My MBA Reflective Essay

Below is the final assignment I submitted to my MBA capstone course in December 2014. Hope you enjoy it!

Initially, I enrolled in the MBA program to acquire business knowledge to make a career switch. I had been working for two years at the University of Alberta in student recruitment for the Faculty of Engineering, and while I loved my job, I knew opportunities for advancement were limited. The province was making cuts to education, and the UofA was trying to manage major budget cuts by forcing early retirements, issuing hiring freezes, and replacing full-time permanent positions with one-year contracts. While I wasn’t facing a layoff in my role, I still perceived myself to be at a dead-end. You have to be a particular sort of personality to whine that your entry-level position paying you $50,000 per year to work 35 easy desk hours a week isn’t enough for you. I might be the entitled millennial I so often vilify.

I had started Money After Graduation, a financial literacy website targeting college students and recent graduates in 2011. By the time I was looking for a way out of UofA job, my website was seeing over 1,000 visitors per day and earning over $1,000 in advertising revenue each month. From it, I managed to establish a small freelance writing career, where I shared my millennial money advice through print and online media. As opportunities continued to arrive at my doorstep, I erroneously concluded I must be destined for a career in finance instead of humdrum academia.

I was enrolled full-time in the MBA program at Haskayne 6 months later, with a generous entrance scholarship to fund the endeavour. It was an award for entrepreneurship. Sometimes we miss what’s right in front of our faces.

Turns out I don’t actually like finance in practice. Or at least not corporate finance. Three months in I was wondering where on earth I’d gotten the dumb idea to abandon my cushy job in academia to burn through all my savings for something I suddenly didn’t want to do anymore. I was starting to worry that I’d successfully executed my most dramatic act of self-sabotage yet. That was only the first term though, so naturally it got worse.

Despite the efforts of the MBA to suck everything out of me, Money After Graduation was still growing. The site doubled in subscribers and revenue, which made paying for the MBA easier. I interviewed on CBC The Current early in the Fall, and in November Tangerine Bank flew me to Toronto for an event. I distinctly remember desperately requesting an exemption from an in-class assignment that I would miss because of the trip. My professor said no, and I lost enough percentage points to hurt my overall grade in the course. But I met Macklemore that week in just as his song “Thrift Shop” was dominating radio waves. You win some, you lose some.

By the second term, I’d made peace with the fact that I wasn’t destined for a career in investment banking. I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. This feeling made sense when I was 22, but was frustrating to come around again at age 28. Surely I was too old to do this again! When the MBA internship program failed to deliver any internships, I was unemployed, in-debt, and feeling thoroughly defeated in that privileged sort of way only first world citizens can. Everything was going wrong, woe is me. Naturally, it got worse again.

While I watched my big MBA professional plans for myself dissolve before my very eyes, Lesley-Anne Scorgie, a best-selling personal finance author approached me to help her with a startup. Her idea was a financial literacy eLearning platform called MeVest. She had seen Money After Graduation and wanted my input. I had nothing else to do, why not? I learned a lot, earned some money, and got another free trip to Toronto.

I went through this really great Zen Buddhism phase at 25, and ever since then, I’ve felt fairly confident that our lives unfold exactly as they are meant to. I’m also fairly confident I am a terrible listener and generally will not adhere to the Universe’s direction unless there are no other choices. My reluctance to lean into whatever is truly best for me is the main reason I eventually managed to wrangle myself into a MBA internship after MeVest, for a company that had no clear direction and a boss that not-so-secretly hated me. I lasted 4 months, only burst into tears at work twice, and quit with an overwhelming sense of failure that was gracefully muted by the tremendous relief of never having to go back there again. At this point, I got it: I was doing my own life wrong.

I took a block week in class in Technology Commercialization this year. You probably shouldn’t base your whole life on a block week class, but I was worn out from my carefully planned ideas and wanted to give going after something on a whim a try. Listening to venture capitalists and angel investors speak about the companies they’ve invested in — both those that have succeeded and those that have failed — inspired me, and I decided I wanted to be standing in their place.

There’s something ridiculous about saying “I want to be a venture capitalist” out-loud because it sounds really, really dumb. It sounds like “I’m going to buy a unicorn!” because it’s whimsical and hilarious and most people will roll their eyes at it. But I wanted it anyway. I want to build businesses and help entrepreneurs, and then roll any profits into the next endeavour without missing a beat. It’s not about the money (which may sound weird coming from a personal finance writer) but I’ve never been that interested in money, only what it can do. And I want to use money to do and create great things.

I was still working all this out internally by the time we got the the MBA leadership capstone class. I can’t tell you how glad I am that personal development plan was the first assignment. Maybe if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have felt so emboldened to ask myself to actually deliver the things I really wanted out of life, or even to acknowledge them aloud, but by the third week of October I was brave enough to admit in a job interview that I was already an entrepreneur and wanted to be a venture capitalist. Thankfully, the people doing the hiring were angel investors so my grand dreams sounded like a reasonable life plan.

I got the job as a Product Strategist at Uncommon Innovation right after I signed with a book agent to bring Money After Graduation from the web into print. These represent two deeply satisfying, highly profitable endeavours that are everything I ever wanted for myself, while at the same time being nothing I ever expected. The MBA was just a catalyst to drive me faster to where I was always headed — even if I didn’t realize it. Now that I’m nearly done, I feel empowered to tackle greater challenges, and enjoy greater successes, in my future. Maybe I’ll even learn to recognize what’s right for me, instead of persisting in the wrong direction until all avenues are exhausted.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. - Steve Jobs