Theodore Roosevelt’s challenge to “Dare Mighty Things” stood out in large crimson letters. Words like passion and leadership were sprinkled about like punctuation. There were photographs of eager-looking students and bespectacled professors, their hands poised in explanatory poses, exuding wisdom and energy. There on the banks of the Charles River people were daring, leading, imagining, and pursuing. I was drawn to Harvard for two main reasons. The first, I confess, was the name. However famous Harvard is in the United States, it is even more so overseas. It remains, for better or worse, by far the best-known university in America. The second reason was the particular education the business school promised. Even though most business schools teach much the same stuff, the approach and emphasis vary. Among the top schools, Stanford is known as a place for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Kellogg, at Northwestern University, is famous for marketing. If your dream is to build or manage a great American brand, Kellogg is the place. Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania, is for financiers, those with their eyes fixed on Wall Street. Columbia is similarly plugged into all that happens in New York. The Sloan School, at MIT, is for engineers and scientists wanting to turn their ideas into businesses. And Harvard is about general management. It prepares you to manage and lead all the parts of a business without any particular specialization. These descriptions doubtless do all of these schools a disservice, but they are repeated so often that an applicant, forced to choose, can scarcely ignore them.
Over the Christmas holiday of 2003, I wrote application essays for four schools: Harvard, Kellogg, Stanford, and the Haas School at Berkeley. With no sense of what any of them would make of me, I hoped at least one would take me in. I cranked the essays out blind, as honestly as I could. I had no template to work from, no friendly advisers telling me what the admissions offices wanted to hear. The questions were of three kinds: Why do you want to come to business school? Why do you want to come to this business school? And what have you done in your life up to now that makes you think a business education at this school would be worth your time and ours? As an example of my leadership experience, I wrote about running a newspaper bureau on September 11, 2001. To illustrate an ethical quandary, I described the difficulty of staying impartial as a reporter when writing about the victims and supporters of General Pinochet in Chile. My intention in coming to business school, I wrote, was to be able to build and manage my own media company one day, creating and distributing the kind of news and entertainment I could be proud of.
My English referees were baffled by the forms they were required to fill out. “You have to help me with this, Philip,” my editor pleaded on the telephone from his home in rural England on Christmas Eve “Where on this scale of one to five am I supposed to rank your leadership qualities?”
The next stage in the process was to be interviewed by alumni. My Harvard alumnus was a Frenchman of formidable girth who had once been the publisher of a business magazine. He hobbled to the door of his apartment on Place Vauban to greet me, his leg in a cast. It was early evening and the spotlights shining on Les Invalides reflected off the ceiling. He had pulled out a chair embossed with the Harvard insignia and the year of his graduation. He invited me to sit on it and then retreated behind his enormous desk.
“So, why Harvard?” His rich voice seemed to emanate from deep beneath layers of gleefully devoured cheese and terrine.
“It’s supposed to be the best one, isn’t it?”
“I see you read Classics at Oxford. Who was your favorite author?”
“Any of the golden age Latin poets. Virgil, Catullus, Horace.”
“What is your favorite work by Virgil?”
“The Georgics.”
“Hmm. Most people say The
Over the Christmas holiday of 2003, I wrote application essays for four schools: Harvard, Kellogg, Stanford, and the Haas School at Berkeley. With no sense of what any of them would make of me, I hoped at least one would take me in. I cranked the essays out blind, as honestly as I could. I had no template to work from, no friendly advisers telling me what the admissions offices wanted to hear. The questions were of three kinds: Why do you want to come to business school? Why do you want to come to this business school? And what have you done in your life up to now that makes you think a business education at this school would be worth your time and ours? As an example of my leadership experience, I wrote about running a newspaper bureau on September 11, 2001. To illustrate an ethical quandary, I described the difficulty of staying impartial as a reporter when writing about the victims and supporters of General Pinochet in Chile. My intention in coming to business school, I wrote, was to be able to build and manage my own media company one day, creating and distributing the kind of news and entertainment I could be proud of.
My English referees were baffled by the forms they were required to fill out. “You have to help me with this, Philip,” my editor pleaded on the telephone from his home in rural England on Christmas Eve “Where on this scale of one to five am I supposed to rank your leadership qualities?”
The next stage in the process was to be interviewed by alumni. My Harvard alumnus was a Frenchman of formidable girth who had once been the publisher of a business magazine. He hobbled to the door of his apartment on Place Vauban to greet me, his leg in a cast. It was early evening and the spotlights shining on Les Invalides reflected off the ceiling. He had pulled out a chair embossed with the Harvard insignia and the year of his graduation. He invited me to sit on it and then retreated behind his enormous desk.
“So, why Harvard?” His rich voice seemed to emanate from deep beneath layers of gleefully devoured cheese and terrine.
“It’s supposed to be the best one, isn’t it?”
“I see you read Classics at Oxford. Who was your favorite author?”
“Any of the golden age Latin poets. Virgil, Catullus, Horace.”
“What is your favorite work by Virgil?”
“The Georgics.”
“Hmm. Most people say The
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