On the day TEMI OLATUNDE received her acceptance to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, she says the tales of acceptance on MBA blogs “followed the sun.” Asia first, extending westward through the afternoon and evening.
“Needless to say, when my phone rang, that single call compensated for the sleepless nights, countless essay revisions and nail-biting wait,” Olatunde wrote in the first installment of her MBA Diary, published in The Economist.
She has since arrived on the Farm and is adjusting to the transition from the London trading floor to the classroom and acclimating to the hyper-social activity beyond. There was “Condi Week,” during which GSB professor and former Secretary of State CONDOLEEZZA RICE taught lessons on global management. Then there are the school night and weekend parties and Bay Area excursions.
“Returning to the life of a student in this foreign world, I feel like a beginner again. But with each new challenge I am learning to embrace change as one of life’s and business’s constants,” Olatunde writes. “I am reminded of this every time I walk past the Apple store on University Avenue. It is adorned with hundreds of colourful post-it notes—messages from students who felt some level of connection to Steve Jobs. Jobs gave an inspiring commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, during which he reflected on the day he was fired from Apple: ‘The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.’ As I reflect on my MBA journey thus far, the words resonate,” she concludes.
Read the full post in The Economist.
