Meet UCLA Anderson’s MBA Class of 2020

Ezra Glenn

UCLA, Anderson School of Management

“Queer artist turned entrepreneur seeks to reimagine paradigms of representation.”

Hometown: New York, NY

Fun Fact About Yourself: One winter in Siberia, I jumped into the largest lake in the world through a hole cut into the four feet of ice on its surface.

Undergraduate School and Major: Bard College, double major in Photography and Written Arts

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Co-Founder and Creative Director of a startup record label and artist management company called First One Up, focused on musicians operating outside the conventional definitions of genre.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: Leaving my previous job to start my own company and support myself through freelance work. It was terrifying to leave the safety net of being a part of a larger organization (and, you know, health insurance), but in these past three years I’ve learned more about myself, the world around me, and my vision for the future than I ever could have hoped.

What quality best describes the MBA classmates you’ve met so far and why? My Anderson classmates are the most driven group of people I’ve ever surrounded myself with – everybody came in on their A-game with a clear understanding of how they got to this point and what they want to become in these next two years. But at the same time, there’s very little ego at play. We’re all just as committed to helping one another succeed as we are to pursuing our own goals. The energy on campus is overwhelmingly positive, collaborative, and productive.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key factor that led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA and why was it so important to you? Los Angeles is a city that rewards hard work in a way that my hometown does not. In New York, the baseline assumption is that everyone is grinding and pushing as hard as they can just to stay afloat. Anderson embodies the synergistic quality of LA – the more you give, the more you get. Rather than being a transactional environment, it’s a truly transformational one, a space for both personal and professional growth and a community that rewards each in kind.

What club or activity are you looking most forward to in business school? I’m excited about opportunities in the Anderson Student Association. Even so far in the summer quarter, with just first-years on campus, it’s been evident that the ASA has a huge impact on shaping the culture and activity here. Because it’s such a student-run institution, the organization touches everything from consulting on the structure of the core curriculum and the composition of the student body to how we educate each other about diversity and use that education to go out and shape our future workplaces.

What led you to pursue an MBA at this point in your career? All my experience, thus far, has been either in working for myself or for startups in the media and entertainment industries. I know that, in order to increase my potential for impact, I have a lot of learning to do, both in and outside of the classroom. An MBA felt like the most efficient way to broaden my perspective and hone the skills I need to realize my visions for those industries and the world at large.

How did you decide if an MBA was worth the investment? I looked closely at salary data and the career trajectories of recent MBA graduates from my programs of interest whose paths aligned with mine in various ways, and used that to project the outcomes of a few possible paths for my own career. I also had as many conversations as I could with folks enrolled in those programs whose interests and identities overlapped with mine, and used their experiences to imagine and map out my own.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? USC Marshall, NYU Stern, and HBS.

How did you determine your fit at various schools? Spending time on campus was vital to my decision-making process. Attending classes and meeting with students is good, but I found that just trying to blend in was an even more productive simulation of membership in a given student body. I sat in campus cafés and quads, listened a bit to the conversations around me, and pulled out my laptop to do some work or answer emails. It’s always hard to separate your experience as a visitor from the general feeling of a place, so when I could, I made multiple trips to campus on different days and at different times of year to give myself more data.

What was your defining moment and how did it shape who you are? My first career was as a chef. I worked in kitchens throughout undergrad, but my first cooking job was when I was 18, as the head chef of the summer camp I grew up attending. I had hardly any experience even cooking for myself, but I somehow had the confidence to take responsibility for feeding 130 people three meals a day for seven weeks. On an unfathomably limited budget, I was responsible for hiring and managing a staff of six, planning the menus, placing orders with distributors, and ensuring meals were delivered in proper quantities, on schedule. To date, I’ve never worked harder, but it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, and absolutely a defining moment for me. In addition to my assigned responsibilities that summer, I ended up teaching a nutritional health program to campers, eliminating fried foods from the collective diet, and getting rave reviews for my cooking (some former campers still ask me for recipes). And I came in 16% under budget. The experience shaped my work ethic and my understanding of the human capacity for making things happen against all odds.

What do you plan to do after you graduate? I’d like to apply my experience with client-facing, project-based creative problem solving as a strategy consultant, ideally within the entertainment industry, though I’m open to a more general portfolio, especially at first. Much like business school, I hope for my post-MBA position to be one that allows for continued growth and learning by doing.

Where do you see yourself in five years? I hope to be in a position to shape the way companies understand and relate to consumers, and use that power to increase representation for folks of marginalized identities both within the corporate world and in the content it produces, from major marketing campaigns to chart-topping singles.

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