No Business Background, No Problem.
Feng Chang, a 2012 Yale SOM alumna who now heads digital marketing strategy for online retail company Rue La La, didn’t major as an undergraduate in a business discipline. And so she had tips for the women in the room who likewise didn’t have a business background and might be concerned it would pose a hurdle when applying for an MBA.
“When you are thinking about the essays, why you want to get the MBA, I think pulling through those experiences where no matter what your job title or responsibility was day to day, finding those opportunities where you were analytical and where you had leadership opportunities—making them part of your story is important,” Chang says. “I wouldn’t be set back by ‘Oh, I was an art history major” or “I was a history major,’” she says. Instead, find the ways that you have woven analytics and leadership into your current job, whatever it is, and make that part of the story you tell in your applications, she advises.
“I Learned How to Influence People Over Whom I Had No Authority.”
What about the women in the room who might not want to be an investment banker or a consultant? What can an MBA be for them if they don’t want to go in those directions? Hargraves threw those questions out to another member of the panel.
“I didn’t ever resonate with those fields,” says Rachel Greenberger, a 2011 graduate from the Babson College MBA program who now runs a startup called FoodSol. “I don’t wear a suit, I feel like a penguin if I wear a suit, it’s just not my vibe.”
“My biggest takeaway from the MBA is I learned how to influence people over whom I had no authority,” she says. “Part of that comes from learning how to work in groups. You can’t fire people in your groups—you don’t have authority over them—so you need to learn to sell your ideas to very diverse sets of people.”
“Now, part of that is a communications thing, but it is also reading a situation—negotiating—understanding what people want out of something and how to bring a lot of people together,” she said. Those skills, acquired in business school, will benefit you in traditional fields like investment banking and consulting, but they will be just as useful at a small startup incubator for food entrepreneurs, Greenberger says, speaking from experience.
Next Steps for Would-Be MBA Applicants
As to what young women considering applying to MBA programs should do to prepare, the panelists had words of wisdom here, too. “You are absolutely doing the right thing by attending events like this and by taking in information,” said Pinki Mishra, a 2008 graduate of Tepper who now works as a director of mergers and acquisitions at Nortek.
A self-professed “big geek,” she herself created a spreadsheet listing out the schools she was interested in applying to, which helped her keep organized. But by no means is that required, she stressed. “Find the approach that works for you. No single element is going to dictate the success of your application, and no single element is going to doom you from a certain program,” she says. “Schools look at admissions packages holistically.”
“We all have got tremendous experiences and we went to four different places and we managed to be very successful regardless of the MBA institution,” Mishra continued. “So don’t stress out. You are going to get a quality education somewhere wherever it ends up being the best fit for you. And you are going to look back and you are going to love your business school. It’s a new phase, a new adventure—you should be excited about it.”
Looking around the room, it was clear to see that many of the women were indeed very excited about the new phase and new adventure that awaits them.
Three more Forté Forums are scheduled this fall, one taking place tonight, Sept. 2nd, in New York City; another tomorrow night, Sept. 3rd, in Toronto, and a final forum in London on October 1st. Click here to learn more or to register.
