The Surprises & Challenges of Business School

Challenges

What challenged me the most was learning how to operate in the section setting, especially academically. You’ll quickly need to learn how to speak about your ideas in a way that gets other people to accept them.

Everyone reads the same cases, but not everyone has the same background. Depending on the case, you’ll have to talk about different issues with a different perspective and level of understanding than your peers.

For example, sometimes I’d end up discussing a case on finance or entrepreneurship even with my limited understanding of these aspects of business. In  business school, you learn how to discuss unfamiliar concepts. You’ll confront the limits of communication and build up your confidence in your ability to communicate and persuade others.

In your work environment, you have a narrow range of people you communicate with. You mainly talk to co-workers, subordinates, supervisors, and clients, all of whom are communicating with you within the boundaries of your area of expertise. It’s a completely different situation when you’re talking to people who worked in different industries and have to learn their vocabulary.

The experience may seem daunting, but the challenge of interacting with a whole spectrum of people is necessary because it develops your flexibility as a leader.

Surprises

The people at HSB were a lot different from what I expected. Before coming to HBS I had the perception of people at Harvard all being a certain type of person. During business school, I realized that with a class size of nearly 1000 people, there are always going to be people who are extremely different and people who are extremely similar to you.

There is no general archetype that encompasses all the students. The people at business school are just as varied as any other group of people you meet.

In spite of HSB’s reputation for having aggressive, overly competitive students, the people I met were actually very nice. I didn’t get to know everyone in my section, but I feel that I respected each individual in our group. People in general treated everyone else with respect.

One quality that might distinguish the people at HSB from others is they tend to be a bit more pragmatic than normal.

For example, we had one case that discussed Yahoo’s dilemma in China. The Chinese government wanted Yahoo to censor the results of sensitive search queries.We debated whether we, if confronted with the same dilemma, would agree to follow a government’s controversial laws.

Interestingly, the overall conclusion was that, as a businessman, the correct thing to do is to obey a country’s laws if you intend on conducting business there. This pragmatic conclusion surprised me because college students on the whole tend to be a lot more idealistic and focused on human rights issues. The censorship issue in particular was one I knew had been frowned upon by most of my peers in undergraduate school.

Conducting business in our international economy market requires an open mind and a willingness to address things from both an ethical and cross-cultural perspective. A lot of my peers who hadn’t travelled abroad or conducted business with other countries were especially eager to learn how to think internationally.