Suzy Welch on “Becoming You”: NYU Stern Course on Career Exploration
ApplicantLab |
November 27, 2023

This episode of Business Casual had special guest Suzy Welch, who — amongst her MANY accomplishments — is now teaching a course at NYU Stern called “Becoming You”. The goal of the course is to help MBA students determine explore career paths that might veer from the norm of the main job categories that MBA programs might funnel you to (e.g., consulting; banking; tech).

How did Suzy develop the course, and what are some of its take-aways? Listen to the podcast to find out!  

Episode Transcript

[JOHN BYRNE]:  

Hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets& Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast. We have a special guest in the house, Suzy Welch, who is a management professor at  NYU Stern. She’s a professor of management practice. Uh, she’s been teaching a very popular course there called “Becoming You”.

We’ll get into that in a moment. With me, of course, as always, are my co hosts, Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Caroline is a former managing director of admissions at INSEAD, and the co founder of Fortuna Admissions, and Maria is a former Harvard MBA. Not former, you’re always a Harvard MBA when you graduate with that degree and the founder of Applicant Lab.

Of course, Suzy Welch is the widow of the legendary chairman of General Electric, Jack Welch, who has a Harvard MBA herself. And in fact, when she was thinking about developing a course, one of the things that Suzy told me was she wanted to develop the course she never was able to take at Harvard, but wished she did.

Welcome Suzy.

[SUZY WELCH]:

Thank you for having me. I’m absolutely delighted to be here. So tell us what led to your course. It’s one of the most popular courses among MBAs at Stern, and it’s an unusual and innovative one called Becoming You. How do you become you? You take my class. I said the full name of the class is becoming you crafting the authentic life you want and need.

It has a little, you’re right. It has an unusual origin story. So I’m going to run through it pretty quickly. So I had had a long career as a business journalist myself, um, both on, uh, CNBC on the today show and writing, writing books with Jack and working for, Oh, the open magazine. And, and, uh, I actually also had a stint as a CEO at a tech startup and.

Was kind of, um, enjoying all the different things I was doing with my life. And then, uh, very unfortunately, um, Jack got very sick. And, uh, I stopped working, um, to take care of him in his last year or so of his life. And then right after he died, two weeks after he died, as a matter of fact, COVID struck. And like everyone else in the world, I went into the woods.

I was kind of gonna go into the woods anyway. We were well aware of, um, of our short. timeframe with Jack and I knew that there was going to be a period where I needed to kind of go away and regroup. And then COVID made that period really, you know, quite long. And after about two years, I came out of the woods because the Today Show called me and asked if I would come back on.

And I went back on and they were like, well, you come back and you know, we’re all back now. And I said, yes, but I was thinking, I think I’m ready to do something new with my life. I don’t, I think I had a wonderful, fantastic run, um, on in broadcast journalism, but something else is calling me and right around that time, a good friend of mine wrote to check in on me and said, Oh, I mentioned your husband, Jack in class, uh, the other day, because I’m teaching X, Y, and Z, um, I’m teaching at Stern now, by the way.

 

And I thought, huh. Stern, and it was like this light bulb, the kind of moment where I thought that sounds fantastic. So I went to go see the Dean. He’s called by one and all and at NYU Stern, and he was incredibly gracious and said, hi, you know, I’m hearing that you were thinking about. Maybe coming and teaching as an adjunct and I said, yeah, and he said, well, what would you like to teach?

Would you like to teach communications? Would you like to teach leadership? You start sort of rattling off different classes. And I had done a lot of thinking and a lot of research before that meeting because I knew exactly what I wanted to teach. I wanted to teach the class. That I should have taken at HBS but what didn’t exist then.

So I said, I said to my actually want to teach this class, and he said, um, he said, I described the class to him and he said, but we don’t have that class. And I said, that’s right, I’m going to. Go write it. And he said, have you ever written a class before? But in fact, I had, I’d written a lot. The first draft of the entire curriculum for Jack’s business school, J. W. M. I. So I said, well, I have, but I mean, I know I’m not a curriculum writer, but I have a very clear vision of what this class could be. And I am sure that the thought bubble above his head was, I will never see this woman again. Um, he said, okay, why don’t you go ahead and go write it? And I went away and I wrote it.

It was. Yeah. You know, like you, I’ve written several books and I know how hard it is to write a book and it was a lot harder than writing a book. Um, and I did a ton of research. I don’t know if you saw homeland where carry, like, has the wall filled with all these, like, stickums and tapes. And that’s what my office look like.

I mean, I was creating this class. I wanted to create a clear methodology where you could figure out what you should do with your life because I believe that it’s the eternal question is what I want to do with my life. But I also believe that. Thank you. There’s a problem in business schools in general that people get on a conveyor belt they go there with the, you know, everybody goes to business school to pivot, everybody, why would you go if you didn’t want to sort of do something new and different.

And they get there and the world seems so wide and so exciting and so filled with opportunity. And then they get on this conveyor belt and they go directly into consulting and investment banking. And as I tell my students, don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are consultants and investment bankers, but it’s not for everyone.

And you are inexorably pulled to it when the world is wide and the world needs you coming out of a good MBA program needs you very much. Um, and instead you go to consulting or investment banking. So in, you know, I’ve just never, ever heard anybody say, I want to grow up to be a consultant. And so I had a feeling that there were unfulfilled. Dreams out there and it catches up with you. Typically, when you’re around 50 and you have one of those talking head moments where you say, what is this beautiful house? What is this beautiful job? My God, what have I done? And I wanted to and I actually play that whole clip for my students. And because they’re young, they’ve never heard of the talking heads or that song.

And so I shout out the words. My God, what have I done? So they get the point. Um, and so that was the point of the, of the class and we didn’t know how it was going to go. I am grateful, very grateful to NYU for giving me the chance. Um, and the class, uh, took off and it kind of, it, it felt, it filled a need, it filled a need.

[JOHN BYRNE]:

Now, Suzy, after you earned your MBA at Harvard, you did a very conventional thing. You signed up for Bain and Company.

[SUZY WELCH]:  

I was poor.

[JOHN BYRNE]:

That’s something you regret?

[SUZY WELCH]:  

No, I don’t regret it. But I, and I talked to my class a lot about that fact. I. Was a reporter. I had been a reporter as a crime reporter, the Miami Herald, and I paid for my MBA out of pocket along with a little bit of help from my first husband, Eric.

And he and we then he lost his job and we had no money. We’ve lived in a … we lived in a very unsafe place because we were. Counting pennies, we were burglarized three times. I mean, it was, I needed money. And I found out that if you were a Baker Scholar from Bain, told me, if you are a Baker Scholar, we will pay off your entire debt if you come and work here.

And so I was close enough to being a Baker Scholar after my first year that I thought I got one goal and one goal only, and I’m going to be a Baker Scholar and I’m going to go work at Bain and I’m not going to feel this way anymore, which, and you know, it was, Scary. And so I, I use actually my experience of Bain as an example to talk about how one value can drive your life.

And it did. And I have no regrets about it. I met the most marvelous people who are still great friends of mine. And I learned a ton and I got a lot of self confidence around business. And so I don’t have any regrets that I did it. I did it for too long. That’s for sure. No, I’m thinking that your course, uh, really involves making people more introspective about their lives and what they want to achieve in those in their life.

And I wonder how you do that. How do you plunge them into that space, uh, where people think long term about what their obituary may eventually say about them. Yeah, well, I 1st day of class, I say, if you’re if you’re here, because you think this class is going to be easy, please go because this is a very hard process.

It’s a, you know, people think it’s going to be woo woo, but the word is out. It is not woo woo. This classes is a, I have a methodology. So the construct that underlies the class is that, um, that. Um, that we should all, we will all have the most meaning in our lives if I, if we seek an area that’s called which I call our area of transcendence.

Let me just back up a little bit. Imagine three spheres. If you would. The 1st is your values and what you truly believe, not generic stuff like family achievement and travel, right? But your true values, what you really care about in life, what really motivates you? Um, that’s 1 sphere. The 2nd sphere is your aptitudes.

 

These are very, um, hard to know when you are pretty good at everything, which most students at good MBA programs are they’re pretty good at anything. You know, I mean, if somebody told me Suzy, you need to become an architect. I could have become a pretty good architect. I mean, it’s just you go because I.

I’m educated because I’m generally competent. Should I be an architect? I’d be the worst architect in the world, frankly. And so then imagine aptitudes as a second sphere. And then the third sphere is the areas of economic growth that call you emotionally and intellectually. And the area of transcendence is at the center, is at the intersection of your values, your aptitudes, and what we call opportunity, which is the areas of economic growth.

Okay, because we can’t all be calligraphers that call you intellectually and emotionally and we methodically walk through each 1 of those spheres. We spend 2, 3 hour lectures on excavating your values through a series of exercises that I’ve either adapted from the literature or that I’ve invented. Most of them are invented, but I 1 of them that’s very key.

I worked with a psychiatrist who was at the University of Washington and then, but there’s a series of values. Excavation exercises and at the end you have a clearer sense of your values. First of all, you’ve learned what gets in the way of you finding out what your values are, and we sort of work on those and then we come out and people have a new and clear sense of what their values true, truly are.

Sometimes quite shocking, uh, for people who have been in denial about their values or don’t like to admit their values. And then, with the aptitudes section, we do a lot of testing. Aptitudes can be discerned through testing. We do, um, the uScience test. We do Enneagram. We have experts come in and speak about that.

But every member of my class has to do a 360 feedback. That starts the first day. They send it out to raters. Uh, you can send it up to 25 raters, and they all find out how the world receives them. And we spend two classes, uh, uncovering what your true aptitudes are. And then we have a, Uh, class on economic opportunity.

This is pretty hard because what’s going on with the economy and where the areas of growth are, are, are hard to pin down, but I have some excellent experts who come in and talk to about us about that. And we talk about what it really means to love a space or a product or a, or a, or a role, you know, like loving HR for instance, or loving a certain, uh, you know, my son is in game design because he just loves games and it, he, it wasn’t enough for them just to be his hobby.

So. Um, we spend a session on that and at the end, each student must take this new raw data and derive from it using their best thinking. As I like to say, their area of transcendence. If this is the data, what does it tell you? And then they have to present to class what their next 40 years of their life are going to look like.

And they do it by they can. There’s a menu of ways they can do it. I give them four dates going into the future, and they have to choose each one of those dates. And they either have an Instagram post, or a LinkedIn post, or a letter to their children, or a diary entry. And they tell us the story of the next 40 years of their lives based on what the data would suggest they should be doing with it.

 

Wow, that’s pretty powerful. So it’s searching for your, as you put it, your area of destiny. Now, it’s an area of transcendence because I used to say it was area of destiny. I did, but destiny is the wrong word. Transcendence is the word I love. And I’ll tell you why. Um, with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the top one was self actualization when he first came up with the hierarchy of needs, but he revised it himself four years later.

Um, and he put another little peek on it and he called it transcendence, which is self actualization plus. Giving back so that this is what my students and actually, probably all people desire, which is to be self actualized to be your best self as Oprah would say, but also in doing. So, in some way, serve humanity.

In some way, be doing something that makes the world a better place or makes a group of people better off or whatever. So my students and I think all people in general want to be in this area of transcendence where they are in their, their best selves. They’re sort of in peak flow, but in a way that is also contributing to society or the world or their family in a way that’s meaningful to them.

So that’s why I call it area of transcendence.

[JOHN BYRNE]:

Now, Maria, your thoughts.

[MARIA WICH-VILA]

 Yeah, Suzy, you know, it broke my heart when I read in the article that you said, Oh, I wish at Harvard business school, they would have had this class because when I attended HBS, they actually did have a class like this. It was called self assessment and career development, and it was really transformative for me.

 It really gave me the courage to walk away from, you know, when I entered HBS, I did not originally have any plans to pursue the consulting or the banking types of paths. But wow, that Pressure is just, this feels like everyone else is doing it. , and like you, I also came from a family of modest means and, you know, you can’t help, but start looking at those salary reports.

Uh, and you know,  you can’t help but have  your attention grabbed by them. Uh, and so when I took the self assessment class, it’s funny. I wanted it to tell me a certain narrative about myself that wasn’t true. I wanted it to tell me that, you know, yes, Maria, this is the path that , you should pursue.

And I remember being actually a little bit grumpy. With my results when they came back, because it was like, well, actually, you’re really a creative person and you really bristle against  hierarchy just for the sake of hierarchy. 

Uh, and so it these typical paths are the last paths you should follow. , and while I. Did not really want to hear that news. , I’m glad that I got it right because it was really transformative. It did prevent me from spending all of the time and effort into pursuing one of these roles that in fact would have probably made me miserable, and it’s really funny because there’s like this big week, second year, where everyone is interviewing and everyone’s trying to get those typical post MBA jobs. Uh, and instead of me doing that at all, I just took  some of my classmates who were from Asia who had never been to Latin America. to Peru. We went to Machu Picchu instead.

Uh, and that was a magical week and sure I gave up this path, that the siren song has started pulling me towards it. But taking a class like this really gave me the confidence to verify that this really wasn’t the right path for me.

And  I’m glad to see that you are replicating this class at NYU Stern. , it’s one of these skills or levels of introspection that most business schools just don’t teach. And that’s really a shame because,  I think that they’re doing folks such a disservice.

[SUZY WELCH]:

 I think good business schools are now getting getting religion with it. I mean, I think the more and more I mean, I think that when I was doing the research, I actually went before I went to speak to the 1st time.

I thought, oh, surely. And why you has this class by now. Because I heard it, you know, my son, when he was at Stanford took a class that was like this, and it was called the happiness project or something like that. It did not succeed in making him happy, unfortunately, but he’s happy now. Now he’s happy because we’ve got the great baby and all those other things going on.

But, uh, but it didn’t when he was there. Um, but I would say that I was surprised. And so I’m really glad, um, that more and more business schools have this opportunity. I frankly, you know, It wouldn’t hurt if it went into the undergraduate programs in different schools as well. Um, kids who are in that age frame are a little less formed and don’t know, you know, we’re really sort of in transition more, but frankly, uh, I think it has a place also with a cohort of people who are not quite so far along.

[JOHN BYRNE]:

Caroline, we often talk on on these podcasts about the need to be introspective when you actually apply to business school. And 1 would that that exercise in and of itself would would put you on the right course. But apparently it does not.

[CAROLINE DIARTE EDWARDS]:

Yeah, it’s very true. I mean, reading the article that you wrote about, um, Suzy’s work made me think of some of the work that we do with our clients, right, to help them develop their career vision.

And we often get feedback from our clients when they go to business school that having gone through that process, it helps them get a lot more out of the program. And I’m sure that’s the case with your students as well, Suzy, that once they’ve done this class, they’re able to really leverage the resources that’s there.

So much more effectively because they have a much stronger sense of what they want to get out of the program and how they want to carry that forward. We’re in a little bit of a pickle right now because the class is at this point is over subscribed to the point where only second semester second year students can take it.

[SUZY WELCH]:

Right. So the most common comment I get from people is exactly to your point, which is, I wish I took this first. Term because it would have changed all the classes I took. And, um, and so we are, uh, I don’t know how we fix that because obviously you want to make sure the kids are getting it before they graduate.

But yeah, I think it is an incredibly important exercise. The problem with the exercise. And I don’t know how you experience this with your own practice, which, uh, it sounds so incredibly valuable is. It’s hard to get people to do the hard work of actually identifying their true values aptitudes. You can test for.

So I’m always happy when we hit the aptitude section of it. Those are tested, but true values. People have a lot of time, a lot of trouble sometimes. A, accessing them, and B, admitting them. Yeah, that’s, that’s very true. And I think part of that comes with maturity. Um, and so, I really like the point that you make that, um, that it’s not, it’s not an end point, right?

You’re not looking to get to an end point. It’s an iterative process. And so I think that, um, you know, there’s value in doing this at different stages in, in one’s life, right? As you said, it could be good at undergraduate stage. It’s good at graduate school stage because people change, people evolve, and they have greater insight into themselves as time goes on, greater self awareness, and that will, um, you know, inform the process.

[JOHN BYRNE]:

And I was very interested in what you said, you talked about how you went into consulting post MBA and what a wonderful training ground that was, but you stayed too long. And, and so, you know, that made me think about how this, this one’s career is, is a process of change. Right? And so how do people, you know, they, they do your program, they do your course, they get this wonderful vision, they get this inspiration, but maybe when they’ll really need that is five years down the road or 10 years down the road when they are getting to a point where it’s It’s time for a change.

[SUZY WELCH]:

And as you say, people kind of get stuck, right? They get stuck in a career. They think I can’t let go. It’s a great employer. I’m in this sort of golden cage and I, I call it the velvet coffin. I mean, I put it in a coffin and I talked to them about it. You get in it. very comfortable. You get addicted to the money.

You really like the people. Um, it has just the right amount of stress for you and it’s good enough. And the next thing you know, the lid is closing on you. I use this very graphic term because I want them to understand that you can wake up at age 50 and say, my God, what have I done? I actually have them read this unbelievably painful article.

It was beautiful. the Atlantic. of a man who found his wife’s diaries after she died and consultation with the children. They agreed that they would read her diary. She had died of breast cancer and they find out that she had not lived in any way, the life she was, she had lived. And, um, and it, yes, but I want them to feel that “owie”.

Because we settle, we settle because it’s of expedience and optics and habit and many other things. And so what I like to do is send my students off with a, with a tool that they can use several again and again. I mean, I don’t think that, you know, the answer to them, the final answer is in my class, here’s the tool, here’s the journey.

Um, here’s your, what’s your, what’s your best thinking without the pressures of the daylight. But I would like you to pull this out once a year and review it. Um, and I’d like you to revisit this process. And if you’ve fallen off the. Journey, as I like to call it, because it is a journey and they’re going to be hills and valleys.

I mean, I, I talked to them a lot about how events get in the way. I mean, my life was going along in a way that was just very splendid. And then my husband got sick and that happens. A kid goes off the rails. Uh, you know, you, you break your leg and you, you can’t go in and then you’re replaced. I mean, just things happen.

And so, but the question is, if you don’t, Have a journey or a destination in mind, you know, you end up going on a lot of different roads and that is also not fulfilling. And so, um, I, I do think that they should revisit it. If no other reason, just to kind of freshen up and remind themselves, but also because the economy is changing.

I mean, I every many, many people’s jobs are going to be radically different. And so you may be going towards someplace, but that job may disappear or a new industry may bubble up. That is so exciting to you. I mean, I. We, I have an expert come in and we talk about the four big mega trends. And some of these are sound very, very, you know, sci fi.

And I ask every time one of these trends is presented, is anybody’s heart pounding? Is anybody’s heart pounding? And I always get some hands because it’s a beginning of feeling like this is very cool and they need to be thinking about that. We also play industry bingo because frankly, when you’re in business school, you just stop thinking about all the industries that exist.

Um, there’s 135 industries and suddenly you sort of think there’s four. There’s consulting, there’s banking, there’s real estate, and if you’re wild, okay, there’s, if you’re crazy, there’s retail. Okay, what? And so, you know, it’s like, I, we play bingo and I literally, I say, I’m, I’m doing this just so that you hear the names of these industries out loud.

Aviation. That’s an industry, you know, and I go through them and then they get very excited because they want to win bingo because these are MBA students. They all want to win something. So, you know, they, you know, you can, your world gets very narrow. If you don’t keep on coming back to asking these very big, hard questions with some kind of construct now, have you seen the impact on your students of the course?

That is so unreal. I have, I mean, that it is like, I, you know, Jack, one of the things he used to do when something got very excited. He used to say in the veins, in the veins, as if he even had any idea what a drug would be like, or feel like the guy was, you know, a beer was like as big as it got for him.

But I get that because I have seen students lives radically transformed in front of my eyes. I mean, I often jokingly this is a joke I call my class. The class where everyone cries, because there are so much emotionality. And I mean, I saw a student present her area of transcendence. She was in financial reporting at her company, took the class as a lark had no kind of actually, she was a big skeptic at the beginning.

Everyone’s like, get somebody who comes in and like, okay, I’ve heard a lot about this class. You just prove it to me. So she came in really. Button down financial person, airy transcendence presents to the class. She’s going to become an interior decorator. She’s like every I learned, I have been living a big lie.

This is what I love. This is what I do in my free time. All my aptitudes confirm. This is what I want to be. And I’m going and I’m blowing it up. And this is what I’m doing. My husband and I have come up with a business idea. He’s in real estate. We’re going to work together. We’ve got this idea. And she was on fire.

And everyone cried. I mean, to see, I mean, and I’m, if I could tell you this was the exception, I’d be lying because every single semester we get this and, um, it’s just, um, mind blowing to be a part of it. I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. It’s yes. So, but okay. By contrast, I had a student come in.

And she was wildly confused, and she actually wrote me her opening essay, asked them to write me a personal letter at the beginning saying why they’re taking the class. And it was very painful. She said, I’m confused. I’m in despair. And it was filled with despondency and self doubt. And she got up and gave her area of transcendence presentation.

And she said, I started off this class. So confused about what I was doing and what it confirmed for me is there is a reason I am doing all of this. I am in the right place. It is hard. It is where I belong. I’ve made the right choices and this class has been so affirming to me because nothing is going to change.

But at least I understand why I’m doing it now. And everyone cried. I mean, it was just very powerful and I thought this is just as useful as the person becoming the interior decorator. Is this is a person who’s discovered that the stuff that’s hard has a reason to it and she’s bought in. So it’s all good now, given that most people won’t have the benefit of taking your course who are listening to this podcast.

I wonder what advice you might convey to help them make the right choices. Now, you know, most people who are listening to this are people who are in the process of consideration of an MBA and applying to an MBA program questions. Should they be asking themselves right now? Well, I think they probably crossed the bridge to understanding why they’re getting their MBA.

I mean, I think you get your, I often joke with my students that I was the only person who went to get an MBA because I needed to learn more about business. I mean, I had been a crime reporter. They switched me over to covering business and I was like, I don’t know a ding dang thing about business. I don’t know anything.

Google then. So I couldn’t sort of Yeah. Brush up on myself. And so I had to go to business school to learn about business, which I found fascinating. Um, but, um, business school has got all these things, um, where you can learn about, um, jobs and roles and functions. And I guess my advice would be take advantage of them.

Like, go to all those meetings, go to all those info sessions. Uh, you’re going to get, you’re going to get a herded very quickly onto a conveyor belt. And so fight that, uh, and go to the, you know, go when somebody is on campus or. Some teacher knows a lot about some topic, you know, uh, find them and keep, keep your aperture as wide as possible once you get there, because you’re going there to open up possibilities for your life.

 

And then you get there and you start narrowing it down very quickly. And I’d, I’d fight that, fight that very hard. Yeah. That’s really good advice.

Well, uh, hey, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it for all of you out there. I hope you learn something about, uh, really just thinking more deeply about what you want to do with your life.

 

Um, because I think you’re right. So many people just are funneled into these positions by virtue of peer pressure and the need to pay off those loans, and they’re not thinking long term about what’s going to make them happy. What’s going to make them fulfilled and how they are going to lead the most meaningful life possible.

[JOHN BYRNE]:  

So, uh, I wish all of, uh, all of us could take your course, uh, even me at my late stage, I think I could learn something from it as well. Well, I think that actually, I, I, I, I’d love to figure out ways for people who are not in business school to take it because I do know the value. Absolutely. Maybe a book, Suzy?

Can we look forward to the book?

[SUZY WELCH]:

Yeah, I, you know, uh, um, I can’t hear you. You know, writing books is very hard. You know, it’s like, I don’t, I don’t know if I have the heart for it, but I do, I do want to figure out a way where more people can take it. I don’t know what that is, but I, I would love to do that.

[JOHN BYRNE]:  

And some of this harks back to actually your book, 10, 10, 10, right transforming idea, uh, where I bet you the seeds of this course were originally planted.

[SUZY WELCH]:

I actually in the executive MBA program at NYU, where I have 2 extra weeks with becoming you, I actually do teach decision making as part of it because.

Part of why we don’t do the right things with our career once we’re getting our MBA, or even before we go to get our MBA, is we don’t know how to make a good decision. And so that’s, that’s part and parcel with this is that we have to decide, but first we have to know how to decide.

[JOHN BYRNE]:  

Indeed. Suzy, thank you.

[SUZY WELCH]:

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[JOHN BYRNE]:  

All right. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast. Thanks for tuning in.

Suzy Welch on “Becoming You”: NYU Stern Course on Career Exploration
ApplicantLab |
November 27, 2023

[00:00:00] John Byrne: Well hello everyone, this is John Byrne with Poets and Quants, welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-hosts Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Today we have a special guest, Heidi Hillis from Fortuna Admissions. She is based in Australia, is a senior expert coach for Fortuna, and has three degrees, all from Stanford, a BA in English literature, that’s my degree, an MA in Russian studies, and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business. And we have Heidi here to discuss some really fascinating research. Here’s what Fortuna did. They dug into the last Two class profiles of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

That’s the class of ‘23 and the class of ‘24. They looked up all these folks on LinkedIn to identify a little bit more about their backgrounds, including their former employers and their places of undergraduate education to come up with an incredible analysis. Heidi, welcome.

[00:00:46] Heidi Hillis: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

[00:00:48] John Byrne: Heidi, what is, what are the big takeaways from your deep dive discovery?

[00:00:54] Heidi Hillis: It’s hard to know even where to start. I think there’s a quite a few interesting kind of trends that we’ve seen that have taken place over the years. We were mentioning before the call that traditionally there hadn’t been, 10 years ago, if you’d looked, you wouldn’t have seen so many tech companies represented, but now there’s a big presence of tech companies who are feeding a lot of these MBA programs in Stanford in particular.

I think that the thing that was really interesting was, looking, not just at where the companies that were feeding the students, the applicants to Stanford. When they were working there, when they were applying, but actually the paths that they took prior to their current job.

So how many people were working, if you look at McKinsey, for example, or Bain and BCG, those are obviously companies that feed a lot of applicants to the program, but we found 20%, which seemed to be normal of, the class came from consulting, but if you actually look into the numbers in their background, You would see that actually 37 percent of these two classes had worked at McKinsey sometime prior, or actually in consulting, so it was, it’s The kind of the patterns that are behind, what you would normally see in terms of what Stanford tells us.

So you get a sense of the paths that people have taken. And so that’s something that was really interesting to see.

[00:02:16] John Byrne: Absolutely. And of course, this is this analysis goes so far beyond what any applicant would learn by simply looking at the class profile that the school up because, this level of detail is never available to people.

[00:02:33] Heidi Hillis: No, and yeah, for example, you could see that, Stanford will say that they have around, each year around 50 percent of applicants are international, which is a great statistic and gives you lots of hope if you are an international student. But when you dig into the numbers, you actually understand that.

75 percent of the people who get into Stanford actually went to a U. S. University. So even if you’re international, it does have does seem to have kind of an advantage of having been educated in the U. S. That seems to be something that they look for. However, I think. The concentration of universities in the U.

S. that are feeding to Stanford is something also that, if you’re looking at it, you might find a little bit dis, disconcerting. There’s a few programs that are really, obviously the top. Programs as you would expect places like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the Ivies but if you look at the international universities very diverse from all over the world, really lots of people from different places, which is also really interesting.

[00:03:38] John Byrne: Yeah I tell you, one of the things that struck me in the data is how consistent it is. 10 years ago, we did the same exercise at Stanford and a bunch of other. Schools from Harvard and Dartmouth and Columbia and talk and a few others and back 10 years ago, we found that 25. 2 percent of the class of 2013 were from Ivy League colleges.

And the Ivy League 8 schools, not including Stanford. And if you included Stanford, it would have been 32. 6%. So now, let’s move forward to your data. And in 23, 30. 7 percent went to Ivy League schools, even above the 25. 2. And in 24, 27. 9 percent went to Ivy League schools. So it looks like Stanford has gotten even a little bit more elitist than it was.

Yeah,

[00:04:41] Heidi Hillis: It’s, it is it’s what the data says, right? Obviously, this is a sample. We have 80 percent of the two classes. So we don’t know where those other people went. And that might skew the data a little bit in another direction. But it is, if you look at there’s 15 schools, that include the Ivy’s and then you have UC Berkeley and obviously Stanford that really are contributing, 49 percent of the class of 23, 47. 3 percent of the class of 24. So that is a pretty heavy concentration and But, if you actually look into the data, you see a lot of people also, each of these is actually an individual story.

You see a lot of people who come from other schools as well. So it’s not like you have to give up hope if you come from a different school. I see a lot of individual stories that, from the whole range of U. S. schools that really are feeding into Stanford. So I think what the data doesn’t also tell you, unfortunately, is how many of these Of people from these backgrounds are actually applying.

So

[00:05:39] John Byrne: good point.

[00:05:40] Heidi Hillis: It’s it’s hard to know. And sometimes I think people this is. A path that a lot of people who go to these schools plan to take from the very beginning. So I would see, it would be interesting to know that I don’t know that we will ever find that out. But, um, that’s something to keep in mind as well.

[00:05:56] John Byrne: Yeah. And that’s a fair point. Because how reflective are these results of the applicant pool reflective of an elitist attitude probably a combination of if I had to guess, but, it is what it is, and these institutions obviously are great filters, so you come from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and you go to Harvard or Stanford or Penn, and you pass through a fine filter, and it makes you less of a admissions risk than if you went to, frankly, the University of Kentucky and worked for a company that no one knows of.

That’s just the reality of elite MBA admissions, right?

[00:06:40] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. And so you will see that the people who are not going, you’ll see a lot of the people who you would, the profiles that you would expect, the Harvard undergrad that then goes to Goldman that then was working at a PE firm.

That’s a really typical profile that you’ll see. But you’ll also see some really, unique and interesting ones, which I think, Okay. Helps you understand that if you don’t have that path, you also have a real chance at these schools, and maybe even more of a chance, again, not knowing, how many of those Goldman P.

E. Harvard grads are applying. So I’m thinking of the guy that I saw who he went to UPenn undergrad, studied engineering, started out a kind of pretty typical path working in private equity, but then made a big pivot to work for go to Poland where he was working in a real estate investment firm and the head coach of the Polish lacrosse team.

So you have really interesting profiles like that, that you can see that. aren’t necessarily taking that typical path. And sometimes that really does help you stand out.

[00:07:42] John Byrne: True. Maria, what surprised you most about the data?

[00:07:48] Maria Wich-Vila: Wow. I think we already covered, the, one of the biggest ones was the number, the percentage of people who would had some sort of either their undergraduate or graduate education within the United States.

Intuitively, I had felt that was true. And sometimes when I try to, give some honest, tough love to applicants from certain countries, and they’ll say, oh, but Maria, I think you’re being a little too pessimistic. After all, X percent of the applicants at these schools are international, and Y percent are from a certain geography internationally.

I’ll say yes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all Solely from that area. A lot of them are, do have significant international educational experiences. I think another, speaking of the international piece the percentage of people who had significant international work experience as well was something else that really jumped out at me.

Because it would signal to me that Stanford really does value this global perspective both within probably its domestic applicants and also its international applicants. So I thought that was also a really interesting piece of data that jumped out at me.

[00:08:52] John Byrne: Now remind me what percentage was that?

[00:08:56] Heidi Hillis: People who are international

[00:08:58] John Byrne: who have had international work experience.

[00:09:01] Heidi Hillis: I think it was 30%.

[00:09:02] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty

[00:09:04] John Byrne: impressive.

[00:09:04] Caroline Diarte Edwards: 30%, which I was thrilled to see. As well as coming from in Seattle and Europe. Obviously the international schools put a heavy emphasis on international experience and I hadn’t fully appreciated that. A school like Stanford would also.

really value that to the same extent. And it’s great to see that candidates are making the effort to get outside of the U. S. and get international experience because I think you gain so much from that exposure. And you bring more to the classroom if you’ve got that experience. I know that both Maria and Heidi.

I’ve worked outside of the home countries as well. Pre MBA and I think that you just have so much more to contribute to the whole experience. And it was great to see that 30%.

[00:09:50] John Byrne: What else struck you, Caroline?

[00:09:53] Caroline Diarte Edwards: We talked about the concentration of academic institutions, and I was also surprised about the concentration in employers.

So while there is a very long list of employers where the students have worked pre MBA when you dig into the career paths that they’ve taken there is some interesting concentration. Heidi had noted that the reports that There are 26 companies that account for nearly one third of the class in terms of where they were working right before Stanford.

But when you look at their whole career history, those same 26 companies represent over 60 percent of the class. So that is, yeah, that’s quite extraordinary that so many of the class have experience of working at quite a short list of companies.

[00:10:46] Heidi Hillis: I think that’s reflective of, if you really think about it, you have a lot of these companies.

You’re talking about the Goldmans and the Morgan Stanley and McKinsey that have really large programs that recruit out of undergrad that are really training grounds for. A lot of people that then on to do, work in industry or go on to work for in finance in particular, a lot of people starting out at some of these bulge bracket banks and then going into.

Private equity or smaller firms. So the diversity within finance in terms of where they were working prior to MBA is quite large compared to consulting because there just aren’t as many consulting firms, but a lot of people in financing, a lot of different firms, but they, a lot of them really do start out in these training programs, these analyst programs that are so big and popular.

[00:11:34] John Byrne: Yeah, true. And looking back, I did this exercise as well. The feeder companies to Stanford 10 years ago in the class of 2023, 22. 8 percent from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and your data, 22. 5 percent work there. Incredible consistency over a 10 year period. When you look at the top six employers 10 years ago, they were McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and JP.

Morgan Chase. They accounted alone for 34 percent of all the students in the class of 20, 2013 at Stanford. In your data for 23 and 24 they account for 29. 8%, just a few percentage points less. So remarkable consistency. And I think you’re right, Heidi, this is a function of the fact that these firms bring in a lot of people who are analysts and actually expect them after 3 to 5 years to go to a top MBA school.

So there’s a good number of them in the applicant pool to choose from and let’s face it, they’re terrific candidates.

[00:12:46] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. I think another pool of really terrific candidates that you see, and I don’t know what the 2013 data was saying, but is the US military, which is really, I think, again, something that I felt having worked with lots of military candidates myself, understand that, Yeah, intuitively, I would have expected, but to see it in the data is actually really interesting.

You just see Stanford in particular, I think, is really looking for leadership potential, and it’s so hard to show that as an analyst, as a consultant, but as in the military, these people have such incredible leadership experience that it really helps them to stand out.

[00:13:23] John Byrne: Yeah. And let’s tell people what the data shows.

How many out of us military academies,

[00:13:28] Heidi Hillis: In all in total, we had, 20 over the two years. So that’s in the two classes that we found. So that’s, a pretty large number. And they come from all the different academies, right? So you’ll find them from different, not academies, in the army, navy and the marines.

So you’ll see that. And you also see quite a few, in the data we’ll, we see a lot from the Israeli military as well, but that’s actually a little bit difficult to because every Israeli does go into the military. So it’s they have that in their background. Any Israeli candidate would have Israeli military background as well, but again, that’s.

Place that people can really highlight their leadership. So you had eight people from who had been, who were Israeli and obviously had military experience where they were able to demonstrate significant impact and leadership prior to MBA.

[00:14:18] John Byrne: Yeah. In fact, 10 years ago, roughly 2%. of the class went to either West Point or the U.

S. Naval Academy. Good number of people actually from the military. Maria, any other observations?

[00:14:34] Maria Wich-Vila: Yeah, I was also surprised at the fact that within those top employers And when we look at the tech companies, it was Google and Facebook and Meta with a pretty large showing. Google was actually the fourth largest employer after the MBBs and, but then, I was expecting there to be an equal distribution amongst those famous large cap technology companies.

So I, I would have expected even representation amongst Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, et cetera. And yet. Apple and Amazon only had one or two people each versus Google at 25. So I thought that was really fascinating and it makes me wonder if perhaps it’s a function of maybe Google and Meta might give their younger talent more opportunities to lead impactful projects, perhaps.

I’m just guessing here, but maybe Apple and Amazon perhaps are more hierarchical. And maybe don’t give their younger talent so many opportunities, but I was really surprised by that. I would have expected a much more even distribution amongst the those famous those famous tech companies.

[00:15:40] John Byrne: Yeah. You’re right. And I crunched the numbers on the percentages and Google took three and a half percent of the two classes and that’s better than Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase. Facebook had 2. 7 percent and Microsoft at 1. 5, and I was shocked at Amazon because, Amazon is widely known as the largest single recruiter of MBAs in the past five years.

At one point, they were recruiting a thousand MBAs a year, but in, in one sense, maybe Amazon quite doesn’t really have the prestige. For Stanford MBAs who might rather work elsewhere, I think that might be is, you look at the employment reports at a lot of the other schools and Amazon is number one at a number of schools and very low percentage of people from Amazon going to Stanford.

We don’t know, of course, how many. Leaving Stanford and going back to Amazon, but it can’t be that many.

[00:16:41] Heidi Hillis: I wonder if there’s something about just a proximity effect here. You have the plate, like the meta and Google just being so close to Stanford, maybe it just, attracts more people applying because they.

They’re almost on campus and maybe, just being Amazon all over the world and different places could be not attracting as many. I don’t know.

[00:17:03] John Byrne: Yeah, true. The other thing, the analysis shows, and this is what you also gather from the more public class profile is really the remarkable diversity of talent that a school like Stanford can attract year after year.

It is, it blows you away, really. The quality and the diversity of people despite the concentration of undergraduate degree holders or company employers, it’s it’s really mind boggling, isn’t it?

[00:17:33] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, they come from everywhere and really interesting paths and even the people I think that, have those kind of typical paths, you see a lot of diversity within them as well.

So I think, even if you’re coming from a Goldman or a McKinsey having lived in another country or gone to done a fellowship abroad or running a non profit on the side. These things are actually what helped them to stand out. But you do see some really interesting, I think, profiles, too, of people who’ve just done, you get a sense of what it would be like to be in the Stanford classroom.

People from really unique and different backgrounds. People who come from all different countries and lawyers, doctors people who have run, nonprofits in developing countries people running large programs for places like Heineken or Amazon too. But, it’s a real diversity of backgrounds.

[00:18:27] John Byrne: Now, Heidi, I wonder if one is an applicant. Is this discouraging to read and here’s why if I’m not from Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and if I didn’t work for McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google am I at a disadvantage and should I even try? Some people look at the data and come away with that conclusion.

[00:18:52] Heidi Hillis: I think it’s a reality check for a lot of people. I think it’s just, it’s really, it just helps people understand, what it, the difficulty of this, why it’s so competitive, but I think that there is, again, behind the kind of the percentages, you do look at these individual profiles and I would get, I would actually take a lot of hope from it if I were looking, as an applicant, because especially if you are.

Maybe a little bit more of a big fish or small fish in a bigger pond or big fish in a smaller pond you go to Rice or you go to Purdue or, and you do really well, those are the people who, they’re definitely looking for that diversity of background as well as the international.

I think that’s really neat. think that, instead of looking at the data and saying, why not, why I shouldn’t even apply, it’s why not me look at these other profiles of people who have taken really unique paths that that do get in. So I think it is actually a Kind of a mix of both, it is a reality check for a lot of people, but it’s actually, there is so much diversity in the data as well.

I think also one thing that we haven’t really covered is about is just the prevalence of social impact in, that’s really taken hold of the class. I don’t, again, going back to your 2013 analysis, I’m not sure how easy it was to tell that, but a lot of you can see reflected in the both the types of organizations people are working for, but also their titles and the kinds of work that they’re doing that that there’s a huge 40 percent of the class of the two classes had some kind of social impact in their background.

Whether that’s, running their own nonprofit on the side or volunteering or. Running trans transformational kind of programs within companies that are, either in finance or consulting or in industry. That’s a big trend. I think that people can take heart from as well.

So if you’re working if you feel like you’re in an organization where you’re not getting the leadership that you. can use to highlight your potential for Stanford, that’s definitely a place you can go is working for in volunteer capacity for a non profit or on the board of a of some kind of foundation.

Those are the kinds of places that you can highlight your potential

[00:21:00] John Byrne: true. And I know we have a overrepresented part of every applicant pool at an elite business school are software engineers from India. And I wonder in your analysis, how many of them did you find from like the IITs?

[00:21:18] Heidi Hillis: That’s a good question. The IITs, it was again, it was one of these you have about 50 percent of classes internet, so 25 percent of the class. was educated outside of the US. The IITs are going to be up there. Let’s see from India, 2. 1 percent of the class came from India. So probably, I don’t know offhand exactly how many of those were IITs, but

[00:21:43] John Byrne: I’ve had a lot of them.

[00:21:45] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, probably a lot of them. Although I think, that’s the other thing is that people who come, to work with me from India, they feel like if they haven’t gone to IIT, then that’s going to be a disadvantage. But I think, you’ll find that there are, there’s representation of other universities as well.

Definitely.

[00:22:00] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah, I was just looking at the list of undergrad institutions. And for example, you’ve got Osmania University from Hyderabad. So it is not, it’s not all IIT. Okay.

[00:22:12] John Byrne: Yeah, exactly. And Caroline, 1 of the things about the institutions that are really represented here and that I don’t really see unless I missed it.

I didn’t see a Cambridge or an Oxford. Two of the best five universities in the world. And I wonder if that’s just a function of fewer people in the applicant pool or what? What do you think that could be about?

[00:22:36] Caroline Diarte Edwards: I had a look through the uk Institutions and you have got cambridge in there.

I think I also noticed. Bristol university there are a few different universities. So i’m aston university, which is not it’s not on a par with Oxford or Cambridge. So I think that speaks to the point that Heidi made that you don’t have to have been to an elite school to get into Stanford.

Aston is a good solid university, nothing wrong with Aston, but it’s not it’s not one of the top UK universities. So there’s definitely some interesting variety in the educational backgrounds of the students going to Stanford. And

[00:23:16] John Byrne: then, yeah, it is if you’re a big fish in a small pond, like Afton, you’ll you could still stand out in the pool.

[00:23:26] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely. There’s a lot of really interesting background, you have look hard on blue and you have Miami University and some really smaller universities abroad. I think. Again, it’s really, if you look at that, it does give you hope because it’s really what you do afterwards and if you, obviously, if you come from one of these schools, you probably want to be in the top, 5 percent of the graduating class, you want to show that you have the GPA that can support an academic background that they feel comfortable that you’ll be able to compete academically, but, and maybe that’s what you’re Offset by the, the GMA or the scores, you don’t know, we don’t have those on here.

But, um, the path post university really becomes much more important in those cases. What you’ve done since then where you’ve, how you’ve risen from starting at a entry level position to, running a division or heading a country group or something like that.

[00:24:21] John Byrne: And as far as Cordon Bleu goes, every good business program needs a Cordon Bleu, for God’s sake, right?

You want to eat well at those NBA parties, don’t you?

[00:24:32] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely.

[00:24:35] John Byrne: Maria, I’m sure that was true at Harvard.

[00:24:38] Maria Wich-Vila: I wasn’t the one doing the cooking but I certainly, I was certainly a member of the wine and cuisine society where I happily participated in the eating and consuming a part of that.

But to, to the point that we were just recently talking about. regarding being a big fish in a small pond. Not only have I seen it personally with applicants that I’ve worked with who did not attend these elite universities, but even many years ago, I attended a, an admissions conference where Kirsten Moss, who was the former head of admissions at Stanford, she actually told stories about how they’ve accepted people who even attended community college.

But within the context of that community college, they had really moved mountains. And she said that one of the things that they look for is, Within the context and the opportunities that you’ve been given, how much impact have you had? So maybe you don’t have an opportunity to go to Yale or MIT or IIT for your undergraduate, but whatever opportunity you have been given, have you grabbed that opportunity and really made the most of it and really driven change?

So she specifically called out, I believe, I believe there were two students that year at the GSB who had both started their educations, their higher educations at community college. Anything is possible. It really is about finding the people who, wherever they go, they jump in and make an impact.

[00:25:55] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that to that point, I think it can almost be a more difficult if you’ve gone to Harvard and then worked at one of these, gone on one of these paths because we know that there’s, that’s an overrepresented pool in the applicant pool to stand out among those to have had that, that pedigree sometimes can be a disadvantage, right?

If you haven’t done as much as you should have with that, or if you started at that high level to show that level of progress over the course of your career is actually a little bit more difficult. Okay. And coming from a community college and rising to, a country level manager in some places is actually puts you at a significant advantage, I would say.

[00:26:31] Maria Wich-Vila: Because it’s hard for those people, it’s hard for those people to stand out, but also I think some of them go on autopilot, right? I think some people are on this kind of achievement, elite achievement treadmill, where they’re not even really thinking about what do I want to do with my life?

They’re always reaching for whatever that next, what’s the best college to go to? It’s Harvard Princeton. Yeah. Okay. Now that I’m here, what’s the best employer to work for? It’s McKinsey, Bain, BCG and without actually perhaps stopping to think about what is my passion? What impact do I want to make in the world?

And so I feel sometimes those autopilot candidates, I feel a little bit bad for them because they’re doing everything quote unquote and yet sometimes when you speak with them, that passion just isn’t there. And I do think that may ultimately harm them in the very, very elite business school.

Admissions because business schools want people who are passionate because at the end of the day, in order to do hard things, you’re going to need passion at some point to get you through those low periods. And so I think that’s something business schools look for. And I do think that sometimes these.

These kind of autopilot candidates might sometimes be at a disadvantage.

[00:27:29] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that, to that point look in the data, when you look at it, you see so many people who’ve gone to McKinsey, Bain, Weasley, or Goldman, but then there’s a, you see a lot of success for people who’ve actually pivoted.

So those pivots that are post The second or third job really do show you that, if you’re if you get a candidate who’s coming from, still at McKinsey, okay, that’s fine. They have to be the top 5 percent of McKinsey, like they have to be going to get so many McKinsey applicants that the only the, you can look at the data in a couple ways.

One is, oh, my God, they took 12 people from McKinsey and the others. Oh, my God, they only took 12 people from McKinsey, right? That’s So if you want to be one of those 12, you have to be the top 12 in the world, right? Whereas if you’ve gone to McKinsey and then done an externship at a health care startup and then moved on to be a product manager at for health at Google, that kind of a path is definitely showing a little bit more, maybe risk taking, maybe ability to follow your passions.

So I think that. When I see candidates who come to me, for example, and they’re like, not thinking about applying now, but maybe in a year or two, I say, look for an externship, maybe think about pivoting out of one of these places and looking for some operational experience.

And because you see in the data that works.

[00:28:42] Maria Wich-Vila: And they’re doing themselves a service not only in terms of enhancing their admissions chances, but even just in terms of determining, what do I want to do with my career? If I do eventually want to go into industry, what functional role do I want to have?

What industry do I want to work in? So it’s, it actually benefits them in the long term to do that as well, even if they don’t go to business school. I think those secondments and externships and second job, post consulting jobs are extremely valuable. Totally agree with you.

[00:29:06] Caroline Diarte Edwards: And I’m sure they also bring more to the classroom as well.

I would think that’s also why Stanford is selecting some of those candidates, because not only have they worked at McKinsey, but they’ve also led a non profit in Africa or worked in private equity or whatever it is. So they have much more breadth that they can bring to the classroom. And I think that It’s seen as a very valuable contribution

[00:29:29] John Byrne: in Heidi.

Did you see that? The majority of the candidates to examined actually did work in more than one place, right?

[00:29:37] Heidi Hillis: Yes, most of them did. There were very few that, you see working at one place. And I would say that those are people that would have really risen through the ranks.

Someone who’s worked at Walmart and become, started in, I don’t know, in one state, but then to become a regional manager and things like that really are going to onto a global role. The people who have stayed at one place really have shown significant career progression within that.

And then the other people I think you do see a lot of movement. The big. The most typical would be from investment banking to private equity and then you do find in finance, there’s a little bit less kind of movement into other industries. You see a lot of people staying within finance, but within finance.

Yeah. Yeah. The other industries, especially consulting or other, tech, people are really moving into other places and it’s becoming, it is a little bit difficult. We have these categories that we’ve talked about, for example, healthcare, but it’s hard to categorize some of these companies.

Are they healthcare? Are they tech? There’s a lot of overlap. And so everything’s a little bit of tech in something nowadays. So whether it’s finance and fintech or education and ed tech or health care and health tech, these are all merging and combining. It’s hard to categorize them.

[00:30:53] John Byrne: So looking at the data here I wonder if you’ve seen your old classmates in the sense that these new people are very much like the people you went to school with at Stanford. I

[00:31:05] Heidi Hillis: put this out and it’s really interesting to a lot of my classmates downloaded the report and read it. And a lot of them came back and said, oh, boy, I would never get in now.

It’s these people are super impressive. I think that you see a lot of. It’s just become more and more competitive. And I think that with more information and more people every year applying, it is becoming really difficult. I think that you do see a lot of, I am encouraged by the diversity part of it that you see still Stanford.

I feel like they do take risks on some really interesting profiles and candidates that maybe some other schools are less likely to do. And so that’s what does give me. A lot of hope when I get some kind of really nontraditional candidate who wants to, their dream school is Stanford. I feel like, I say all the time, there’s a 6 percent chance.

You’re going to get in, but there’s 100 percent chance. You won’t get in if you don’t apply. So you’ve got to, you got to give it a go. And that’s, the attitude that we take to it.

[00:32:04] John Byrne: Indeed. So for all of you out there read Heidi’s article on our site, it’s called who gets in and why exclusive research.

Into Stanford GSB and I’ll tell you one conclusion I have about this is that, man, if you really want to get into Stanford, you need a Sherpa, and and Heidi would be a great Sherpa for you because the, just the profiles of these folks, where they’ve been, what they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished in their early lives is so remarkable that To compete against, in this pool for a spot in the class you need every possible advantage you can get.

And and having an expert guide you through this trip probably would be a really big advantage. So Heidi, thank you for sharing your insights with us and the research, the very cool research.

[00:33:01] Heidi Hillis: Thank you

[00:33:03] John Byrne: and for all of you out there. Good luck. And if you want to go to Stanford, you got to check out this report.

Okay. It will inspire you to up your game, even if you are from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or wherever McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google, you want to look at this report and you want to really think about. What it will really take to get in. I think it will inspire you, motivate you to really put your best foot forward.

Thanks for listening. This is John Byrne with Poets& Quants.

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