November 2008

Today's WSJ profiles six college students who give their first-hand accounts of the admissions process. They ended up at Stanford, Cornell, Wellesley, Michigan, Grinnell, and Lafayette (Pennsylvania). The lessons:

 

• It's possible to defy the odds and get in off the waitlist (Stanford), even after everyone tells you you won't get in.

• Repeatedly misspelling basic words like literature ("literatre") and chemistry ("chemestry") on one form likely got an applicant dinged at Dartmouth, and after fixing them he got into five other schools, including Cornell. Attention to the smallest details matters in applications.

• You can be happy at the school you considered your safety (Michigan -- lucky boy, not a safety for most people). "And make sure that all the schools you're applying to, you're pretty sure you'd be willing to go to." Very true.

• Don't be a poser in your essays, and don't try to tell admissions officers what you think they want to hear. The school she got into -- Wellesley -- is the one for whom she wrote an essay that "really sounded like her." The schools that received the phony-baloney essays all rejected her.

• Be honest with yourself about where you'll thrive. One applicant turned down Georgetown and Cornell, because she was worried she'd stress over the student loans (Georgetown) and that she'd get lost in a sea of 13,000 undergrads (Cornell). She ended up at Lafayette.

• Taking a "gap year" made the difference between getting dinged the first time and getting in the second time for an applicant to Grinnell.

Read the whole article here. All great advice, to which I would add the following:

• It is the kiss of death to have your application essays worked over by a bunch of people, because essays written by committee are never, ever good, and the applicant's voice gets lost in the process. Even worse are the essays that the parents wrote themselves. Aside from the ethical violation that poses, those essays always stink, because no teenager ever writes like a 40 or 50-something, or sees the world the way they do. People who are trying to help you with your essays should be doing two things, and only these two things: helping you figure out what you want to say, and helping you say it in your best voice. Any other kind of assistance leads to junk.

• I'm a big fan of gap years, as are admissions officers, even at top schools. Parents are usually the only skeptics, and I would urge them to read my gap year postings here.

 

I love the question a commenter asked in my last posting called “International Law: Believe the Hype?” Here I’ve been telling you not to fall for the “International Law” hype, but I haven’t told you what areas of the law you should focus on instead. I’ll address that here.

In a perfect world, people don’t go to law school right out of college. They’ve experienced the world, and the working world in particular, so that they have some idea who they are outside of that bubble called school, and they have some sense of their talents and inclinations (and disinclinations!) in the “real” world, which is so very different from the academic world.

In a perfect world, that person gets some experience, say, working in the compliance department of a big bank, and discovers that she loves the compliance world, she’s psyched about the intersection of banking and finance and the law and the regulatory state. And she can apply to law school articulating that interest in a coherent and credible and persuasive way (making her application stronger), and she can start law school knowing what she hopes to get out of it, and knowing what courses she wants to concentrate on in her second and third years (making her academic experience, and her career, stronger). Those people exist, and yay for them.

Or, also in a perfect world, that person discovers that she hates banking or finance or the nitty-gritty obsession with details that such laws and regulations require, and she’s just learned something very important: what she doesn’t want to do. That has enormous value as well. Should she go running off to law school? I would argue no – not until she has been able to observe, first-hand, somebody, somewhere, practicing the kind of law that does excite her, and whose life she can envision living (because lifestyle matters too).

You should go to law school only if you like the idea of being a lawyer. A real lawyer, not a lawyer that exists only in your head, or only on TV. If what is drawing you to law school is the adjective rather than the noun -- "international" or "corporate" or "environmental" or something else rather than "lawyer" -- then go explore that world first: work at the State Department or the Peace Corps, work in a corporation, intern at an environmental group. Don’t go running off to law school until you’ve done that. I’ve written about that more in a posting called “Law School for Non-Lawyers.”

But we don’t live in a perfect world, and most law school applicants do go jumping into law school without having reached that level of self-awareness, and I should have what is (I hope) advice for them too. Here’s what I say to those applicants.

A good legal education – whether you already know what you want to do with it or not – should give you a set of tools that teach you how to “think like a lawyer.” You’ll hear that phrase a lot among law professors and lawyers. It’s hard to understand what that means until you’re actually doing it, but it’s basically a very particular way of analyzing and solving problems (both legal and non-legal). It rewires your brain – whether for good or for ill, because once you’ve been properly trained to “think like a lawyer,” it’s not really something you can undo. It’s a whole new way of thinking about things, and those glasses don’t come off again. They’re soldered on… if the training is done right.

Those tools should be fundamental ones, and they are typically the ones you learn during your first year. Will you ever again need to know the Rule Against Perpetuities, or the Parol Evidence Rule, or Judge Learned Hand’s formula for calculating negligence damages? Maybe not. But those 1L courses teach you the basic tools of learning how to think like a lawyer, and then you can go explore different pockets of the law in your second and third years, and for your entire career. Here’s one way to think about this: during your first year, you’re learning the law; in your second and third years, you’re learning laws. Big difference.

Laws are going to change before you even graduate from law school. Laws change constantly, and you have to learn how to understand them and use them as they change. You might even have a role in changing them. Your career path is going to take you through many different areas of the law, and it’s almost impossible to predict what those are going to be. There was a time when I thought (along with many others) that IP lawyers were going to rule the roost, but over time IP has become so commoditized that it has even started to wreck some law firm business models. And right now bankruptcy is hot, but that can change quickly.

Those are just examples. You may choose to migrate through different areas of the law over the course of your career, but chances are you’ll be forced to. Just as the law changes, your career will change too, and the odds that you’ll end up doing – for your entire career – what you thought you’d be doing when you applied to graduate school at age 21 are pretty slim.

In our dynamic economy, with many lawyers changing jobs multiple times over the course of a career, flexibility is crucial. General training enables that; specializations and boutique seminars don't. That’s also an argument against picking a law school because it has some alleged expertise in some narrow area.

For that reason, in your second and third years, take only at most a sprinkling of esoteric seminars. The goal should be to have some specialized knowledge and sustained interest in a particular area or areas that might become hot, or that interest you. But at the same time, have general training to fall back on.

Also go easy on all those Law & Whatever seminars. I’ve written before about how the law schools' obsession with "interdisciplinary" approaches to the law is also a big marketing exercise (I’m looking at you, Penn, but all the schools do it to some degree, including my own law school, Chicago). Why do applicants love the Law & Whatever courses? Because the Law & Whatever courses look and feel just like advanced courses in the humanities, and lost and confused college students who have no idea why they’re applying to law school are wildly attracted to more coursework that looks just like college.

And guess what? Those Law & Whatever courses are often pretty fluffy. They aren’t terribly respected out in the real world, and they don’t really make you better lawyers. I can’t make this argument better than Judge Easterbrook in his article “Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse,” where he talks about the "cross-sterilization of ideas" ("put together two fields about which you know very little and get the worst of both words"). Read it.

A lawyer friend of mine also put it really well:

I'm firmly with Easterbrook on this based partly on my own experience -- thought I wanted to be a litigator while I was in law school and loaded up on litigation-oriented classes that are of little relevance to what I now do.

My [big NYC] firm and, as far as I know, others like mine, are recruiting for well-trained generalists and have very extensive internal training programs for the specialized stuff that's needed for our practice. I don't expect summer associate interviewees to know anything about cross-border M&A or whatever; the point is that if they're telling me they want to come to my firm to practice international law, they need to at least be able to identify the thing we do that most plausibly could be called international law. Otherwise it's like they're telling me they want to come here to do admiralty law, or dogbite litigation, or something else that we don't do.

This profession is chock full o’ malcontents and my advice to students is, think hard about all the people out there who regret becoming lawyers or who regret choosing a particular practice. Other than trial and error, the best way to avoid becoming one of those people is to steer toward an area that you'll enjoy practicing as opposed to studying. The fact that a practice area has relatively little demand (trusts and estates), or has clients who nitpick the bills (insurance defense), or results in your making less money than your friends (many specialty practices), or results in your clients being criminals (public defender) are all things that need to be taken into account in deciding how much you're going to like what you do.

To boil all this down:

• If you have observed lawyers whose work life you want, and whose personal life you want, go to law school. Otherwise, don’t. Yet.

• If you’re certain you want to do “X Law,” go experience X before you tack on the Law part.

• Go to the best law school you can get into that will give the best fundamental training. Don’t pay too much attention to a school’s marketing or fame in specialties X, Y, or Z.

• During your first year, learn how to read, write, and think like a lawyer, and learn how to network. In your second and third years, take whatever classes you want, and do specialize in areas you discover that you love (they can be great distinguishing factors out on the job market), but go easy on the esoteric seminars and the Law of the Horse.

 

I've written previously about the obsession among law school applicants with "international law" (which they can't even define, in most cases), and how law schools are responding to that obsession by slapping the "international" label on everything possible and furiously peddling their study abroad programs.

The "international" label is a great marketing tool for law schools, and they are no doubt responding rationally to demand from applicants for whom they compete. However, I continue to question the underlying merits of that obsession. I also have doubts about the quality control among these many study-abroad offerings, as well as the assumptions applicants make about what "international law" actually is, or what an international practice actually looks like.

I've received some interesting feedback from law school students and practicing lawyers alike, all of them questioning this uninformed (on applicants' part) and superficial (on the schools' part) international law "mania." And yesterday, this article appeared in the New York Times about young American lawyers flocking oversees during the downturn. (Not a bad idea, but far less glamorous than most law students assume it will be.)

This post will be long, because I'll let these students and lawyers speak for themselves. It's good stuff for applicants to hear.

From a student at a top-10 law school, thoughts on his study abroad program:

Mostly I find the other students disappointing. People don't seem to think critically. I know that's a huge generalization, but it's all I can say. Students are in this program from all countries of the world, and some are practicing attorneys. But most of them "know" various laws in their respective countries but are incapable of discussing them intelligently. So the professors dumb down the classes for them. All the program directors keep lauding the "internationalism" in the program. But what good are different perspectives if they do not contribute meaningfully to anything? For instance, a professor will ask, "according to the author, what is 2 plus 2?" and a student will respond, "in my country, 5 minus 4 is 1, and that is because historically in our legal system, 4 times 4 equaled 16". I hope my inept illustration makes sense. To make matters worse, the American students are no better. A student even asked the following question: "So, if a company manufactures a product in a given state, is that enough for it to be sued in that state?" I wondered if he was conscious during that entire semester of civil procedure.

From a student earning a joint American JD and and a law degree from another country:

I got offers at both [deleted] and [deleted]! Those two were my top choices (for the firms that actually called me back). I didn't get [deleted], which really depressed me.

I was also very angry, actually, because my dual degree was a huge handicap. I didn't even get callbacks at a lot of places I otherwise would have with my gpa and journal experience. I was very angry at my school for leading me to believe that if I did well, it wouldn't hurt my chances because it was in fact a huge factor. Most firms simply looked the other way as soon as it was mentioned. Even though I was top 10%, got on law review, got a [deleted] award, etc., I found that because I was getting specialized training in a civil law system, I was suddenly a disfigured burden that no one wanted, even though these firms claim to be "international." I was most disappointed about [deleted], [deleted], [deleted] and [deleted].

I would be happy to rant about my dual degree ‘till the cows come home. I hear about the next group of students coming in thinking they are doing something so valuable and I feel bad for them. And it is extemely valuable-just not on the market, and that is NOT what the schools tell us. In fact, it is even worse for the [non-US] students. Many of them (including my friend from this year) get NO offers at all. In fact, he not only got no offers, he got no callbacks after the initial interviews. And he has a B average from [top law school], which is not far off the curve, and he has a business degree from [deleted], one of the top business schools in Europe. That apparently means nothing to the "international" firms. Most of the interviewers didn't even believe that he was getting a JD. They kept saying, "Wait, so, you're getting an LLM?"

In case you haven't seen it-thought you might be interested in an article I just read in Financial Times about the increasing internationalness of commercial legal practice, with corresponding development in law schools. International-this and international-that has been a buzzword everywhere I've gone since I was in middle school, but it's taken me until law school to realize just how much of a marketing tool it is and how little substance there is to it.

Almost all of my interviewers in recruiting this fall responded that their firms had grown more "international" in the past few years. Even I thought I wanted to practice "private international law" when I came to law school, until I found out that it didn't exist. LOL And from what I have seen of international arbitration, I would be tempted to call it a trend. I am taking a class called "international business transactions," which sounded very interesting to me. Little did I know it would be the worst class I would probably ever take. In fact, the article mentions the growth of LLM programs and how useful they are. Maybe so, but [top law school] has one of the top ranked LLMs and this class I am taking is mostly filled with LLM students and they seem to find the platitudinous and simplistic discussions quite engaging. The LLM program seems to offer none of the rigor of the JD. And the FT article fails to mention that an LLM is in no way as marketable as a JD. Many LLMs from [top school] cannot get hired in the U.S. (although, of course, their degrees are quite useful in other countries).

Perhaps people and companies invest abroad more than they used to, and courts (mostly non-American ones) increasingly turn to decisions in other countries for guidance, and law firms (and possibly law schools) are responding to this. But to me, doing law and business remains country-specific and all the focus on internationalness often distracts and shoves quality down. Of course it helps to have cross-cultural experiences and speak different languages, as it always has. But I really wonder about the value of all this international mania in education.

And now turning to the lawyers (some of them also law professors). Their reactions:

• You'll be happy to know that when chatting with the student at [college] who was calling me for donations, I explained to him that very few people actually practice "International Law". I told him he'd better off getting a job that allowed him to develop his dual focus of economics and near-eastern affairs (already speaks Korean and is learning Chinese) than going straight to law school. Hopefully he'll take the advice to heart. I told him that law schools all offer International Law programs because that's what students want, but he shouldn't use that as a basis for his career.

• No law student should expect ex ante to have a career in int'l law, given how small the field actually is. But it's no wonder, as Anna suggests, that kids still buy into the myth--because schools like hls, nyu, and columbia (along with many lesser ones) have bloated int'l law programs that perpetuate and use this myth to sell themselves. Programmatic emphasis or deemphasis is a critical way in which to educate (or mislead) students. This naïve consumer interest is what justifies having a figleaf of int'l offerings. It's important for the school to be able to say it has *some* offerings in these areas. At the same time, students will in fact be better served if only a small amount of resources are expended in those directions.

• That's a vicious circle - one of the main reasons that the schools pump up those things is that the prospective students want them. When I stand behind a table for admissions fully 80% of the students ask about international law, and more than half of them say that's what they want to "do" after law school. They have no idea what it is. But it's very very important to them. It's quite mind boggling, really. Over half of them say they want to do public interest law, and most of them have no idea what that means either.

• [An aside, from someone who practices election law:] I get asked regularly questions about practicing election law, including "which law school should I go to if I want to practice ...?" I then explain that the number of actual practicioners is probably less than 100.

• [And another aside:] Are these the same people who think "environmental law" means "I heal the planet" versus "I litigate fights between companies as to who pays for it"?

• I don't think the vast majority of them think about "public international" as a category - I think most of them just like the idea of working overseas.

• I regularly give a speech where I explain that it doesn't make sense to pursue a "concentration" in international law (or any other subject). I explain that if three people are standing in front of me, one might be interested in international human rights, one in international business and one in international litigation. The three practice areas would have a relatively small number of relevant courses in common, yet all might be considered "international law," along with a variety of other things. I also explain that one can "practice international law" working in the US or overseas, for a law firm based here or overseas, working for our government or another government, working in the public interest here or there. Invariably, none of the people I'm talking to have ever thought about any of that, and express surprise at the variety of things one might do that could be considered "international law." All many of them know is that they want to live in another country.

• Most of the lawyers who work for "int'l clients" on int'l deals or litigation are actually consulted for their expertise in domestic law. I've done antitrust work on int'l deals. Our work was usually to explain to foreign firms whether US regulators would permit the deal--and then to shepherd the deal through. No int'l law involved--though sometimes int'l travel and clients who in addition to english also spoke japanese or french.

• A not insignificant percentage of them continue to ask about it in interviews for summer associate positions. When I get the question, I inquire what they mean and if they can articulate that they're interested in cross-border M&A and capital markets work, fine. If not, automatic ding.

• I would love to see a firm consolidate all of its major document production efforts in some warehouse in Paris or Rome or Tokyo or Singapore and then let all the 1-3 year associates who want international work go work there. And if we can work out the confidentiality issues, it will be a warehouse in Mumbai.

That's a lot for applicants to digest. If there are people out there who've had different experiences with international law, please leave a comment!

I'll conclude by pointing out my own "international law" experience, for what that's worth. When I was a film finance lawyer out in Los Angeles, every single one of our deals involved money from German investors because of a weird quirk in the German tax code. Every once in a blue moon some German would fly in to sign some papers, but despite the fact that I'm half-German, grew up in Germany, and speak German fluently, I never left the borders of L.A. County for a single one of those deals. Fact is, in the age of emails and PDFs and faxes, I never needed to. Each closing also involved contracts with non-US movie distributors covering just about every country on the globe. I'd review the contracts and make sure they were kosher (because they were collateral for the movie loans), I'd look at the faxed signatures (always faxed -- I never met these people), and then I'd slap those puppies in a closing binder (which also never left L.A. County). And here's the kicker: despite my language skills, nobody wanted to conduct business in anything other than English, which they all spoke flawlessly. People still ooh and aah when they hear the words "entertainment law" or "international law," but there you have it. It was a good job, and international film finance can be fun, but glamorous? Jet-setting? Polyglot? Not so much.

Edited to add: Follow-up posting is here.

Recently I posted my reactions to a new book about Harvard Business School called "Ahead of the Curve," by recent alum Philip Delves Broughton. Philip thought I had misintepreted his reflections in the book, and he was kind enough to elaborate on his experiences as an HBS student and let me pick his brain. Here's our email exchange about the value of an MBA for career changers, the HBS culture, teaching leadership and ethics in the classroom, being a humanities guy in an Excel world, and more:

 

AI: I got the sense from your book -- I think you even say so expressly -- that you weren't terribly clear in your own mind about what you were hoping to do with your MBA before you embarked on business school. It sounds as if you went to business school hoping to take more control over your life, and you assumed you'd be able to work out the specifics of a career change while you were there. That didn't seem to come together as neatly as you had hoped -- by the end of the MBA program, you were still trying to sort out what you wanted to do, and you were finding the job search harder than expected. In hindsight, do you wish you had done more planning or soul-searching before starting business school?

PDB: No, I was pretty clear about why I was going. I needed to be. I left a great job to go to business school. The challenge was remaining clear about it under the kind of peer pressure you find at a business school. I wanted to be able to pursue my own interests while controlling my own P&L. I didn't want an employer. I wanted control over my time. Now this is pretty different from a lot of people at b-school. I didn't want a "career change" so much as more power to decide my own personal and economic fate. It's different. The book is not about my failed job search. It's about my struggle to remain on the path I set out on while pulled in various directions.

AI: I've been somewhat skeptical about the value of business school, even a top business school, for career changers, for some of the reasons you mention in the book, and also because the recruiting schedule starts so relentlessly early that you don't really have any time to navel-gaze about your career once you get there. I'm thinking in particular of the hiring interview you did with the Washington Post (pretty dispiriting), and the following:

"But I was not alone in struggling to change my career. Luis, the Franco-Argentine, complained to me that many people felt HBS failed in its promise to give people a new start. 'They say this is your chance to change industry, but very few are succeeding. You see, the problem is that the path of least resistance is to do banking or consulting. Now, if you wanted to do either of those, you probably could. But if you wanted to get out of them, you really have to fight.... If you don't have experience in an industry, they don't want you, so you end up going back to the industries you do have experience in."

Do you think career changers should go to business school? If yes, what can they do to make their time there, and the job search process, less difficult?

PDB: Career changers need to do a couple of things. The first thing, as you say, is to start thinking early about what you want to change to. Even if you're not sure, you must have a vague idea. Then use every resource - especially alumni - to help you do that. The second thing is to regard your first job out of b-school as a bank shot. You go into one of the standard b-school professions - banking/consulting - in order to drop into the career you want in a couple of years. Lots of people do that successfully. But simply hoping the MBA magic dust will transform you into the dream candidate in the career you're after is delusional. The final thing I'd recommend, is to go to places where people know you already, your home town for example - then your career to that point, plus the MBA, plus trust and familiarity will make a career change easier.

AI: In hindsight, do you think you were naive about the HBS culture (I know I was pretty tough on you in that regard in my initial blog posting), and what HBS would be able to do for your career change? Aside from reading your book, what would you recommend applicants do to educate themselves about whether business school is a good idea for them, and whether a particular school is a good match?

PDB: I wasn't so much naive as ignorant of what HBS would be like. I didn't come from a profession where lots of people went to business school. I wasn't surprised that people were like they were - but given all that we heard from the most successful business people, Buffett/Paulson/Whitman, about work-life balance, I thought people should have taken that stuff more seriously. As I say in my book, I made a lot of very good friends at HBS and admired a lot of my fellow students. Anyone reading the book as a whole - and not just the reviews - will see that. I think the best thing to do to educate yourself is find people who have been to business school and ask them. Also ask people you admire - would I benefit from this? Match only really matters if you're fortunate enough to get into a bunch of schools. Otherwise, you go to the best one you can.

AI: You write about some of the difficulties you had as a humanities guy with no quantitative or business background. How can other humanities or liberal arts types best prepare themselves if they think they want to pursue a management or business education?

PDB: Oh, this is just practice. I hadn't done math since I was 16. I had never opened Excel. You have two years to figure this stuff out, which I did. It's a hassle at first, but short of taking an Excel course before getting on campus, there's not much you can do. You pick it up pretty fast once you're there - but just have to swallow your ego while you're trying to catch up.

AI: HBS says its mission is "to educate leaders who make a difference in the world." In your book, Ben asks, "I wonder why the school can't just admit that its job is teaching people how to run profitable businesses? Why does it even think that leadership is best taught through courses on business? I mean, if it is really leadership they want to teach, why don't they have us taking history or religion courses or spending the weekends with the Marine Corps?" Do you agree? Do you think leadership can be taught in a classroom?

(I do know your thinking process changed, and that you found that valuable: "Despite my frustration at being so far behind my classmates technically and in my basic knowledge of business functions, I knew that my intellectual apparatus had toughened. I saw things in the world that I had not seen before. I looked at facts and numbers a different way" -- but that's arguably different than leadership skills.)

PDB: Yes, leadership can be taught. Not in the sense that you're teaching people how to be Churchills or Roosevelts or Napoleons even. Just in the sense of helping people think about managing organizations. Every CEO we heard from said that people management was the biggest part of their job. And this didn't mean making big speeches. It meant hiring and firing, establishing a culture, setting the right incentives - and there is a large academic component to that, in addition to any personal qualities a leader might have.

AI: You took a somewhat dyspeptic view of the HBS culture, which in parts of the book sounds like a cross between American Pie fraternity antics and some kind of EST/Maoist reeducation camp. Do you think that's unique to HBS vs. other business schools? And was perhaps your age a factor? Your non-American-ness? I got the impression throughout the book that the other non-Americans were similarly nonplussed by those parts of the HBS culture. Thoughts?

PDB: Yes, being older made me look at it differently. I was married with a child - therefore not going out to Boston nightclubs midweek. Yes, I'm British, but I've lived in America since 1998, except for 2.5 years, and my wife is American, and my grandfather, aunt and cousins are American.... so I'm not entirely "not American." Yes, I think the foreigners did find it strange. American college culture is somewhat startling to foreigners. I know it's not unique to HBS. But perhaps the contrast between the seriousness in the classroom and the frat-ishness of much of the social life was more glaring. But again, I think this exists in business culture more broadly - you have companies preaching corporate social responsibility in the morning and then doing quite irresponsible things the rest of the day. Would the more exotic nightlife of Las Vegas exist, one wonders, without business expense accounts? I think people outside business are more sensitive to this hypocrisy.

AI: In your book, your classmates come in for quite a drubbing on the ethics front. I'm thinking in particular of the "financial aid BMWs" and the large proportion of the class (3/4 or thereabouts) who thought it ethically permissible for applicants to seek access to an admissions server that they knew to be unauthorized. There seems to be a big disconnect between the values of Dean Clark and his students. Thoughts on that? And do you think ethics can be taught in the classroom?

PDB: Ethics can certainly be discussed in the classroom - but can the ethics of students in their mid-late 20's actually be changed? Not so sure. I did find the discussions thought-provoking though. I'm not sure I give my classmates a "drubbing" about ethics. I'm in no position to do that! What I do discuss, however, is the contrast between what I describe as the rather excessive - and unrealistic - piety of business ethics as we discussed in class and the reality of how most people, business students included, actually behave. HBS took ethics extremely seriously - and kind of sets itself up to be beaten up when its alumni cause the collapse of Enron, and now have their fingerprints all over the current financial mess.

AI: You write in the start of the book that it was not intended as an "inside raid." I hear that some people at HBS nonetheless took it that way. One could argue that you wanted the upside of the brand and the network, but then violated a tacit compact with the HBS community by writing an exposé. In the book you express a lot of appreciation for the power of the HBS network. Do you think you've compromised the value of that network (to you) because you've written the book? Has there been any other kind of fallout? Am I wrong entirely -- perhaps it has increased the value of your network? Why did you write the book?

PDB: I wrote the book because I thought it would be interesting and useful to do so. And because I was offered an advance by a publisher. I knew elements of my experience were shared by many of my classmates. And I think at both HBS and many big firms, one is expected either to be a 100% booster, or a bitter critic. The truth is one can be ambivalent. I say that HBS was about 80% great and about 20% weird. Most people I know who went there agree. I know some people are upset. That's fine. I don't think I violated any compact. I didn't become a Free Mason when I went there. I attended an educational establishment and paid handsomely to do so. And I wrote a book that is honest and true. For every attack I've received from the school, I've received messages from classmates and other alumni thanking me for being so honest about the experience. So I'm ok with that.

AI: You acknowledge that "the Harvard Business School classroom is a safe learning environment, a place to experiment and make mistakes...." and that's why you cloaked the identities of your classmates. You decided not to do so for professors, because you think that they have a "public role." That's not as clear to me. Don't they experiment and course-correct as well? Aren't they entitled to some expectation of privacy in the classroom?

PDB: No. They are paid extremely well for their work at HBS and earn even more from outside gigs linked to their role as HBS professors. Most professors come off well in the book. I'm only actually critical of one. They can experiment and course-correct, fine, but I was paying the school $100 per class. I think I'm entitled to do what I did with the experience.

AI: How would your wife reflect on your MBA? Is she glad you went? Any advice she would give prospective business school spouses?

PDB: My wife enjoyed it, I think. We met lots of interesting people and I was around a lot when our second son was born. The only challenge was going back to a student life and budget after living like grown-ups for so long. But that was pretty easy, and rather refreshing. Advice? Be prepared for your other half to become a navel-gazing egotist while going through the process.

And a nice bonus for people working on their Round 2 HBS essays right now: Philip also had some advice for people writing the "career vision" essay (optional this year, but in my opinion still highly recommended):

PDB: I don't think HBS wants to hear "I want to make VP at 30 and MD at 35 and partner at 40." They want to hear that you have some sense of where you want to go: do you want to be in finance, do you want to manage a factory, do you want to be entrepreneurial? Or in my case, do you want to take your proven skills in writing, journalism and being a foreign correspondent, add on some business know-how and go write your own pay check - somehow. Anyone applying to business school should be able to come up with something which is consistent with their life and professional ambitions.