What Success Looks Like For An MBA Career Changer

Byrne: I wonder to what extent you found out something about yourself that you didn’t know before you went through the MBA program. Maybe it was a result of introspection in Me, Inc. , or through your peer coach or your executive coach.

Solomon: I just feel like a totally different person than when I first came here. I feel like I have found such a sense of confidence in who I was, who I am, and who I’m going to be moving forward. I feel like I have learned how to not only navigate my own path, but to create my own path moving forward, and I think that trickles not only in my professional life but in my personal passions, too. I did my yoga teacher training while I finished my MBA, and part of that came from the folks at the school saying, ‘Yes, you’re getting this great career path that you’re focusing on, but you have to do what’s right for you, too.’ I think Kelley really gave me the opportunity to figure out what makes my heart beat and how to continue that moving forward.

Kay: I’m somewhat of an analytical person. My brain is wired that way. So for me, learning to trust in a process or just having trust to take a leap of faith was critical. Through a lot of stressful nights and worrying about the different interviews and all the different things that happen as part of an MBA program, just really learning to have some faith in my own abilities and my own ability to commit to something and going headfirst into the deep end is what I really learned at Kelley. The MBA program here really taught me how to navigate that.

I’m a Kelley humble, as we like to say. Everyone takes a different path. There’s no right path for anyone. But that being said, there was a person on my team doing basically the same job as me, and she was a former Goldman Sachs person who worked in private equity, went to an Ivy League school and had a great pedigree MBA program here in the states. And despite our different paths, we are now on the same team doing the same thing, and it was just very eye-opening to me to think that here I am, able to execute in this job, and I think I’m doing a good job.

Byrne: Evelyn, what did you learn about yourself that you didn’t know before you got here?

Wang: If you go back several years, I don’t think I could have ever ended up here.  I had a friend tell me she envies my life, but I said we just have different journeys.

Byrne: In our previous panel we had three second-year students, and one of the things that came up was how Kelley can make you uncomfortable and how important that is to your journey. Can you recall a time when you were in the program when you felt you were being stretched at a level where you actually felt discomfort?

Wang: The core is very demanding and stressful. For international students, it’s extremely so because we are just landing here and just starting to get to know the country and the culture.  We start very intensive classes, and the faculty push you.

Byrne: Jennifer, when do you feel you were stretched?

Solomon: I remember being at an interview at one of the consulting firms, and it was the night before, and I was there with some of my classmates who had had some very prestigious pre-Kelley careers. And this was probably in January of the first year, so you just got through the core. You get back from winter break. You’re feeling really jazzed up and ready to interview, and then it was in this room with all these people. I’m like, ‘I don’t even know if I want to be a consultant. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m networking with all these people. Am I even good at case interviewing?’

It was this moment of, ‘Oh, man. You need to step up right now.; And I think that continues throughout the interview process, throughout the recruiting process. It’s just constantly figuring out how can you communicate with people about where you came from, where you want to go, but do it in an authentic way. And I think once you can get to that authentic area, that’s when you go from being uncomfortable to being comfortable. But I think it takes some time.

Kay: I would just echo that. There’s a lot of introspection and changing course in your first semester at least if not the first year. Maybe even longer. But a lot of people will come to business school with an end goal in mind, but that will change. So learning to navigate your own interpersonal battles, it’s really stressful. Your whole life is in flux. You don’t know where you’re going to land. You don’t know anything about what the future’s going to look like, and it’s an uncomfortable feeling. Becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable is something that Kelley really instills in us early on, but they do provide that whole support framework to really coach you and help you refine your story, which in doing so, you’ll learn more about yourself and where you think you want to be and what’s the right fit for you.

Byrne: Now all three of you chose an in residence two-year, full-time MBA program.  Did all three of you intern at the companies that you’re currently employed at?

Solomon: Yes.

Wang: Yeah.

Kay: I did not.

Byrne: Okay. So tell me about the internship experience and how that helped you decide what you wanted to do. And David, we may as well start with you since you had a different internship.

Kay: I basically found an opportunity through my own network. This internship was a finance internship and it was unstructured in that it wasn’t an official program that had an assigned mentor or onboarding or anything like that. It was very much a pave your own path type of internship. But the skills that I developed there both on the personal side as well as the technical side, they really enabled me to land and hit the ground running. I worked on a variety of different projects and really learned how to be your own advocate and go out and ask for projects and ask to partner with teams on other projects.

You’re taking classes that cover basically every corner of what it takes to run a company. So my internship maybe was unusual, but ultimately it was a great learning opportunity. The skills that I learned in the first year directly applied to my internship which translated to an experience that I could discuss and speak to when creating that full-time recruiting pitch as I was going into into the second year.