Greetings from Goizueta: The Things I’ll Miss (And the One Thing I Won’t)

I’m one month from graduation, and people keep asking if I’m excited about to be done. I am excited, unsurprisingly. I’m excited for my job as an Associate Brand Manager. I’m excited for the time to travel, go to weddings, settle into my new home, and just chill. But nobody asks what I’ll miss, probably because the obvious answers (the learning, the network, the opportunity to grow) are too cliché to be interesting.

The truth is messier and more personal than that. I’ll miss squeezing in a workout between morning homework sessions and my afternoon writing class. I’ll miss being able to share a look in class with a group of friends, where we know exactly what is on each other’s minds. I’ll miss driving or biking to campus in the late spring, when the Georgia air is still crisp, but the flowers are blooming on tree-lined streets between my home and school.

These aren’t the moments that make it into the admissions brochures or the LinkedIn posts. But they’re the moments that completed the picture of my time at Emory.

THE BEAUTIFUL MUNDANE

There are tables on an outdoor balcony overlooking a courtyard at the business school building. I sit there most days at lunch to enjoy the breeze, the shade, and the occasional bit of sun to bask in the sunlight after many hours inside the building. Here, I worked, ate, and hung out with friends in between classes or before I went home. All of this was nice, but I also enjoyed the simple pleasure of people watching.

There were classmates walking in pairs to get lunch, undergrads moving through the world as if they had not one care in it. Some people got lost in their phones. Others lived in the moment, as they sipped coffee from Costa Coffee from across the courtyard. There were energy shifts depending on where we are in the school year. Fewer smiles around exam time and well-rested faces after break. I will miss all that I could take in the school fully from this catbird seat.

This one may sound crazy, but hear me out: I’ll miss presentations. Presentations are a great opportunity to tell a story and have a conversation about a topic where you have deep knowledge. There is camaraderie in the last five minutes before you present, doing last-minute run-throughs and making sure your teammates know their cues. You’re all in it together.

I presented with a team for a cohort-wide competition at the end of our first year and we put in a lot of hard work. Our slides looked excellent. The color palette was beautiful and matched the brand of our client, while our journey map seamlessly followed the flow of the customer experience in a way the audience could understand. We looked great in our suits and dresses. In my case, I donned my favorite black monk strap brogues with my navy windowpane Charles Tyrwitt suit and was feeling great.

In fact, everything was going well…until it didn’t. One of my teammates did not know what to say so he presented with his iPad full of notes. He talked directly into the screen, killing our momentum and credibility with the audience. We recovered a bit and handled the question period very well. But we stood no chance of winning after that strong dip in performance. Even though this mattered and the stakes were real, they were far from career-ending. We either nailed it, or we didn’t. Either way, we got drinks, clinked glasses to what we did well, and laughed off the times when things fell apart.

WHAT I’LL REMEMBER MOST

People. People. People. The memories will last beyond the first or second promotion after graduation. I will remember things from class, like the “Good Growth” methodology to marketing and growing a business. I’ll remember going to our weekly Thursday afternoon social event called KEGS or to the Asian Night Market the Emory undergrads hold every year on campus. These school-organized events will live long in the memory, but the people I have met and my time with them will resonate even more.

I will remember my first day in South Korea, when my friend and I went around the city and saw parts that we would never see during the official tours. We got lunch at Grandmother’s Recipe before crossing the street to Today’s Enough espresso bar. We walked through Seoul Forest in Seongdong District before meeting with the rest of our classmates for the perfect amount of fried chicken, soju, and Terra. We were learning about a culture, and each other, together. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to a country I never thought I would visit and spend time with classmates I hadn’t talked with much. This trip fulfilled the promise of business school: impactful global experience with even better people.

It’s easy to remember big trips abroad, though. Something that will stick with me from closer to home was going to a local bar with friends to cheer on the Emory men’s basketball team in the DIII National Championship game. The game didn’t go our way, but our excitement got the rest of the pub invested in the drama of a game that wasn’t making any news coverage. I’ll also remember one late night in the library in my first semester, when we closed the place down. That isn’t what I was aiming to do during my MBA career, but hard work is the only shortcut. We were writing incoherent chicken scratch on a whiteboard as we stumbled through perpetuities for our finance exam and return acronyms for our accounting exam. Somehow, only aided by the grace of God, the drive for success, and the bottle of red wine, we made it to and through those exams…and to graduation.

These are the things that made business school feel like a life I was living, not just a program I was completing. When people ask me years from now what business school was like, I’ll talk about what it did for my career, the skills I developed, and the methodologies I learned. But I won’t talk about these things first. What I’ll talk about first are the people who made these two years so wonderfully full.

THE ONE THING I WON’T MISS

But let’s be honest, there’s one thing I will absolutely not miss: not even a little bit, not even for nostalgia’s sake. That’s recruiting.

The endless coffee chats where no one actually gets you coffee. The networking events where you try to have meaningful conversations in 30-second intervals – all while holding a drink you’re not drinking and nursing food you don’t have time to eat. The resume reviews and mock interviews and informational calls that blur into one exhausting performance of professional competence.

Unfortunately, things don’t end there. There is the anxiety of waiting for interview invitations. The tension among classmates going for the same few slots at the same few companies. The self-doubt spiral that comes when you don’t have an offer, but all of your friends do. What can be a great time for exploring what you want from a role, a company, and the next step in your career can quickly become nightmare fuel. The quality of life can of even the most well-adjusted MBA student can fall off a cliff.

Recruiting is necessary. It’s pretty hard to get a job without it. But it’s also an ego-bruising, time-consuming grind that turns autumn into a slew of tailored talking points and strategic follow-ups. I’m grateful for the outcome, but I will never miss the process.

PERMISSION TO NOTICE EVERYTHING

If you’re about to start business school, people will tell you to make the most of it. They’ll tell you to network aggressively, to optimize every opportunity, to treat it like the investment it is. All of that is true.

But take time to notice the small things, too. “Stop to smell the roses” – or the magnolias in my case. Take time to appreciate the context-specific jokes from your study group. Love the local dive bar or cheap sandwich shop that wouldn’t be on your radar if you weren’t in this program at this time in your life. Remember the anecdotes from professors that make a concept stick. But, most importantly, remember the people who become part of your everyday. Friends, acquaintances, professors, and staff who make the school function. They aren’t distractions from the business school experience. They are what takes it from information you can get on YouTube University or LinkedIn learning to stories you’ll tell your kids or the journalist interviewing when you make it to the C-Suite.

Bio: Born and raised in Cincinnati, OH, Martin graduated from Seton Hall University with a B.S. in Marketing and Economics. After undergrad, he worked in digital marketing and social media analytics in health media before moving to into the agency world with SSCG Media Group as an analyst and brand supervisor.

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