When Harvard MBAs Turn Introspective: The Class of 2012

Jake Cusack: “When great sacrifices are made, they do not pass quietly into the night, but call loudly for the rest of us to fulfill their promise, their legacy, their dreams.” Photo by and courtesy of Tony Deifell.

For HBS applicants, the essays provide a sense of what they’re up against—highly crafted and polished stories that reveal hurdles overcome and lessons learned. It would not be hard to imagine that some of these biographic sentences were first written in MBA applications that initially opened the doors to Harvard Business School.

LITTLE ART PIECES ON THE TRIALS, MOTIVATIONS AND IMAGININGS OF MBA GRADUATES

Inevitably, the photos and words constitute little art pieces that allow the outside world to glimpse the trials, motivations and imaginings of young people with those three coveted initials on their resumes. The result is not what you might expect, especially if you buy into the stereotype of what an MBA from Harvard is supposed to be.

“Typically people think of HBS as a place filled with a lot of bankers and consultants who are type A, go-getters,” says Chris Kaleel, a student co-leader with Cantrell. “What the project shows is that there are so many different types of people here. And behind the statistics and the school’s reputation, there are people with passions and feelings who have set out to do positive things with their lives.

There’s Jake Cusack, the former Marine Corps captain, who did tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I once served alongside men better than I,” writes Cuscack. “I watched them give selflessly — in the small things, offering me the only bowl of hot soup after a cold winter patrol, and in the big things, paying the ultimate price after volunteering to be the first through the door on a counterterrorism raid.”

FROM THE STREETS OF SOUTH CENTRAL LOS ANGELES TO A NEW HAMPSHIRE BOARDING SCHOOL

There’s Juan Felix, who recounts his journey from an L.A. ghetto to a New England boarding school. “’There’s more than one way to carry money,’ my parents promised me over the phone,” he writes. “It was simple advice. A few nights before, my mother had given me a roll of bills. She told me to stick the cash in my socks rather than risk carrying it in my pockets. With a stash of cash in my socks, I flew from South Central Los Angeles to a boarding school in New Hampshire. I was attending on scholarship, a lanky fourteen- year-old boy “from the hood” with beady eyes and a barely noticeable mustache. I visited the bookstore upon my arrival. There, I pulled up my pant leg, rolled down my sock, and whipped out the wad of cash. As students snickered, I nervously thumbed through the bills, paid, and fled the store. I called my parents that evening and cried about being different. That’s when they assured me there’s more than one way to carry money.”

Then, there is Maxeme Tuchman, who describes the experience of losing a student as a Teach For America teacher. Recalls Tuchman, “’A kid got shot at the football game on Friday. Is he one of your students?’ I was a teacher at Miami Northwestern High School, and my Teach For America summer training had not prepared me for the phone call I received from a friend one Sunday night in September. No one really ever trains you how to handle the loss of a child, and it was then that I realized whether it is your child, or someone else’s, the loss reverberates just as loudly.”

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