On closures, business school and gratitude
A love letter to accomplishment // A "thank you" in long form
After 25th of May 2019, I re-applied to the Wharton School of Business for an MBA, and as of this 15th December 2022, I've been accepted to the Class of 2025.
The news is so big that I haven't even been able to digest it. There is so much mental circuitry that I have devoted to this singular goal for the last four years that to suddenly have it complete has my brain in free-fall. I find myself deleting evidence of the struggle (entire folders of bookmarks dedicated to admission blogs and GMAT testing material) and saying,
Image source: Elle Woods (Witherspoon) in Legally Blonde (MGM Studios, 2001)
(Editor's note: It was, yeah. It was real hard.)
My parents cried with joy when they heard the news. My father looked at me and said, "You do not even know the scale of what you have achieved," which sounds ominous. He said, "For humble origins like ours? For an ordinary middle class Indian family? Not just one but two Ivy League degrees and a FAANG job...?" and then he falters at the weight of the words he just said.
It's sweet, because I like to make my parents happy. They deserve to feel proud of my efforts for how much they supported me through it. But also, as my father pointed out, I don't fully get it yet.
In 2019, I was waitlisted to Wharton, on the verge of unemployment, struggling to move, in the process of changing my immigration status, and my father was suddenly on death’s doorstep. Everything except my father and my citizenship fell through or fell apart (Yay America?).
On the one hand, I constantly heard, what does an MBA really get you? Do you even need one? MBA's are useless in tech. It's a waste of money. Business is better learned in life than in the classroom. On the other hand, six different admission departments politely told me, thanks but you don’t have what it takes. How do you feel like you're not good enough for b-school, a program that's “so easy to get into, that it's basically a scam” and yet “one of the most transformative things you could do with your career"?
Waitlisted applicants are always invited to re-apply. It's the school's way of saying, not this time, but please try again. Wharton, at least, waives the application fee for the next two academic years since the waitlisting.
Other remarkable career growth happened during this time. I was interviewing at Google, and my recruiter pushed me to a more customer-facing role in Google Cloud that required both business expertise and technical experience. She did this, and I am not even joking, because she saw that I had comedy experience on my resume. She channeled my years of being on stage and making jokes to a job that required facing some of the most stressful clients. Unfortunately, Google is an environment where imposter syndrome lives in the air and infects everyone. To be surrounded by talented and smart people, and made to feel like the work you do matters, raises the constant existential question of deservedness, of belonging and of self-worth.
My anxiety fed on this atmosphere. Not only did I have the crushing failure of b-school rejections, but also told myself that I was an accidental hire into Google. That I was going to lose this job within days of securing it. At some point, my brain had locked itself into a constant low-volume scream that I could not shake off. Then, my life went on hold because the world went on hold in 2020. My real breakthroughs in therapy that year were surviving the breakup of an incredibly judgmental partner and actually having cried at the thought that I wasn't good enough for graduate school.
At least 4 different friends have prophesied that I am going to become a CEO. Their certainty is unshakeable. I ask them how they know. They tell me, we just know, alright. We knew you were gonna get in, and we know you will become great someday. Their faith in me is astounding to me.
The fear of re-application did stain everything I did since 2019: creating my website, showcasing more of my creative efforts and taking on more challenging work all felt like steady marches to a dense resume, to somehow a more certain chance of standing out before Wharton admissions. It also made everything feel like an interim place: whether I lived in NYC or whether the people I dated would last through the impending stress of school. At the height of the pandemic, I felt I had to squeeze utility out of every second of my day to feel alive again. And all this for what? To likely be told you're not good enough, again?
I also managed to get a promotion at work this year, which is also considered fast for my part of Google (a promotion in less than 3 years). Even though that is an achievement worth celebrating in its own right, I kept thinking of how I would have to put that somewhere into my re-application form. Only now can I appreciate how much my manager (who is my recommender to the schools, and therefore knew I was applying) argued for my case, knowing that I wouldn't have many days to enjoy the perk if b-school came through.
Business schools will ask you what your real reasons for applying are. Wharton asks How do you plan to use the Wharton MBA program to help you achieve your future professional goals? (which I find fairly straightforward and focused). Stanford tries to play it vague by asking What matters the most to you and why? (a question whose context I find insulting).
There's no reason why an admission council needs to literally peek into my soul in order to deem me worthy of joining its ranks. And more so, I have to fashion my most sensitive hopes into a performance deemed acceptable to a powerful invisible admissions committee. I was rejected from Stanford, so I can assure you that my hopes and dreams are the wrong answer. But I also imagine that they didn't want to hear, "Well, I think b-school will finally let my parents accept that I am an independent adult now and that they will respect me if I achieve this."
My reasons for applying to business school are perhaps too many: I genuinely believe that the tech industry's tactics of moving fast and breaking things glamorizes disruption over actual building and engineering. I think that a lot of good engineering work gets made that never sees the light of the day because people either don't understand it or are too consumed with the "hype" to use what actually fixes their problems. For too long, the allure of venture capitalism controlling the money that goes into tech determines what gets built rather than meaningful solutions to problems. I think that my MBA helps me bridge these gaps in what I know to be true as an engineer and what I suspect the solutions might be (which are often more in the business wheelhouse than in engineering).
I’m sure there are non-MBA routes to navigate the pathways I described above, and I’ve met too many people who exhaust me with this reasoning. Because I have other personal reasons for applying too, ones I can’t express on an application. It will make my parents wildest dreams come true, and that is important to me. An MBA might give me access to a community of impressive peers whose lives would not have otherwise intersected with mine. I do secretly harbor optimistic but low expectations that I might meet Someone, because graduate schools are where a lot of my friends met their Someones. An MBA lets me move out of my parents' house, move out of NYC, and try something new in my career while I am still single and able to absorb the cost of failures into my life. These aren’t things that I can maybe explicitly say in an application form, and maybe don’t translate to monetary value of the degree. But they are important to me nonetheless.
I hope, as one makes with all future investments, that this step helps me find the calling that I need: a deep need to build something useful that impacts many people. It doesn't have to be fun, glamorous, the next word-in-the-mouth of VC's or even lucrative. I simply want to build useful, well-considered things, and use whatever spare time I have to create absurdist comedic nonsense and spend my very short time in the world with the people I love.
People have been asking me what it was like on the day I received my news. How does it feel since then. It feels a lot of things. Extreme joy mirrors extreme grief in the sense that the first autopilot reaction is relief. I've been feeling tired more than anything else: tired for the nights at the airports where I tried to edit and rewrite essays, tired for the nights where I tried to catch up on admission blogs, tired for the nights where I worked almost two jobs, tired for the nights when I kissed someone and wondered if they would care enough about me to want to continue dating me if they knew I was going to grad school.
For the longest time, my anxiety also stemmed from being in my twenties. The successes that I enjoy now (Columbia engineering undergrad, a job at Google) came from a lot of grinding and sacrifices through my teen years. If I did not somehow put in the same level of work in my twenties, then what would I make of myself in my thirties? It's stupid and reductionist to have such benchmarks, but this accomplishment finally feels like I have stopped fighting time and its inexorable onslaught.
What I am feeling now is a long exhale.
I will be thirty soon (2024), and now that I have my admission letter in hand, I can safely say that all the things I made of myself since 2019, all the things I tried to add on my resume, to explore my hobbies and my creative interests, to form lasting genuine friendships in the digital post-millennial adult world have shown me who I am more than a document stamped from an institution will.
That's not to say that joy isn't on the horizon. There's an admission letter in the mail. Wharton has already started sending me swag. But the truth is that the joy is still conceptual. If anything, there's still seven months left to the life that I currently enjoy. Maybe it will feel real during my first class or my first Accounting midterm (I hear this one breaks people). I'm looking at housing options, and clicking through campus brochures. I am learning about the SEPTA. I am learning to open my heart to Philadelphia.
Ultimately though, I want to say thank you. I am thanking everyone who knew me in Boston, everyone who knew me in NYC, everyone who has known me in my comedy avatar, everyone who has known me in through my writing, everyone who has let me rant about how difficult this year has been, everyone who somehow believed in me even when my own faith faltered. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you for trusting me to feel the fear and do the scary thing anyway (kinda like writing this post).
Congrats Peels! I resonate with so many parts of this - applied to Berkeley's Haas program back in 2018, got waitlisted, felt wholly incompetent, lived in that shadow of potential re-application, ultimately mustered enough to get in for the 2021 incoming class. Love the self-awareness and transparency in this piece. Wharton is lucky to have you :)
An incredible accomplishment, Peels. Congratulations!