When Harvard MBAs Turn Introspective: The Class of 2012

Aditya Dhanrajani: “I will build.” Photo by and courtesy of Tony Deifell.

When Aditya Dhanrajani tackled the essay for this year’s project, he recalled the time when he was six and built a car out of a cardboard box and a pizza tray for a steering wheel. “When I got in, the car gave way to my weight and collapsed,” Dhanrajani writes. “Later in my engineering classes I learned that I had executed a ‘catastrophic failure,’ but I had already learned the biggest lesson that day—I want to build.”

So Dhanrajani went on to gain degrees in both industrial and mechanical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and at Stanford University and to work at both General Electric and McKinsey & Co. before going to Harvard for his MBA. The MBA has landed a job at Google where he is working in strategic partnership development.

What does he plan to do with his “one wild and precious life?”

“I will build,” he writes, “for what I build takes on a life of its own and can have meaning and purpose beyond the time I live…I will build to win, not to define myself but to further ourselves….to unleash our infinite ability.”

DON’T MISS: WHAT HARVARD MBAS REALLY WANT TO ACCOMPLISH IN LIFE or DREAMS AND WISHES OF HARVARD’S CLASS OF 2011