Meet Yale SOM’s MBA Class of 2017

Brandon Perkovich

 

Yale School of Management

Hometown: Naples, Florida

Undergraduate School and Major:

Harvard College, Major: History of Science

University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine

Employers and Job Titles Since Graduation:

University of California, San Francisco Medical Center – Student Intern

University of California, San Francisco Office of Diversity and Outreach – LGBT Intern

Recalling your own experience, what advice do you have for applicants who are preparing for either the GMAT or the GRE? Preparing for the big standardized test was one of the biggest hurdles for me in applying to business school. I only figured out that an MBA was the right career move well into medical school. Taking the GMAT meant squeezing as much studying time as I could out of the few precious hours I had between patients and rounding on the hospital wards. As is true for a lot of business school applicants, my test prep had to be very time-efficient. My biggest piece of advice is to get a hold of as many practice tests as is possible. The first major challenge with any of these standardized admissions tests is just familiarizing yourself with the test, how it’s written, what it’s asking, and how it feels to answer multiple choice questions for hours on end. You can access some practice materials direct from the folks behind the GMAT. A lot of the firms out there that are offering guidance to business school applicants also make some of their practice GMAT materials available online. If you’re in a situation similar to mine (e.g. in a professional degree program that doesn’t give you a lot of free time), the constant barrage of testing that comes with medical school and some law schools actually prepares you quite well for the GMAT.

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? Once I had figured out that business school was the right career move, the next big task was figuring out to which programs I wanted to apply. I’m really glad that my starting point in the process was physically sitting down and writing out answers to the question: “In two years’ time, how will I know I made the right choice not just to go to business school but also to go to this business school?”  Before I even cracked open a business school ranking list or visited an admissions website, I made a list of priorities that grounded me. Having said that, most of the major decisions in life aren’t made on the basis of entirely rational criteria. Most of our big decisions are in large part based on a gut feeling, which is OK. I ended up applying to 5 schools. Those 5 were a subset of the schools that I had identified that fit my criteria and they were schools that got me excited on a gut level.

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? Oh boy. It’s worth acknowledging that the process is a hard one, and shouldn’t be taken on lightly. People can, and do, write books about how to navigate its complexities. What I can offer is a couple nuggets of actionable advice that I wish someone had shared with me before I embarked on the MBA application process:

1)    Find someone from a similar professional background, with a similar worldview, and who’s gone through the process recently. Talk with that person. Often. I’m coming into business school with a somewhat unusual background (e.g. lots of work in LGBT health, domestic HIV research, heading into Emergency Medicine residency). One of my big concerns in finding an MBA program was finding a program culture that fit. That meant finding someone who was also a medical student, thought about the world in a similar way, and navigated the application process while completing his clinical work was absolutely essential in my being able to successfully apply.

2)    Right now is the best time to start refining your answer to this question: “Why is business school right for you at this moment?” It’s the question your letters of recommendation are meant to inform. It’s the question that should animate your personal statement. And it’s certainly a question you’ll need a crisp answer for during your interviews. In a way, it was useful for me to decide to apply to business school at a time when few of my classmates, instructors, or mentors had ever even considered an MBA as a useful thing for a doctor to have. I had to answer this question all the time, and I think all that practice helped to hone the way I approached it in the application process.

3)    Self-care. Self-care. Self-care. It may sound trite, but it’s also true. It’s critical to have a toolbox of strategies you can deploy to restore yourself when you feel burnout nipping at your heels. For me, that meant recognizing when I needed a bike ride, a trail run, or a late night venting session over the phone, and then carving out the time to make that happen. If you’re applying to business school, it’s probably because you’re ambitious, hard-working, and want to increase your ability to impact organizations and the world around you. That’s awesome, but it’s also true that those types of jobs often demand a lot of us. One of the great lessons of medical school for me has been accepting that there is not a time in the future when I’ll be suddenly blessed with all the time, energy, and money I need to finally be able to do all those things I’ve been saying I’ll eventually get to. Balance is a skill that, like any other, has to be learned and practiced. If I’m going to do good work and stay healthy, sane, and connected to the people I love, then I need get better at creating time and space in my life that’s optimally conducive to that. In a way, the business school application process was an important test of those skills.

What led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA? I couldn’t be more excited to be starting at Yale SOM. For me the biggest deciding factor in choosing Yale was a tremendous sense of opportunity and potential here combined with a culture that aligned well with my values. Their unique curriculum, their emphasis on global leadership, their reputation for non-profit and social impact leadership all appealed to me, and I’m excited by the unique opportunities at Yale to actively participate in the shaping of the school’s curriculum. On a more personal note, being an out gay man, it was important for me to find a school where I knew being out wouldn’t just be tolerated, but could be celebrated. Yale is a place of abundant opportunity where I felt like I knew I could feel at home. What more could you ask for?

What would you ultimately like to achieve before you graduate? I’m excited to be able to develop my leadership skills, deepen my understanding of how the healthcare system works, and meet people who are also looking to work hard to make the world a little bit more vibrant.