MBA Voices: Is There Ever A ‘Right’ Time For An MBA?

“You’re applying a little early, aren’t you?”

It was a question I’d heard more than once while preparing my MBA applications.

At 23, with just over two years at Salesforce, it was a fair question. Most MBA classrooms are filled with professionals who’ve spent considerably longer building their careers. Conventional advice pointed in one direction: wait.

Looking back, I don’t think there’s a universally “right” time to pursue an MBA. For me, that moment came sooner than most people expected.

I’ve never been particularly drawn to the room with the biggest crowd. I’ve always been more interested in the room where I believed I would grow the most, even when I wasn’t the obvious person to be there. That instinct showed up earlier than Salesforce, and it resurfaced later than my application too. It’s the thread that connects everything that follows.

YEARS DON’T CREATE READINESS: REFLECTION DOES

A few months before Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual conference, my team gathered to answer a simple-sounding question: Were we ready? It wasn’t really about writing better code or fixing another bug. It was about setting priorities. Which issues had to be resolved before thousands of customers interacted with our product? Which risks were acceptable? Which failures simply couldn’t happen?

As the conversation unfolded, I realized I was listening differently. I knew our systems well: where problems were likely to appear and how to solve most of them. But sitting in that room, I understood something else: knowing how to solve a problem and deciding which problem deserved solving first were two entirely different responsibilities. The former belonged to me. The latter belonged to the people deciding customer priorities and long-term strategy.

I didn’t have a name for the gap yet. I just knew I wanted a seat in that second room.

Back at my desk, every project started revealing two problems instead of one: the technical problem in front of me and the business decision that had put it there. Some weeks, I was engineering a framework that would catch configuration errors before they ever reached a customer. Other weeks, I was untangling a bottleneck slowing teams down across a platform running millions of environments. One fix, built for my own team’s workflow, eventually got generalized into a feature that other teams across the company now build on.

What stayed with me wasn’t the engineering, however. It was the decision sitting one level above it: why this problem and not another? Why now and not next quarter? Those were business questions, not technical ones. I wasn’t looking to move away from technology. I wanted to get better at connecting technology to the decisions that shape it.

TRUSTING MY OWN TIMING

Once I admitted that to myself, another question followed naturally: If not now, what exactly was I waiting for?

I’d been circling the GMAT for months. It wasn’t because I doubted whether I wanted an MBA. Instead, it was because I wasn’t sure I trusted myself inside that three-hour exam, against that particular clock. I hadn’t yet noticed I was treating a scheduling problem like an identity problem.

On September 12, I finally sat for the GMAT. Walking out of the test center, I did the one calculation I’d been avoiding. Cambridge’s Round 2 admissions deadline was October 5. Just over three weeks away. For a moment, I genuinely hoped I’d counted wrong. I hadn’t.

What followed wasn’t a carefully-engineered plan. Every day became a balancing act between full-time work, IELTS preparation, application essays, and revisions that somehow created even more revisions. My evenings faded into drafts. My weekends disappeared into deadlines. Every time I crossed one task off my list, another seemed to take its place.

Then, in the middle of it, I did something that looked completely irrational: I took a weekend trip to Varkala, a coastal town in southern India. With two weeks left before the biggest deadline of my life, stepping away felt reckless. It turned out to be exactly what I needed. Somewhere between long walks along the cliffs and the moments I wasn’t trying to force the next paragraph, my thinking cleared. The essays stopped sounding like applications. They started sounding like me.

The application took twenty-three days. The decision had been taking shape for much longer.

FINDING THE RIGHT CLASSROOM

Coming from Salesforce, there was an obvious next step. I could have chosen a business school that felt like an extension of the world I already knew: closely connected to Silicon Valley, fast-moving and technology-first. It would have been familiar, and I know I would have enjoyed it.

But familiarity wasn’t what I was seeking.

The first part of my career taught me how technology solves problems. The next chapter, I felt, should teach me how leaders decide which problems are worth solving in the first place. I wanted to learn alongside people who approached that question from entirely different angles: healthcare, policy, finance, entrepreneurship, and sustainability.

That was what drew me to the University of Cambridge.

Cambridge Judge sits inside an ecosystem where engineers, researchers, founders, scientists, and investors constantly intersect. What appealed to me wasn’t simply the proximity to innovation. It was the diversity of perspectives surrounding it. I wanted conversations where technology was one lens among many – not the only language everyone spoke.

WRITING IT MYSELF / OWNING MY STORY

There’s a strange irony in watching applicants pay someone else to help them explain who they are. I’d spent my professional life automating processes and removing unnecessary manual effort. But the MBA application was different. The parts that felt inefficient turned out to be the ones that mattered most. Sitting with difficult questions. Revisiting experiences I’d once dismissed as ordinary. Looking for connections between moments that had never seemed related before.

The connections weren’t obvious at first. I had a list of achievements and a list of questions. For a while, they just sat next to each other. It wasn’t until I wrote out the specialization story, the one where I’d been the only woman in a room of 11, that I stopped and asked myself why I kept bringing it up. I went back through drafts and noticed the same instinct showing up in places I hadn’t linked before. It was asking one extra question in a meeting when everyone else was ready to move on; choosing to take a weekend away in Varkala instead of grinding through a deadline; and applying to Cambridge at 23 when the advice was to wait. None of those had felt connected while I was living them. On the page, they were clearly the same choice, made over-and-over.

A consultant might have made the writing sharper. They couldn’t have made those connections for me, because the connections only existed inside my own reasoning.

I wasn’t inventing a narrative. I was discovering one.

Writing the essays myself wasn’t about proving I could do everything alone. It was about making sure the person Cambridge was getting to know was actually me.

THE INTERVIEW THAT STOPPED FEELING LIKE ONE

Submitting the application didn’t end the reflecting. It just changed the format. A few weeks later, I was invited to interview, and I had to say all of this out loud instead of on the page.

I walked in nervous, the kind of nervous where you rehearse your own name…even though you’ve said it thousands of times before. I’d built the moment up in my head for weeks. The person across from me was Juliana Kozak Rogo, Director of the MBA Programme.

Somewhere in the first few minutes, it stopped feeling like an interview and started feeling like a conversation. The questions didn’t feel like tests to pass; they felt like opportunities to explain how I think. I wasn’t trying to manage the conversation anymore. I was in it.

One moment stayed with me long after the interview ended. Near the end, I asked a question I’d been quietly carrying with me: If I received an offer, what would I need to become for her to feel that choosing me was the right decision?

I expected a checklist answer: academics, leadership, career achievements. Instead, she spoke about the people who thrive at Cambridge being the ones who fully embrace the experience. Not just the MBA, but the college community, the traditions, and the people outside their own cohort.

That answer told me something about the place, not just the programme. Cambridge wasn’t simply looking for people who would succeed in the classroom. It was seeking people who would contribute to the community around it.

MY RÉSUMÉ WASN’T READY. I WAS

The offer arrived at 5:30 on an ordinary evening. I was doing that in-between thing you do after work and before a workout: half checking emails on my phone, not really expecting anything. Then I saw it: Cambridge MBA: Congratulations.

I felt my heartbeat skip. Not metaphorically. An actual, physical pause. The kind where your body reacts half a second before your brain catches up and asks, Did that really say what I think it said?

The first person I called was my mother. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I just wanted to hear the words out loud.

Then I went to Zumba, and that’s the part of the evening I remember most clearly. Not the email, not the call. I couldn’t tell you a single song that played or a single step we danced. I just remember moving before the news had fully landed, as though my body had understood it before my mind had.

That’s what made it feel real. Not the email itself, but the fact that an ordinary hour on an ordinary evening quietly became one I’ll never forget.

APPLICATIONS REVEAL PROFILES. THEY DON’T BUILD THEM

MBA admissions conversations tend to revolve around numbers: GMAT scores, years of experience, career progression. Those things matter. But they only tell part of the story.

At 23, with just over two years of experience, I didn’t fit the traditional profile. My GMAT Focus score of 645 wasn’t the highest in the pool. But I’d spent those two years at Salesforce intentionally: choosing challenging environments, taking ownership before I had a title for it, and walking into rooms where I wasn’t the obvious person to belong. The application didn’t create those experiences. It helped me recognize them.

THE NEXT CHAPTER BEGINS

In September, I’ll walk into Cambridge Judge Business School as an MBA student, surrounded by people with different industries, cultures, and definitions of success. That’s exactly the mix I’m looking forward to experiencing.

For years, I’ve worked on technology and automation. At Cambridge, I want to expand that lens: how leaders make decisions when there’s no perfect answer; how businesses balance innovation with responsibility; and how ideas move from technology into real-world impact.

The question I started this journey with was whether there is ever a “right” time for an MBA. I don’t think the answer is measured in years of experience anymore.

Looking back, I realize I’ve been making the same decision for years without knowing it: choosing a DevOps concentration in my undergrad that only 11 students out of nearly 1,500 pursued; applying to Cambridge at 23 when most people advised me to wait; and choosing the classroom that would challenge me rather than the one that felt familiar. I kept choosing growth over comfort.

Maybe that’s what readiness really is. It’s not feeling certain that you belong, but recognizing when you’ve outgrown one room and having the courage to walk into the next.

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Tanya Agarwal is an MBA candidate at Cambridge Judge Business School. She previously worked as a Software Engineer at Salesforce, building AI-driven automation and enterprise solutions at scale. Combining an engineering background with a strong interest in business, she is passionate about solving complex problems through technology, strategy, and cross-functional collaboration. She is particularly interested in how organizations leverage emerging technologies to drive innovation, improve customer experiences, and create long-term business value. Outside of work, she writes about AI and enterprise technology, enjoys traveling, and is an avid Zumba enthusiast. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

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