Temmy Ode (MBA 2022) - What I wish I'd Known before applying to business school

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Welcome back everyone, it's to me and I thought I'd share with you a few things I wish I had known before I applied to business school. The first of them is do it afraid take big risks whether you're an undergrad right now, thinking about what projects to get involved in or you know, you're already working and in your professional career, it's important for you to try out new things. Um So if you're an undergrad, like try leaving a student organization, try working on the research paper in the department that you're not even a student in. Like I did my papers um even though I was in the business school um and that gave me the opportunity to travel to different states for free, present my papers, so I have no regrets and I loved doing it and found out that I really loved Mad. You should also try to do study abroad, you should try to do an internship abroad if you get the opportunity to do so. If it's affordable to you and you know, if you're in your professional career, if you have the opportunity to go work in London or in china in a different country in Vietnam in Africa, go for it. Um it will be rewarding personally for you and it will help you discover parts of yourself that you would never have known about. Um, but specifically as relates to your application, the second thing that I would recommend is just to stay in touch with people who have had a very meaningful impact on your life. Your manager as your professors who shaped the directory of your life or where you ended up in your career, they know your story, they've seen you fail and pick yourself up. They've seen you be resilient, They've seen you developed this interest in a special project that you might talk about on your essay and they're able to speak to your story and tell the admissions committee why you'd be a unique edition to the class. So you don't want to reach out to them three years later saying, hey, I need Detroit my recommendation letter. I, you know, I haven't spoken to you for three years because you don't know what's happening all those three years. It's just an awkward conversation that I think you should try to avoid. Then the third thing that I would recommend doing is just staying true to yourself when you write your application. So when Harvard business school asks you to tell them about yourself, they want you to do exactly that. Whether other people think that it's boring or not. Um, so as an example, I really like commercial banks and the rest of the world finds commercial banks extremely boring. I really think that commercial banks and magicians, they take chip deposits from individuals and from other sources of capital. Then they brought those cheap deposits into like infrastructure projects, into education loans, into government projects, into vaccine development, a whole range of, you know, capital projects. That basically changed the stretchy of individuals, of small businesses, of corporate, of nations. So I told the admissions committee why I'm so fascinated by financial institutions and how I would like to make a difference in the way that financial institutions operate in emerging markets. That was it guys, I got in and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be here. So when people tell you like this is boring or you know, maybe there's something else that you need to do that will make you more attractive to the admissions committee, trusting who you are, trusting your uniqueness and, you know, share that confidently with the admissions committee, and everything usually works out in the end.