David Lee: Stanford Graduate School of Business (Class of 2019)

Author profile: Single male. Marine officer for 6 years. Attended Stanford GSB full time MBA program 2017-2019.

Regardless of whether someone was transitioning from the military or a different sector, almost everyone I know who got an MBA evaluated the decision (pre-matriculation) from the perspective of financial opportunity cost. While there are many other considerations, it’s the most tangible and concrete data that people can compare on an apples to apples basis. This isn’t a wrong or bad methodology. Just one of many and the most common. It’s not dissimilar to how people anchor on salary in job negotiations when we all know that a job encapsulates so much more than a paycheck.

In hindsight, I can honestly say that I have not thought about my decision to attend a full time MBA program from a financial perspective a single time since I have graduated. I say this as someone who took out six-figure student loans. In fact, I have thought many times that I would make that decision all over again if someone told me that stepping out of the workforce for 2 years and paying a lot of money would have zero positive impact on my future lifetime earnings.

Similar to how it feels wrong to count the money you spent on the countless dates trying to get to know your husband/wife or the money you spend on raising your kids, it feels futile to try to put a price tag on the experience of a full time program. What is it about the experience of a 2 year full time program that underpins such a strong sentiment?

When I think about my time in business school, here’s what I feel I took away in order of significance.

1. Lifelong friends and memories

2. Personal journey

3. Network

4. Education

Lifelong friends and memories

The reputation of business school is that it is primarily partying, schmoozing, and professional networking. That’s partially true, particularly on the surface level. But after you graduate and see the experience for what it is on the other end, it just feels like it doesn’t capture the totality of the experience. It’s like how someone can read a million books, watch every war movie, and talk with hundreds of vets, and even then, their understanding will be lacking and won’t fully capture the totality of what military service entails.

Before business school, every now and then, I would meet someone who would come across as particularly thoughtful, kind, charismatic, interesting, and grounded, and would really whet my appetite to spend more time with them. At business school, I’d say that described the majority of my interactions on any given day.

A full time program afforded me the environment, time, and autonomy to build the foundations for lifelong friendships and to create treasured lifelong memories. I love my friends from the military, but when I left and they stayed in, our common life experiences naturally diverged over time. My military friends understand me in ways that my business school friends never can. Having said that, my day to day life, experiences, and the things I think about on any given day have much more overlap with those of my friends from school.

The experience was incredibly vivacious, perspective giving, and life breathing. Because of the diversity of experiences, I (along with many of my friends) felt like I lived more life during those 2 years than 5 years of working a normal job. I don’t think of my classmates as my “network.” I just think of them as my friends - friends that I feel as strongly about and fondly towards as I do with my friends from the military.

Personal journey

For me and the vast majority of my friends who left the military, transition was a longer, harder, and rockier process than we had all anticipated. Business school is in some ways a 2 year placeholder on your resume where no one will critique what you accomplished professionally.

The full time experience meant that I was immersed in an incredibly supportive and forgiving environment for two full years where I could ask all my dumb questions, explore and learn about what might be interesting for me professionally, soul search about post-military life, and test different hypotheses on how I might best structure my professional career and environment moving forward. It was an incredibly meaningful and powerful opportunity to reflect on my identity outside of that as a Marine and to shed my old skin. Life in the military is the definition of a bubble, and my two years in school afforded me a chance to gain a sense of self-awareness and appreciation for my past life.

When I think about what I learned at business school, my attention immediately snaps to the depth and breadth of all that I learned about myself, the world, and others. It’s only after I spend time reflecting on the big life lessons that I recall everything I learned about the nuts and bolts of the business world.

Network

While I don’t think of my friends as my network, I do think of the general alumni base as the network. One important thing to note when it comes to the value of a network is how responsive and helpful the alumni network is. Some school networks are a loose affiliation. Other schools foster such a tight knit experience that alums will respond to cold emails as if you’re a long lost friend. I tend to think this is a function of the size of the program, the culture and experience of the program, and perceived exclusivity by alums.

I loved where I went to undergrad (a big state school) and wouldn’t change it for a thing if you offered me the chance to redo life and you sweetened the deal by giving me a full ride and admissions to the most prestigious universities in the world. Having said that, the difference in access to people I wanted to engage with before and after business school was on a totally different scale.

Education

I went to school thinking that my greatest takeaway would be the classroom education. Whenever I was assigned to a certain position in the military, I was always sent to a school to learn the ropes whether that was airborne school, MOS school, etc. When I left the military, I just assumed that if I was going to vaguely work in “business,” I should probably go to “business school.” While I chuckle at my naivete, business school in some ways felt like a career starter in a box: “Here are the basic concepts you need to know. Here’s the culture you need to absorb. Here’s the jargon. Here’s your rolodex of people who can help you along the way.”

While I had incredible professors and I learned more in my classes than I can sufficiently capture in this note, the vast majority of my business learnings during school came offline. From asking my friends questions about their previous roles on random weekend trips or dropping in on random conversations on campus, I found that so much of what I learned were things that are more caught than they are taught. How do you communicate the interpersonal dynamics between a lieutenant, the company first sergeant, and company gunny to a new officer? Similarly, I think lessons like that have to be experienced and are incredibly difficult to articulate through a textbook.

It’s also the soft stuff - reading a room, being comfortable talking with executives, developing pattern recognition of complex business dynamics, understanding different organizational cultures (sales, finance, legal, etc), recognizing you aren’t so different from your civilian peers, developing the confidence to feel like you belong in the room and that your opinion isn’t totally irrelevant, etc. To me, the full time experience gave me every opportunity to fill that out.

Conclusion

I haven’t gone through a PT or EMBA or online program. I was intentional in trying not to compare the experiences. Maybe it affords the same opportunity, maybe it doesn’t, but that’s a call that only you can make for yourself. Truth be told, if you’re the type of person that can gain entrance to a top program, you probably don’t even need all the benefits that it affords. You’re the type of person that will succeed regardless of what obstacles you encounter and what disadvantages you may or may not face. But if you have the chance to add all these advantages to your toolkit at what will be a marginal cost in hindsight, why wouldn’t you? I also acknowledge that not everyone is in a position to attend a full time program, but if you can afford to take the time off and have the budget for it, I would highly recommend it. 10/10.