do the program yet, they tell me “Don’t do it if you don’t know why because it’s a lot of work.”
The first fifteen minutes of class, the instructor talks through logistics, before calling on students for some back and forth discussion. We go on a tangent about section 83b of the tax code which I think lets you pay tax on shares before they vest. “If you don’t sign it, you don’t get it, and you’ll be stuck for the rest of your life,” the instructor warns. The words echo.
For the next hour a woman from a healthtech startup gives us a talk about who she is, how she came to start a company, which startup accelerators she went to, and what the total addressable market is. I’m impressed by her story and see into the life of someone who founded a startup with a great cause. It sounds like a lot of work. She asks the class how many of them are working on starting a company or want to. About a third raises their hands. This class is like a fireside chat you would find happening on a weeknight in San Francisco, with some added components of continuity.
We walk to the business building for Power and Negotiation and find a couple empty seats. Also a popular class, and the lecturer is great. I love the first 20 minutes of class where the instruction on how to have difficult conversations with someone validates my beliefs about why my previous relationship failed. Beyond the first half hour, though, I find that the class has a bit too much discussion and feels slow. We break out and I sit outside on a nice spring day watching the students practice their negotiation skills. The two students I sit with are pretty convincing in their acting but I think they’re also way nicer than people would actually be in the situation.
I stepped out of the negotiation class for a meeting with someone I had been trying to reach for over a month. This meeting is important because the girl I’m talking to has one of the most relevant backgrounds among all the people I spoke to. She was in my graduating class at MIT and she’s experienced both a MS in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford and an MBA at MIT. She helps me discern the difference between a Masters in Management Science & Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration. MBA provides you with leadership development—the aim is to build you into a strong leader. MS&E is focused on studying the technical aspects of a business. I agree with her that the MBA is more valuable from an employment perspective, but she assures me I can find similar careers out of both programs, and to me, the MS&E program sounds more fun.
I find out what leadership development means at the next class. Susan warns me it’s an unusual class that all the second year LGO students who are one month away from graduating are in, and they don’t take this program-required course seriously at all. But when she tells me that their team is ad libbing their 5-minute presentation to the class it sounds like there is entertainment value so I tell her that I’m in.
It feels like standup comedy. Early in the presentation the presenter for the team points at me and asks me who I am. Susan tells him that I’m an admitted student and he says that he’ll change what he’s going to say because he wants me to go here next year. I crack up. He goes on to talk about all the stereotypes that existed on his team members and how they’re wrong. “I learned that consultants are actual people with real lives.”
It’s also kind of hilarious that a bunch of the students I met at the admitted students open house last week were now here in class, presenting to me what the program is really like.
The teams of students have to give a presentation on how their first summer at LGO changed their perspective on leadership. Some talk about doing homework together, others talk about a team bonding exercise they did where they had to walk blind-folded to different trees, a few talk about personality tests that they had to take during the program, and one team talks about how they accidentally got inebriated before their Littlefield simulation.
After class the students are super approachable and friendly to me, even though I’m an outsider. We walk to the student lounge where, at 7 pm, some students are chatting. I don’t have much time before my 10:30 pm flight, and I told a friend I’d grab dinner with her so I head out, but not before I eat a slice of the classic pizza from my undergrad years: Bertucci’s.
Late that night I fly home and land a bit past midnight. The flight attendant announces, “As you disembark, remember to appreciate life’s moments and live your best story.”
I ask myself how the day as an LGO student felt. Maybe it’s because I’ve been sleeping on West Coast time and waking up on East Coast time but I’m exhausted.
Shadowing a Stanford MS&E Student, May 29th, 2025
It’s been a long time since I visited a university for the first time. Berkeley and MIT were places I had been before, and I was familiar with how to get around. I’ve never stepped foot on Stanford’s campus before, although I remember my dad driving my mom, sister, and me around the campus when I was 10 years old. The 10-year-old me buckled in the back seat admired what my dad pointed out as Spanish roofing.
I managed to make it there without any mishaps, despite the coded directions from someone which included a bunch of names that didn’t show up on Google Maps when I typed them in.
In the process, I tried finding WiFi on campus. WiFi didn’t cover every part of campus because it’s practically impossible to make sure every foot of the green lawns and wide boulevards is within network range. This fact alone reminded me of Disneyland. That, and how after I got to the coffee shop, I realized people were willingly standing in line for 15 minutes just to order their coffee. And the fact that so many people I passed were smiling.
Stanford’s campus has lots and lots of greenery, and it was sunny and beautiful. I visited in May but it’s like this most of the year.
I met with Ella at Voyager coffee. She was smaller and daintier than her headshot on LinkedIn would lead me to believe. We walked towards the business building where we would have lunch with some of her friends. In the meantime, we talked and occasionally, with her vanilla iced coffee in hand, she would point out some landmarks.
“That’s Hoover tower and if you want to later we could go to the top and get a great view of the entire campus.”
“This is the church. When I got here I didn’t think I would like it because I’m not religious at all, but now it’s one of my favorite parts of campus.”
She told me about how she saw students act out the Hunchback of Notre Dame in the old church, which made the play feel very immersive.
I wasn’t here for the tour of pretty sights, but I admired them anyway and expressed my appreciation.
It was pretty clear to me that Stanford would be a fun place to be, but I wasn’t so certain about what the Management Science & Engineering masters program was like. I asked Ella what the most negative thing she would say about her program is.
“All the MS&E classes are BS.”
Fair point, I think I got that sense before. Ella and the MS&E + MBA girl I chatted with at MIT both had said that they liked classes in other departments much better, so they had asked the department to substitute a lot of the required MS&E courses with courses in other departments. Ella said that most of the business and entrepreneurship classes were really well taught and not BS. Unlike other business schools, where students often were distracted in class, GSB’s classes sometimes had a no-device policy and mandatory attendance. I have mixed feelings about this, because yes it’s good to have a no BS class, but then, I don’t really know if I can sit through business classes and have my full attention devoted to term sheets and negotiation practices for an hour.
Since I was a committed student, I felt a different energy compared to when I toured Berkeley or MIT. I could hear myself saying “when I’m on campus” to play into the excited energy Ella was talking with. I wanted to feel that excitement, and it was interesting to pretend I was for certain going there. I knew I should be more genuine, so I later told her although I was committed to Stanford, there’s a chance I might not go because I deferred my MBA acceptance and could defer my Stanford acceptance too. “Stanford is a nice place,” she replied with a wispiness that made me recognize how much she enjoyed her life there while acknowledging that practically, it doesn’t make sense for everyone.
We got lunch. It was weird to be in a campus dining hall again, and it had been a long time since I had to navigate a buffet, so it felt a little jarring. The dining hall had an indoor-outdoor design and we sat outside in the shade of some trees. The students around the picnic table all seemed to be having a great time. They seemed young and carefree, like stereotypical students, I guess. There was little talk of classes, although someone mentioned that in the Leadership Lab class they came from, they played soccer golf and Jenga with the CEO of Allbirds.
A little later, I saw George walk up to us. That morning, I sent a message in a group chat with admitted MS&E students, telling people I was on campus if anyone wanted to meet up. George was the one student in the group I wanted to meet the least because his profile picture was of him posing in front of a cyber truck, and I think that says a lot, but he’s the one person who responded. He came with a box of donuts leftover from a class he was registered in that quarter, which was nice. To avoid disrupting the conversations the rest of the group were having, I chatted with him on the far end of the lunch table.
I have no reason to dislike George. I think he’s a really friendly, good, and idiosyncratic person. I asked him why he wanted to do MS&E, he said “To be honest, it was the cheapest way to get Stanford on my resume” (because he’s doing the program part-time and Microsoft is helping him pay his tuition). I asked him what careers are interesting to him, and he said “Honestly, I don’t know.” He reminded me that if I did the program full time, I would be losing out on 2 years salary and $100k of tuition, which is a ton of money. He said it might not be worth it to me since I already have MIT’s network. He also said a lot of the classes are BS. I appreciated this practical reminder. George said that he came from a working class family and felt different from most of the students at Stanford, some of which were extremely wealthy. I felt happy for him to be here and to be experiencing a fun, interesting environment while also earning a big tech salary. It’s a very different place compared to where he’s from. Another practical warning from him was not to move to Seattle, which he said was way too cloudy.
Later that day he would text me some unsolicited advice but it’s kind and considerate of him:
I was just thinking more about your situation. Honestly what I recommend you do is do the MS&E program part time.
And while doing the MS&E program part time apply to Stanford/Harvard/maybe Wharton’s MBA programs. If it wasn’t for the fact that you already did your undergrad at MIT I’d say pick that. But I don’t think going to the same school twice will offer much benefit to you. Also unless you are trying to get out of tech I probably wouldn’t consider Wharton either as you hardly ever see someone in tech from that school.
Stanford is very flexible with taking leaves and finishing years later if you happened to get into another program you wanted to go attend full time. Also transferring internally among schools is easier. Earlier this week I had an hour long meeting with the head of the MA/MBA dual degree program asking him questions about that as I’m considering pivoting to EdTech someday.
George works a full-time job and said it’s a pain to have to do schoolwork on the weekends sometimes but it’s worth it to him. He wasn’t able to tell me too much about the experience as a part time student because he just started, but I’m impressed at how he made it work. Today he was crashing on a classmate’s couch and was about to go to the airport to fly back to Seattle. Some part-time students also live on campus, which sounds like a pretty nice way to have the best of both words. However, I feel like juggling a full time job with grad school could be too much. I like having free time, and that’s how I’ve always felt about part-time grad school. The thing driving me to go back to school is so that I can fully be a student again. However, since my job isn’t stressful, I could try to do this. And I could try out being a student and drop out if it’s not a good fit. Or I could study part-time until I got enough from the program and then drop out/ take a leave of absence. Just some things to consider.
George drove Ella and me down Palm drive in his rental car. It’s the famous entrance to Stanford which is a long road lined with palm trees, and George thinks it’s a must-see. I ask Ella how many students are interested in starting a company or joining as an early employee. She said almost everyone is taking entrepreneurship classes, but some opt into big tech, finance, or consulting. The fact that so many people are keen on getting a masters so that they can start a company is a little mind-boggling, because the degree is expensive and starting a company doesn’t make you money immediately. Ella says that some people come in knowing they’ll drop out by the end of the year because they want to start their company by then.
After I took some free time to walk around. I passed by a tour guide showing some prospective undergrads the campus. They were talking about fun traditions, and unfortunately, the only one I caught was them saying how some students go to Bay to Breakers in SF every year and cheer on the runners, which is something anyone living in SF can do.
I left my water bottle in Voyagers that morning and I went back. It was still there on a table, untouched. Campus is so safe compared to the city. The demographics of Stanford don’t seem very different from the demographics of the whole Palo Alto / Silicon Valley area—it’s a lot of people who look like they would work in tech. Although in Stanford the people are younger than the general population you’d see in Silicon Valley. I’d be slightly above the average age of graduate students at Stanford.
I met up with Ella again in the Stanford Robotics Center. The building is all white on the interior and very futuristic, with glass-windowed bays showcasing different environments their robots are trained in: a bedroom, a dance studio, a hospital, a kitchen.
I find Ella in the kitchen. Her and her team are surrounding the kitchen island, watching a robotic arm draw on a piece of paper with a sharpie. They sigh out their disappointment when the pen goes off the page and the markings don’t look like the numbers they hoped for. The person who apparently wrote the script mentions how the paper they’re using now has different friction he needs to account for.
I like robotics, and it’s something I’ve considered working on in the past. I explored robotics a little at MIT, but felt like building things with my hands and designing 3d objects was not something that came naturally to me. The others around me were much better at it. I regret this mentality a little, because I feel like it’s better to struggle in something that doesn’t come to you naturally, if it ends up with you in a job you find more fun years later, than to study something because you feel like you’re good at it and then fall into a job that you don’t really enjoy years later.
I asked Ella how she transitioned from architecture to robotics, having had no robotics experience before Stanford. She said she struggled and that chat gpt was her best friend. I was definitely impressed. She went from having an interest in robotics and just going to events to working on a robotics startup idea in a team of students to taking technical graduate-level robotics courses, all within an academic year. This summer, she’ll be in a small team of people working at a robotics startup that is making a robot chef. She found this opportunity after emailing the CEO because she saw the startup recently got funding, and the CEO also studied at Stanford.
I ask Ella if she has a lightning cable because my phone is on 5% battery. Surprisingly, she does. She lets me borrow it and as its battery recharges, talking about her passion for what she’s doing recharges my inner battery.
Ella is evidence that people who take the MS&E degree requirements lightly but use its flexibility to take courses in something else that they’re interested in are people who can get a lot of value from being at Stanford. She makes me feel like it’s possible for me to enter into something entirely new. However, the prerequisite is knowing what the thing you want to pursue is. I asked Ella why robotics, and she said “It’s just fun”.
I watched her serious expression as a robot arm picks up a plastic cup and drops it in the sink. “I don’t like this,” she says, and tells me that she’s going to have to tweak the algorithm. We go around and she joyfully tells me about mechanisms in robots we see. I enjoy seeing these robots, but I’m reminded that I’m not someone who gets as excited about device mechanisms as other people in robotics. I’m not feeling certainty yet that this is the kind of thing I want to be doing, but I feel inspired by Ella regardless.
I thank Ella for showing me the lab, and I leave, feeling like a deep impression has been made.
Chapter 10: Intuition
When the first life coach I talked to asked me to try listening to my intuition, I was skeptical at first.
Cassie Kozyrkov explains this very straightforwardly: Intuition is developed by experience and is best used for instances where you don’t have much time to think. She says to use intuition where you made similar decisions before and have an “expertise”, where the decision is unstructured, like judging art, or when you don’t have much time. Avoid using intuition and put more effort in where the decision is more important, where you are given more time, and where you don’t have experience making decisions like this one.
Again, this is the third time I’ve had to make a decision on going to grad school, so I have had a couple of experiences making a similar decision before. I learned some things from that, like how things can change so much in a year. In the end I’m glad that I stayed in my job because it was rewarding, and I think I didn’t love chemical engineering that much.
Maybe my gut had been made wise because of those past experiences. However, I still don’t think I can trust my gut. When I’m deciding whether to take an opportunity or not, my gut is treading difficult waters, drifting in the push and pull between fear of change and fear of stagnation.
I believe that it’s not always good to follow your intuition, and that gut decisions should be made carefully or in limited situations where the decision doesn’t matter as much or you don’t have time to think more.
However, I’ve been thinking about energy a lot recently, and I think it makes a lot of sense to listen to your energy.
Since I moved into a city, the highs and lows in my life have oscillated with higher frequency. I now see low energy days side-by-side with high energy days more often, and I can clearly recognize how differently I act based on my energy level.
Seeing my high energy self and my low energy self side-by-side has made me aware of something.
In her talk, Cassie Kozyrkov talked about the importance of being someone who’s enjoyable to work with. And I find that what controls that more than anything is not how much leadership training I went through or how much networking I put myself through, but how much energy I have.
To be my ideal version of myself, more education might help, but what is absolutely certain is that I need to do more of the things that take me to a high energy state.
When I visited grad schools, I realized the importance of your energy level in success there. I’m not going to learn if I’m bored in lecture. I’m not going to strike up conversations with strangers and attract luck to me unless I feel high energy. I’m not saying that introverts should avoid MBA programs if networking drains them, but if they don’t have enough ways of recuperating energy, introverts would probably get less value from MBAs than extroverts. Therefore, considering how you feel in a certain environment and how you feel when doing the day-to-day activities of a grad student is a very important piece of information to listen to.
I see a flywheel effect here: if I have energy, I’ll be better able to make friends, form community, and execute on projects that get me excited, and that in turn will give me more energy. And so, the most crucial thing I can do might be to protect my energy and follow the path that feels the most energizing.
You might call this the same as following your intuition, but be careful because unless you have experience, intuition is only a guess. Really knowing what gives you energy is something you can only learn through trying.
For example, I tested out my current city before I moved here. Before moving, I traveled a bit to get a sense of where I wanted to live, and this city, one neighborhood in this city in particular, felt right. Now that I live here, I have found friendships that fill me with energy even in difficult times, and I find inspiration constantly.
When I visited schools, I was testing them out. I measured whether I could feel any positive energy. To be fair, my sample size was very low. I spent only a few days on campuses this year and I didn’t have time to make any grad school friends. But I do think that I had an allergic reaction to Berkeley and that when I’m at MIT I revert back to being the person who just stays inside studying all the time. These schools would not give me the same kind of energy that I’m getting in my current everyday life, and if energy is a predictor of success, that is a significant fact to consider.