Harvard MBA Admit: Battling COVID-19 On The Frontlines

HIS ESSAY CAME OUT OF AN EXPERIENCE WITH A PATIENT WHOSE LIFE HE SAVED

While his GMAT score was ten points below the class median at Harvard Business School, he brought a 4.0 GPA from Emory where he was named valedictorian of his graduating class. He also brought his acceptance at Cornell, which is highly selective particularly for international students, and his residency. Out of his hospital experience, he found a way to write a compelling essay for HBS. In the essay, Faraz recalls the time, around midnight 18 hours into a 24-hour shift, when he was paged by a nurse to attend to a middle-aged man who was suffering from stomach pain caused by uncontrolled bleeding in his abdomen. Faraz immediately brought him into surgery. “In the operating room, we cut into his belly and stopped the bleeding. His abdomen contained two liters of blood, which is often enough to cause cardiovascular arrest and death. Thankfully, we were able to intervene just in time.”

As he wrote in his essay, “This experience with Mr. B changed me not only as a resident but also as a human being. That night, Mr. B turned to me with a terrified look on his face and said, “Please don’t let me die, doctor. I have three young daughters.” I remember gently holding his hand and reassuring him that he would see his daughters again. Whenever I think of Mr. B now, I always picture him in the park happily playing with his daughters. The imagery not only fills me with happiness but also reminds me of the magnitude of the impact I can have on individual patients. Over the next few months as I began to think more about what I wanted from my career, this notion of impact became a recurring theme. I cherished my clinical role, but I realized that I also wanted to broaden my scope of impact to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of patients. I soon recognized that the best way to do this was as a clinician-administrator leading a large hospital system.”

Ultimately, Faraz earned invites from Harvard, Sloan, Yale, and Booth. Only Wharton and Kellogg rejected him. His girlfriend had just moved from New York City, where they had met, to Boston so it came down to choosing between MIT and Harvard. Somehow, he began to have a real connection to HBS. “Before I got in, I went to the campus a couple of times just to walk around in my scrubs. When I finished a rotation, I would stop by and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the campus.  It is such a beautiful place that I became enamored of it. I began telling myself I really want to go here.”

When he had to venture over to the Harvard campus for his admissions interview, it was after working a 24-hour shift in the hospital. He was so utterly exhausted that he had no clue how well the interview went. “I worked the day before and the night into the morning until 6:30 a.m., went home, showered, put on my suit and went to my interview,” he remembers. “They tried but they couldn’t give me that night off because there are so few residents and it’s hard to move our schedules around. As soon as the interview was over, I thanked them and they told me, ‘You look so happy. You are always smiling.’ I made a joke about how I had worked all night and we had a good laugh about that. I was too tried to process how the interview was going.”

What he does remember from the session was that most of the conversation revolved around the experience he had written about in his essay. He toured the campus once again after the interview and also visited with a friend at HBS a couple of times. He also went to the admitted students weekend. “I fell in love with the place and really connected with my classmates,” he says.

‘I HAVE SEEN PATIENTS DECOMPENSATE OVER HOURS’

For now, however, he is focused on the final month of his residency which ends on June 23. He plans to return to Canada to visit with his parents before starting his MBA at Harvard Business School and finally finishing off his residency after that. Living and working so close to the incalculable losses caused by the pandemic are tough to take. “It is mentally devastating for patients, providers, and the general public,” he says, acknowleding that he and his colleagues witness the horrors of the coronavirus every day. “We tell Americans to stay at home because we see our patients gasping for air. We see the intubations. We see mothers and fathers dying alone.

“Hospitals look very different than they did in normal times. If you walked in the halls then there were children, balloons, and flowers. In the cafeteria, people were laughing. It looked like a lively city or shopping mall during normal times. Now, the hospital looks like a deserted town. There are people in masks. You can’t see each other’s faces or smiles. People have several barriers of protection. There are no families around. Typically, we go to a lounge and eat together and catch up but everyone is maintaining their distance. Psychologically and mentally, we’re divided from each other.

“A lot of COVID patients look relatively okay and then wake up very short of breath. They come to the hospital and are intubated within an hour and are very sick. I have seen patients decompensate over hours. It is pretty devastating to be around that. The other thing is it’s a very psychologically isolating time for patients because they can’t be with their family members or their friends. The psychological side effects will last much longer than this virus.”

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