Meet Columbia’s MBA Class of 2017

Lex Kiefhaber

Columbia Business School

Hometown: Brooklyn, New York

Undergraduate School and Major: Yale University, BA Political Science

Employers and Job Titles Since Graduation: 

Smith and Wollensky NY: Wine Director

Brooklyn Winery: Wine Bar Manager

Maloney and Porcelli: Service Director

(About half a dozen others…)

Recalling your own experience, what advice do you have for applicants who are preparing for either the GMAT or the GRE? Don’t freak out! The test is as much a measure of your ability to stay focused and quick for three plus hours as it is your grasp of quant and verbal. Your greatest asset when you walk into the testing room is your mindset. I found that mimicking the testing environment by reducing distractions, limiting my physical resources to only what I would be allowed in the testing room, and most importantly imposing time restrictions during practice sets gave me the confidence to tackle the actual test with a minimal amount of anxiety– concentration kryptonite. Prepare so you’re not intimidated by the enormity of the endeavor as a whole and condition yourself to think quickly, using the timer as a tool rather than a distraction, thereby freeing you to focus solely on the problem at hand.

Based on your own selection process, what advice do you have for applicants who are trying to draw up a list of target schools to which to apply? Location was a big factor in deciding where I wanted to apply. I had spent the past five years carving out a place for myself in New York City, both personally and professionally, and I wanted business school to be an evolution of my life in NYC not the end of it. Aside from my personal proclivity towards NYC, it is home to the most diverse and deep collection of businesses and business people in the world.  It was important for my school to teach the practical application of theory and have access to leaders in the business community, and there’s nowhere better to immerse yourself in the real world of business than NYC. Lastly, my post-graduate career goals are strongly correlated to new business formation– start-up culture, early stage development, VC financing – and it was imperative that the schools to which I applied were not only structurally well adapted to educate on those topics, but were also philosophically committed to empowering an entrepreneurial mindset.

As an applicant winnowing down the list of prospective schools, figure out what is most important to you and which schools fit your personal criteria, and cut out the rest!  The admissions department can tell whether you’re applying to get a degree (ubiquitous) or an experience (particular), and how well you demonstrate a heart-felt desire to attend a specific program could make the difference in your application. In the long run it’s the experience you will remember and value, so apply to the best fit, not just the highest ranked.

What advice do you have for applicants in actually applying to a school, writing essays, doing admission interviews, and getting recommenders to write letters on your behalf?

Put yourself in the shoes of someone sitting in front of a stack of thousands (thousands!) of essays on exactly the same topic from people in very similar stages of life. When going through the admissions process, from deciding where to apply, crafting personal statements, conducting interviews, and choosing recommenders, my advice is to be unapologetically genuine. In doing so, you will necessarily differentiate yourself from the candidate pool and hopefully arrive at the school that is your best match.  You don’t need to hyperbolize or grandstand to be memorable. Using your own voice when speaking (or writing) about the aspects of your life about which you are most passionate and committed will naturally distinguish you. If the interviewer or admissions representative feel like they are getting an unvarnished look at who you are, then regardless of the narrative you employ as an explanatory vehicle, it will be your character they remember.

What led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA? I believe an exhaustive evaluation of what I wanted from the business school experience before deciding where to apply made my applications more targeted and, thus, stronger. I was diligent in limiting my applications to only the schools I felt would be a good fit, so the pool of choices was small to begin with.  Based on the criteria I used to decide where to apply (location, access and immersion, entrepreneurial mindset) Columbia was head and shoulders above the rest.  When I was admitted to CBS the decision took all of two seconds.

What would you ultimately like to achieve before you graduate? My penultimate goal in attending CBS is to start my own business and given the resources, community and access afforded to me during school I hope to achieve launch before graduation. My ultimate goal is to convince at least 2/3 of my cluster to visit Brooklyn and admit we do pizza better than Manhattan.