Inside the World’s Sunniest MBA Program
A recent grad’s experience at the Stanford Business School.
Some call it a two-year vacation from work. Others call it an elite business school.
As a 2017 graduate, I’m writing this article to share my experience with considering business school, applying to programs, making the big decision, and what it’s like to study at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB).
The process can be relatively opaque with bits and pieces of data available from Poets & Quants to help fill in the gaps, but I’m hoping that my personal experience can help prospective students (maybe even you) make good, informed choices. Since I’m just one data point out of 18,666 living Stanford MBA alumni, it wouldn’t hurt to check out my classmates’ perspectives on the program to get a fuller picture:
- Poets & Quants’ Best & Brightest MBAs: Class of 2017 (Kate Archibald, Federico Mossa, and Sebastian Serra)
- Lessons from the Stanford MBA Experience (Benjamin Fernandes)
- The Stanford Daily’s Interview with Danica Jacinto

Considering Business School
I remember spending a lot of time in college thinking about what I might want to do after I finished my undergraduate degree — it certainly wasn’t a simple decision. The most talented people I knew in college went in many different directions: an MIT PhD program, a Caltech PhD program, the chemical industry, teaching programs, a startup accelerator in Detroit, and various pharmaceutical companies. The path to a fulfilling life and career comes in many forms.
I distinctly remember having a conversation where I wondered aloud to a good friend, “why would you want to do an MBA program?” A top-tier MBA seemed far-fetched and expensive. At the time, I was super pumped about finding a startup that could make it big (and the itch is still there). There was part of me that wanted to do a PhD program, but many of the challenges in advancing the 21st century’s greatest technologies and services are political and business-oriented in nature. Of course, there are many great achievements that come from PhDs and basic research as well.
Needless to say, I moved beyond my original stance and decided to apply to several MBA programs while I was still finishing school. I finished on-campus classes a semester early, so I found an internship that I could do while I applied to the programs and waited to hear back.
Applying to Programs
I applied to Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Chicago since they all allowed deferred enrollment where you can get accepted several years before starting the program. I received advice from many people that work experience is helpful to have before starting an MBA program, and I certainly echo that advice. If you’re fresh out of undergrad, there could be a lot of moments in an MBA classroom where you might wonder, “well why don’t they just do this and fix the problem?” When I started working, I learned firsthand that politics could get in the way of simple, effective solutions — and that’s a big chunk of what ‘doing business’ means.
“So are my GPA and GMAT scores good enough?” It’s a question many of us applicants have had. I’d recommend matching your personal profile to the schools you’re considering. If you’re too far from the average accepted student’s GPA or GMAT score, you’ll probably want to consider adjusting the schools you’re targeting.
When it comes to preparing for the GMAT, buy a good test-prep book, take a practice exam, and spend a few days working on the areas where you’re weakest. For me, one of those areas was English sentence structure (haha! you can PM me all of my typos) even though I grew up in North Carolina and English is my first language. Once you’ve honed your skills with a solid test-prep book, take a few more practice exams and then do the real thing shortly after that while you’re still motivated.
Don’t get caught up on a top-tier MBA program or an MBA program of any kind if it doesn’t feel right. I know there are some accomplished people who have done amazing things with no degrees at all, and honestly the whole higher education system is pretty overrated anyway. After all, Andrew Carnegie dropped out of elementary school and still topped the list of the 19th century’s most successful people.
When it comes to the essays, write about what you’re truly passionate about. Maybe you’re passionate about a lot of things, but this is the time for you to focus on a very core set of things that matter to you. For me, those passions have broadened as I’ve grown, but I wrote about climate change and how chemical & biomolecular engineering can be used as a force for good in the world. Don’t try to mimic me or someone else you know, just do your own thing and let your passion show.
Why does your passion (or essay topic) matter to the world, and why does it matter to you? How can you translate that passion into something useful for society, and why are you the one to do it?
Choosing the Right Program for You
Everyone’s needs are different, but for me, the decision was relatively straightforward. I saw a movie called Orange County many times when I was younger, so that pretty much convinced me that California was calling for me.
It wouldn’t hurt to consider a few more factors.
There’s a big question among business-people and others about how to truly measure the value of an MBA. Is it a purely financial decision? Some people will argue that you shouldn’t look at the financial returns. I think that’s B.S. Not Brian Schuster, the other B.S. If you’re only looking for friendships and life-changing experiences, go work on an organic farm for a while or backpack around your nearest exotic country. Yes, there are intangible benefits that go beyond the monetary value of an MBA, but at the core, elite institutions are selling you a product designed to earn you lasting value in the form of cold, hard cash. They’re charging you a serious amount of money for tuition, and they’d better have something to show for it.
I personally did a simple NPV calculation that incorporated average salaries from my MBA program. There are plenty of assumptions you’ll have to make, but it’s a worthwhile exercise, especially if you’re expecting to pass your upcoming finance course. It’s also worth looking at the industries and companies that pay the largest premiums to new MBA hires. Are you considering these industries?
Before applying to MBA programs, I had no idea what management consulting and private equity were, but you’ll benefit from taking the time to learn about these industries if they’re new to you. If you’re considering working in venture capital, keep in mind that it’s extremely competitive and only a select few grads end up working in VC right after school.
Management consulting, investment banking, Google, Amazon, and private equity (PE) are fairly common paths and can be quite handy for MBAs who need to pay off huge debt loads. I’ve been told that people going to Bain Capital make north of $500k per year straight out of Stanford. Glassdoor and other sources of salary estimates don’t capture the sheer size of the bonuses, which are usually guaranteed.
LinkedIn offers a handy resource where you can browse the companies where most graduates from a particular school work. Just search the school of your choice and click on ‘career insights.’
Financial Aid
Financial aid is a major topic for many prospective applicants. You might be asking, “Can I afford it even if I get in?” Scholarships were slim when I started, but Stanford has recently launched the USA Fellowship for people tied to the Midwest and Knight-Hennessy Scholars program for overachievers. Chances are that if you need money, you’ll be applying for need-based aid with about half of your incoming class.
When I applied to Stanford, my expectation was that the average fellowship amount was $36,000 per year. My fellowship amount was $12,986 for each of the two years, meaning the net cost to me was estimated at $186,370 including living costs. As I deferred enrollment, this was a significant pain point for me, and I only worked for about two years prior to the GSB, so I didn’t have much time to save up. I made a choice to live as frugally as I could in Georgia. I lived in a house with a few engineers far from work, ate the cheapest foods I could find, hardly traveled, and took up side jobs tutoring and drawing pipe networks in a drilling fluid factory.
What’s the moral of the story? It might not be the best plan to save up too hard for the Stanford MBA program. The financial aid office bases your aid on your assets, not on your income. You could make $400k per year working for a private equity firm and blow it all on casinos, or you could make $50k per year and save 80% of it. It’s all the same to Stanford if you end up with the same assets. If you save up a good chunk of cash prior to school, it might not be a bad idea to take that yacht-trip around the world that you’ve been waiting to do for so long and then apply for financial aid. Or better yet, buy a family member something very nice with long-lasting value before filling out the paperwork.
Top business schools have an interesting form of governance. Most of the faculty are essentially shareholders of a lucrative business, so for them there’s a fine balance between handing out too much aid so that it cuts into their profits and not handing out enough to attract students.
From what I was told during a visit to Boston in 2013, Harvard has a reasonably fair way of handing out financial aid. They base their aid packages on the last three years of a student’s income.
I know at least one of my friends has $200k in debt from his Stanford MBA, and there are probably many others across the country. The debt might seem like a mountain at first, but it’s movable. Be sure to keep the numbers in mind when considering various MBA programs. Like another friend of mine, you might land a full fellowship at Penn State if you broaden your outlook.
The Butterfly Garden
Stanford University has a huge campus, so there’s plenty of territory to explore. Since it’s so large, you’ll probably spend most of your time in a few areas of campus dodging the multitude of bikers. The business school has almost everything you need, and first-year housing is right across the street. I lived in the nearby Escondido Village with a campus restaurant a short walk away. A shopping center with Trader Joe’s and coffee shops is a short bike ride away, and a full-sized grocery store is within 15 minutes.
The business school was built fairly recently, and it’s pretty incredible. Palm trees are everywhere, and there’s a nice shaded area that looks like an urban jungle. The landscaping is top-notch. If you’re wondering where your tuition dollars will be going, look no further than these grounds (and the professors).
With all of the sunshine and perfectly cut grass, it’s reasonable to expect a fair amount of celebration. There are Friday courtyard gatherings with pizza and drinks and weekday events at various local bars. Many second-year students move into ‘pass-down houses’ where the furniture gets passed down between generations of students, so parties are held off campus throughout the year. Pool parties too.
You might even call Stanford the butterfly garden since there are so many social butterflies around.
At this point, it shouldn’t be a surprise that academics are not the core focus of the program. Yet if you look deeper, many people are actually working pretty hard to get good grades because we’re all ranked against each other. A certain percentage of every course’s students will get an LP (similar to a D), and students with too many LP’s on their transcript will flunk out.
What surprised me the most about the Stanford experience was strong focus on travel. It was very different from my undergrad experience where travel involved going to Hillsborough Street on the north side of campus… not a bad way to spend a Saturday night. Weekend trips for some students at Stanford involve faraway excursions and flights across the country. Even though some people allocate a generous portion of their budget to travel, there are plenty of other more local trips. Even so, hundreds of students make a trip to an island in Colombia at the beginning of the year before school starts, and from what I’ve heard, it’s worth it.
GSB Academics
The thing about business school that makes it so different from engineering is that there are few problem sets. There are Excel assignments and financial models, but beyond that, it’s mostly case preparation and papers. In most courses, you will be hard-pressed to find work that’s deeply challenging because the MBA program isn’t about that; it’s about developing relationships and reading tons of cases. Although the work isn’t particularly challenging, it is time-consuming during the first few quarters.
When it comes to the cases, I’m serious. There are tons of cases. So many cases that your head might explode. Because the GSB offers free printing to students, it wouldn’t be surprising if the school has its own timber yard to support all of the case printing.
One of the main issues with GSB cases is that beside the fact that they are usually incredibly long, they are also heavily focused on IT (known as ‘tech’ in Silicon Valley), so most class discussions are oriented toward problems faced by tech firms. Many students take CS106A, a course with computer science undergrads that exposes them to the basics of coding, and design school (d.school) courses offer insights into the design process for consumer products and apps.
The focus on tech makes sense since the school is right in the middle of Silicon Valley and sits among the world’s largest tech companies, but the school misses out on many biotech opportunities. Biotechnology represents a huge industry, and major technological leaps are being made across the world in life sciences these days. There are researchers out there working on creating an actual Jurassic Park with woolly mammoths, and that’s just the beginning.
Luckily there are a few across-the-street electives you can take at other Stanford graduate schools to get exposed to fields that aren’t emphasized at the b-school. I took a good one on pharma collaborations with academia and another on health law, but at the moment Stanford is not the place to be for biotech or bio-engineering. Hopefully that’ll change in the near future.
One of Stanford’s greatest strengths is its ability to attract top names from big-name companies. I had several great courses taught by CEOs from multibillion-dollar tech companies and active venture capitalists. In other classes, we were introduced to executives from smaller companies operating in areas ranging from surf accessory sales to wastewater treatment. Evan Spiegel joined us right after the Snap IPO, Sheryl Sandberg came to speak at View From The Top, and many others have blessed us with their presence. It’s humbling to see what they have accomplished.
One of the courses I enjoyed the most was advanced data & decisions, which is basically a businessperson’s intro to machine learning, or what Zuckerberg and Musk call AI. We learned how to run our own algorithms for predictive analytics and briefly got exposed to the power of neural nets. If you’re still wondering what machine learning is, the best way I can describe it is that it’s a bunch of linear and non-linear regressions on steroids, but my professor probably wouldn’t approve of that description. Despite what the media might have us think, it isn’t just being used to make cyborgs that will steal our jobs; it’s also being used to make powerful recommendations and insights in healthcare.
Strategy Beyond Markets was another great course because it exposed us to the underbelly of American business. Many innovative, disruptive businesses push the boundaries of legality and carefully dance along the line until regulations change in their favor. This corporate power can be used as a force for good or evil, but every good businessperson should be aware of it.
Since there’s no escaping politics, I’d also recommend Contemporary Economic Policy. It’s taught by professors who have experience in the White House and know what it’s like to navigate rough political waters. You’re asked to write memos regarding several hot-button political topics and debate leading opinions on politics with the profs and class. Pretty cool, right? That opportunity doesn’t come up very often when working at a private company. Just remember, don’t take the economists too seriously. They’re still learning too.
Don’t focus too intently on the courses with the highest ratings. Take the courses that will be interesting to you and that will broaden your knowledge the most.
Beyond Classes
Many people do summer internships. It’s a good opportunity to get exposure to the startup world if you haven’t been there yet. There are also GMIX opportunities that allow people to work abroad for a month. The process of securing a GMIX is fairly simple and straightforward, nothing like a job search. I did mine in Monterrey, Mexico with an oil & gas company called Strata BPS and enjoyed it.
Global study trips also offer structured opportunities for students to travel abroad and meet with foreign executives. The trips cost a few thousand dollars each whereas the GMIX program covers all costs of travel, food, and lodging.
And finally, the part you’ve been waiting for all this time: career recruiting. You’re going to have to ask me about that later. Whatever you decide to do, may the force be with you.
