Work Life Before Business School: Consultant Or Unconventional Job?

I am a graduate of Harvard Business School. Part of what makes me different from the typical Harvard Business School alumnus is my background as an international student.

I was born in China and grew up there. Later, during middle school, I moved to California, which is also where I attended high school. I even decided to stay in California for my undergraduate education, which I pursued at Stanford University.

After I graduated from college, my family decided to move back to China. I wanted to stay close to my family members, so I moved with them to Hong Kong, which is where I got my first job.

I was offered a job there for an editing and consulting position at a company where I had an internship during the summer of my junior year. It was a good opportunity to start my professional career, so I took that job and returned to China.

I worked between the company’s main offices at Shanghai and Hong Kong for almost 2 years.

I wanted to try something different from consulting work, so I took a job in real estate investment at a local Chinese corporation. It was a family business-style corporation that, in addition to its work in commercial real estate, owned its own brand name as well as a chain of department stores.

I joined that corporation mainly to help out the son of the family, who had recently graduated from Wharton Business School. I joined his team in a couple of different roles. One was the strategic planning side of the department store business. My other role involved the investment side of the business because the family had a real estate investment business going on at the same time.

It was during this time that I developed a specific interest in commercial real estate. For me, part of my job’s allure was the opportunity to explore something completely different from my earlier consulting work. In real estate I got to work in a hands-on, specialized field.

People in the consulting field work mostly as generalists, so my decision to work directly for a specific field was pretty unconventional. Most of my peers in consulting went on to work in equity or took on a consulting job for an established multi-corporation. I, on the other hand, was working for a comparatively small corporation with  family business characteristics.

I knew that if my risky decision to enter an entirely new field didn’t turn out well, I could always fall back on business school. Luckily, I thrived there for almost two years before voluntarily enrolling in business school.