As it ends: concluding reflections on graduate school
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
9:51 P.M. |May 5th, 2022–About 16 hours will be beginning of the end. A little over two years ago, I made the announcement that I would be uprooting my wife and I’s life in Oklahoma City to pursue my MBA, seven hours away, to Houston, at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. Making that announcement felt surreal, and now, at the eve of it all coming to a conclusion, still feels surreal.
And while I can’t forecast how I will feel the moment the tassel goes from left to right, “surreal” is the best word that I can find to describe the experience in its entirety. It has been surreal to think that I have arrived here, even when I believed that I shouldn’t be here in the first place. It has been surreal to think about doing graduate school in the midst of a global pandemic. And, it has been surreal to think about how much has happened in the time that I’ve been here.
Surreal, because I shouldn’t be here.
It is not lost upon me that for every offer of admission to a seat in the Rice Business full-time MBA class of 2022, there were five rejection letters sent. How I ended up receiving one of those offers is beyond me.
I’m at best, a mediocre candidate, and I do not hold a candle to my astonishingly accomplished classmates. But, if I were to be charitable to myself, the case that I would make for myself (and the case that I basically made in my application) was that I had a combination of experiences and skillsets that could be interesting in a graduate-level professional program.
Surely, there would be some value to add from a Filipino-American digital marketer with a background in economics, Western literature, and had an interest in entrepreneurship, right? Long before business school, I had tortured myself with questioning if that kind of story would be legitimate enough to land in the world of the MBA. Even after getting admitted, I operated as if I had to continously earn the spot, or apologize for being here.
It wasn’t until I sat through leadership coaching in the middle of my first semester that my coach, Ruth, had made me recognize such a limiting mindset, the dreaded “impostor syndrome.”
“What if you acted as if you did belong here?” She asked earnestly through the Zoom screen towards the end of our first session. To live in a reality that I was here by merit and free to pursue goals without reservation was a glass-shattering moment. And it opened a whole new world of possibility for me.
Surreal, because it was in the middle of a pandemic.
Nobody could have predicted the pandemonium that was the first outbreak of COVID-19. It upended the world not too long after a nice-sounding “two weeks at home” government directive got us packing our work laptops home. The sheer havoc COVID has brought on is another topic in itself, but the ramifications of doing graduate school during a pandemic definitely impacted the dynamics of learning.
Taking a graduate program built for interactions, collaboration, conflict, and team building was obviously a tall order, and special acknowledgement goes to Rice for still salvaging as much of the in-person interaction as possible in a safe way, but either way, the disruption did alter the expectations and the reality of getting an MBA. That first year will likely not be like any other first year experience that has preceeded me or will proceed me. It’s hard to think of it now, when in-person instruction has returned, but I managed to learn about discounted cash flow analysis, regressions with seasonality variables. or contribution margins in my cramped condo over Zoom. I lived and breathed the Share Screen function, and managed to show off my playlist curation skills with the “Share computer audio” button. In the spring of my first year, I took some pithy lessons I learned and shared it in a blog post, showcasing either resilience or stubbornness.
And as if there wasn’t enough change with transplanting my life into a new city for grad school, second year brought us back to campus with some rockiness of the Omicron variant. I had to relearn how to be social — whether to fist bump, bump elbows, or even shake hands with a first year, to get used to crowds again. Then there was the process of bringing everything back into an in-person format, including the array of student clubs that had done only virtual events. I don’t know how, but I ended up leading three student organizations in that process.
Surreal, because so much sh*t happened.
And it was in that second year, with the world slowly morphing into a new normal, that my wife and I decided to start our family. (Turns out that grad school is a great time to become a dad, depending on if you time it right — my winter break became my built-in paternity leave.)
My wife and I joke that we do all of our transitions all at once. Between moving, grad school, her switching into an entirely new career, and us welcoming our daughter into the world, all of those life events happened in the last two years.
Getting an MBA was enough challenge, but with all those other life events, it felt like an ever-shifting landscape. Not only was I professionally transforming, but my identity as a person remolded from various inputs, such as “young professional” to a “family man,” to a “startup employee,” to “the marketing and PR guy.”
It’s been hard to truly summarize the mountain of takeaways, insights, revelations, and basic “what happened”s, but I will note on a few:
- I traveled abroad for the first time, going to Costa Rica to learn about ecotourism, foreign investments, and medical devices.
- I helped plan a conference in New York City, and built personal connections with an organization that I have admired for years.
- I pivoted into healthcare tech, something I didn’t anticipate.
- I became the leader of a student organization that was virtually inactive and on its way of vanishing from campus, and by the time I appointed a new board for next year, the group had tripled in size.
- Weekly, I managed and MC’ed an even called Lunch Colloquium that involved wrangling everyone’s Powerpoint slides on events on campus, sharing my Spotify playlist, and changing fonts at 9AM every Monday.
- I hit my limit.
- I competed in the first ever racial justice business case competition as a semifinalist with a team from Rice, and then served on the managing team for the second annual competition.
- I completed a 60–hour training program designed to train students leadership coaching.
- I became a part of a student-run production called Follies, providing “comedy” content to the student body in an end-of-year show.
What to make of this surreal experience
Philosophers have long pondered about the purpose of life and existence. And while I have been educated with enough philosophy to risk incorrect references, I have tended to like the musings of existentialists. Life is absurd, but there is value in creating meaning out of it.
And as a parallel, I offer this as a half-baked, sleep-deprived conclusionary thesis of my experience as an MBA student at the Jones School from August 10, 2020 to May 6, 2022: it has been a catalyst for my own development that has yielded outputs that I could have never imagined.
In Data Analysis, Dr. Weston explained the idea of an autoregressive model, a time-series regression where the output is a function of the function’s previous values. A person is likely to be the same person as they were yesterday, even though the state of being and acting may have not been completely the same.
At my last Lunch Colloquium that I led, I referenced this idea: that people had been watching me lead this event week after week, and even if my performance may have had highs and lows, they were ultimately watching something short of an autoregressive model — my way of leading this event was more often than not the same, but my confidence and efficiency seemed to grow over time. I turned this metaphor around to the audience and said, “this is basically what is happening to you, too.”
In business school, we get split into core teams, and through the seemingly endless amount of deliverables and coursework, get to know well each other’s working styles, quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. But as we work through seemingly impossible problem sets and complex case studies, who we are is yet to stay the same. We languish or flourish with new concepts until they become practiced skills. We endure or manage the conflicts that arise. We are more or less the same people as we were yesterday, but with small changes that will make big impacts over time.
And at the end of the two year process, I still consider myself the same person that entered the program, but there is a considerable difference; I am a more transformed version of myself. The Nathan that will cross that stage in the coming hours will have the know-how to build a business model and all the expected skills MBA programs tout, but also, the ability to address limiting beliefs that would have stopped him two years ago. And even in the wake of all this change, he is still the guy that is prone to making jokes and obscure references.
I emerge out ofthis surreal experience not just with a degree, but with experiences that will guide an illuminate my life and career moving forward. It’s been a full two years, between the Zoom classes, the unofficial meetups at Kirby Icehouse, the afternoon working sessions at Audrey’s. It has tested my resolve, and I have, many times, thought about dropping out, giving up, and some other despairing decision, but I’m glad I have made it through.
And all of this wouldn’t have been possible without the village of people who have supported me along the way. There are too many people to list here, but the two people who especially deserve the recognition are my wife, Lauren, and my daughter, Cora.
Both of you have given me a “why” on the hard days, and a reason to keep pushing. This MBA is as much as your accomplishment as it is mine.
And for the rest of you all who have walked this journey with me: your kindness has not gone unnoticed. Thank you. Always.
Even though my MBA journey is ending, I know that something else begins.
And I hope wherever you are in life today, you can move towards new beginnings, too.
