My Story: From Tanzania To The Olympics & Stanford GSB

His story:

What have the last three years been like? Talk about the process of applying here, getting accepted, and then being here — it must have been something of a whirlwind.

It’s sad, reflecting and thinking about how fast the two years has gone by. Even this morning when I was walking past the GSB sign over there, I was like, “In 52 days I won’t be doing this anymore.” I feel very privileged being here, it’s definitely been the most transformational two years of my life, by far. I’ve learned so much from my classmates, I’ve learned so much from professors, it’s just such a supportive environment.

Business school was never something that was going to be a thing for me. I never thought of it as something that was on my radar — it was never something that I ever thought I’d do.

I grew up in Tanzania, I lived there my whole life. I was sponsored K-12 by a British family, my sister and I, to go to school. They paid for us to go to school — we didn’t have a free public education system in Tanzania at the time. When it started it was only K through sixth grade, and after that it was all paid. One British family sponsored us K-12, and that just changed our family’s life.

So school was never something that I took for granted, because it was never something that I was supposed to have naturally. And this family wanted us to go to this international school, a British school in Tanzania, and my sister and I went there K-12. My family has never been to university or college or anything like that — nobody in my family history has done that.

And so when Bernice was a senior and I was a junior, the teachers in school were telling her, “You should apply to university in America.” It was all new for us, so she applied to school, got into every single school that she applied to, and came to the United States. She went to Minnesota’s University of Northwestern.

And that’s where you went as well, right? You followed your sister?

Now, when I was a senior in high school, I wasn’t a smart kid. I was a naughty kid, because I was distracted by sports — football (soccer) was my distraction. I was good academically until about eighth grade, and then when I started playing sports, I got distracted because it was the only way I fit in with my classmates, being the cool kid. Remember, I came from a background that nobody else in the class came from, and so I was a fish out of water hanging out with all these foreign nationals — it was an international school — and so I was just trying to figure stuff out. The only way I fit in was to try to be good at sports.

So from eighth grade on, I committed my time to trying to be good at football, and I had to sacrifice my grades to do that. When I was playing sports, it was my outlet, but my grades were sacrificed, so when I was a senior I didn’t do well academically. We were graded on the British system — A-B-C-D-E-F-U. Our teacher told us that a U meant so far below F that you’re Ungraded. I had two U’s and two D’s. So of course when you apply to university with two U’s and two D’s, the acceptance rate is not gonna be good. I applied to four universities that my sister applied to and got rejected by all four.

“I began emailing back and forth with them asking them to give me a second chance, and they said, ‘We’ll tell you what, we’ll give you one quarter, you do well, you stay, you don’t do well, you’re out.’ I said, ‘I’ll take it.’”

So I moved there to Minnesota for the first time in 2010, and moving to America was intense. And Minnesota is snowy — brutal.

I knew that I was going to get one quarter and I had to do well — I performed academically well all four years straight. But right before leaving to go to undergrad, while playing football (soccer), a guy approached me who worked for a TV station in Tanzania, and he said, “You’re very animated.” So the guy asks me, “Have you ever considered working in television?” And he urged me to try it out. He told me how television works. If you’re animated, you’re going to be able to keep people’s attention who are watching on TV. If you keep people’s attention, they’re going to tell other people about the show that they’re watching. That means more and more viewers are going to be watching the show and that means more money from sponsorships, because more sponsors are going to want to sponsor a show that is watched by more people. Simple business model.

This was the summer right before undergrad. I’m 17 years old, I did about five shows and then I quit. And I quit because of feedback.

Because somebody said something bad about you?

A lot of people said something bad. (Laughs) TV is brutal. We didn’t have Facebook, really, or Twitter or Instagram, they weren’t big then, and so it was mainly text messages. People would text in their views and comments, and what I would do is, right after the show, I’d go and read those comments, and as a 17-year-old, it was brutal.

So I was burned out on the industry, and I said, “I don’t like this industry, I’ll never go back to it, I’m out, I quit.” I was done, and I moved to the U.S. to go to undergrad.

Went back in summer 2011 to do TV, a couple more shows for youth and sports, English Premier League, UEFA Champions League. 2012 comes about and that’s the year of the London Olympics and the UEFA Euro 2012, and one of the key anchors was out and they said, “Would you like to co-host as one of the lead anchors?” I said, “I’m only 19!” But then I said, “Sure, why not?”

Football is huge in my country, and that was the first time I had this public exposure to people, and again I got a lot of brutal feedback — but this time around my boss was like, “Don’t listen to that, let’s keep going. Let’s keep going.” 2013, went back and did some more TV shows, mainly in sports. 2014, I’m graduating from undergrad, and right before graduation one of my professors, Richard Elliott, came up to me and said, “Hey you should apply to business school.” “What?” “Yeah, and you should only apply to two schools, Stanford and Harvard.” Another professor who encouraged me along this journey was Dr. David Fenrick, he has been my mentor up to today. He pushed me to proceed with the applications.

So their advice was that you should apply to business school, but only apply to the two hardest schools in the country to get into?

Yes. (Laughs) I didn’t know anybody who had gone to business school, anybody my age or anything like that. He said, “You should apply to business school.” And another professor said the same. I never thought I’d get in. Harvard and Stanford were honestly never something I’d ever thought about. It was never a dream. So if it weren’t for those professors who told me to apply, I never would have.

It was February and the application for round 3 was due in March, March 15 or something like that. So I was like, “All right, let’s pull it all together.” I didn’t know what business school was all about. I didn’t even know what an MBA was. I’m applying and I didn’t know anything about it. I remember doing my GMAT the day before my Stanford application was due. Terrible score, still submitted it. I remember what it was but I wouldn’t like to share. It was quite low. The first time I took the GMAT, my score was well below the lowest score on the admit year, even until this year.

Surprisingly, I get an email a few weeks later saying, “Hey, we’d like to interview you.” I remember I was sitting in the lunch cafeteria and I was like, “Maybe I should look up how many people get interviewed and how many people actually apply.” I looked it up and saw the percentage was so small and I said, “Whoa, this is a big deal. OK, this is serious.” Both schools wanted to interview me.

I met the Stanford guy who interviewed me in Minneapolis, it was a great interview. Mainly it was a conversation, like “Tell me about yourself. Tell me who you are,” and so on. Interview went well. Then I get my application update email: waitlisted. For both schools.

You were incredibly fortunate to get that far.

I know! I didn’t know round 3 was the worst round to apply in, because they have the least amount of spots available. But I was waitlisted. It’s fine. It could be worse. Then I started to look up stuff. I had a Tanzanian friend who went (to Stanford) for undergrad, he was a junior or senior, and I asked him to connect me with someone in the business school. The guy told me it took him six years to get into the school. “You have no years of work experience, a lousy GMAT and you applied in round 3 and you got waitlisted? You have to stay focused and push and make this happen!”

That was when I really started to realize, “I could potentially go here. This is an opportunity. I’m knocking on the door and it’s kind of open but I still have to do some work to get it fully open.”

In mid-May I had a bunch of job offers in the United States. I declined all of them. One of them, the VP said, “Really? I’m giving you a green card and X amount of money and you’re declining this offer straight out of undergrad? Good luck to you then.” Big privately held company. I was taking a huge risk.

I was still on the waitlist. I moved back to Tanzania in June. The reason I declined the offer was because I felt indebted. I felt I needed to go home. I had already been given a sponsored education K through 12, a sponsored education for four years of college, and I knew most kids my age from the same neighborhood I grew up in would never get that same opportunity. And I couldn’t live with knowing that and being comfortable working in the United States and adding whatever I wanted to. I felt like I needed to do something to give back. What about all those people looking at me as an example for them or their kids? That was what I couldn’t live with. So I said, “I need to go home.” This is a firm commitment I have and will always make.

My boss said, “Hey, we’ve got the World Cup coming up this year,” so I did the World Cup in 2014, then I worked for the equivalent of Comcast for Tanzania, TING (Tanzania Integrated Network Group), but while I was working there, that summer in June, I get an email update from Stanford saying, “Unfortunately we don’t have a spot for you and it looks like you need a lot of financial aid and we aren’t able to swing that, given that we’ve allocated everything already for the people coming in.” But — “we have this Africa MBA Fellowship, application is due in about a week.” I could apply — along with 2,600 others, and they only picked 40 to be finalists, and they picked about eight fellows.

And they said, “What you have to know is, every single application is going to be looked at from scratch, so even though you’re waitlisted, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s going to be a fresh pair of eyes.” But it was $160,000 if I get it, so I said, “Why not?” If you get selected to be a finalist it only means two things: You get a free application to Stanford — you don’t pay the $250 application fee — and you get a free GMAT voucher. And if you get in, you’re potentially eligible to win the fellowship. If you get in.

I submitted about five minutes before deadline — Tanzania has power fluctuations, and if the Internet had cut out I would have been done. I submitted again to HBS and GSB, got interviewed again by both.