A Journey to the West: from China to Cambridge and then Stanford GSB - ChaseDream

I am an economist by education and a finance guy bywork. Therefore, isn’t it a bit sad that I was never remembered as such butmostly by all the stories I told?

After I graduated from Stanford Graduate School ofBusiness, a classmate approached me suggesting I put a talk I gave at Stanfordinto an article as he liked it too much. The talk of course was not abouteconomics or finance but my experience navigating through the educationalsystem in China, UK and then US. The experience was a painful one to me but apainfully funny one to my classmates. They loved it and so seemed the generalreaders from the popularity of the article I eventually wrote for the AmericanAffairs journal. It was even mentioned by the site RealClearPolitics althoughit had little politics in it.

But it is OK and I have a big heart. I know I am nevergoing to anywhere close to my hero Warren Buffett anyway: I started compoundingtoo late, unlikely to live as long and my rate of return was too low. The onlyplaces I can match him are the love for Coke, rejection from Harvard BusinessSchool and the desire to be remembered as a teacher. So if I can share myexperience in my education journey rather than in investing or economics, thatworks for me as well.

So here you go, my journey from China to the UK andlater on going west again to California. If you are the few who can learnthings simply by reading others’ mistakes, thanks for reading this and thepleasure is all mine. However, if you, like me, could only learn after makingthe mistakes yourself, I hope you could at least have a similarly amusingexperience. Life offers plenty of challenges and we might as well enjoy them.

As always,Aly was right. The MBA application was very different from the UK universityapplication we went through in A-level. If anything, it was very similar to ajob application. There was no central application and allocation provider likeUCSA and one had to file a separate application to each school she would liketo be considered. Each school asked a ton of questions including one’s detailedacademic background since high school, work experience, financial situation, outsideinterests, significant achievements and future inspiration. One had to submithis resumes plus 2 sets of recommendations from those who worked with. And mostimportantly, there were the two to three open topic essays per school that gaveone the chance to better present oneself in case all the above informationstill could not fully reflect what kind of person one really was. In short, nodetail was spared. Even worse, unlike job application which was free, there wasnow an application fee for each school. What a blessing that I didn’t plan toapply for most of them, so it would only be a part-time job rather than a fulltime one again. Dear UCAS, just to let you know, after all these years, Ifirmly believed you were the best system ever. You made both the lives ofstudents and those admission officers so much simpler. I was so sorry I hadthose naïve complaints back then, I could not be more wrong.

Harvard hadtwo essays questions this year, asking about “something you did well” and “somethingyou wish you had done better” respectively. The first question was veryfamiliar to me as I was asked exactly that during a mock interview with the lateLehman Brothers back in university. Lehman provided the mock interviews forstudents in return for the right to film the interview and use them in itsinternal training. I certainly didn’t disappoint them in that respect, Iprovided an excellent example of an unprepared applicant. When asked thequestion by a senior employee, I paused and thought about it for a couple ofminutes before replying, “I think what I do the best is to think. I think quitea lot.” The gentleman busted into laughter and commented “I can see that, youdo seem to like thinking a lot, even during interviews.”

So thequestion now was what kind of answer HBS was looking for? Becoming thewhat-not-to-do example in one international institution should be more thanenough for me, I would try not to make the same mistake twice. And a quick callto Aly, I found out the correct answers to those two questions: What I did wellshould be I had single-handedly saved the world; and what I wish I had done bewas that while I saved the world, I didn’t managed to save the whole universe,and that was what I was hoping to improve on at HBS. They sounded much betterthan “thinking, but should not be thinking during job interview” indeed, so letme just go with them!

It was onlywhen you tried to save the world that you realized how good Superman, Spiderman,Batman were at their jobs behind the scenes. Under their careful and diligent eyes,the Sun would always rise in the morning and the British Isles never sink intothe Atlantic Ocean. Even the London Bridge, which I would pass twice daily duringmy commute, was never falling down. But the question then was how shall I do somethingworthy for my HBS essays? Please, just give me one chance, I promise I wouldnot let the world blow up.

Stanford’sessay, “What matters most to you and why?” was a lot easier in comparison. Itwas very obvious to me that luck was the most important factor in my life sofar. Not that long ago, I was just one out of 100,000 12-year-old student in mycity in China and my biggest dream was to get into the best local high school. Eventhat was a very long shot as otherwise I would have made it to that desirablemiddle school in the first place. When I did get in, even my own reaction wasthe result must be wrong! Beyond that, I had never thought about even leavingthe city and a place at Cambridge or any UK university for that matter was simplybeyond imagination. After all I not only spoke no English but also thoughteveryone else including Skywalker spoke Chinese. But even if I did somehow havesuch a plan, would I really have any chance against my peers who were raisedwithin UK’s world class school systems since a toddler? Just ask theinternational education agent who sat me through those two UK school entranceexams. Very likely my time record in completing those exams were stillunbroken.

And yet, I madeit to Cambridge and Trinity, the home of Sir Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon andalike. My English level gradually improved from non-existent to bad and bad tojust all right, but it was never anywhere near the best of my peers, the bar, Iimagined, needed to be reached places like Cambridge. But I found UK educationsystem was unique in the sense that it specialized so early that even in highschool one could only study the subjects one likes. Even English, the country’sown language, was not compulsory and therefore my English was not a problem byitself as I simply didn’t need to do it. UK students also had to learn subjectssuch as French or Latin from an early age and I always wondered how on earth Icould even pass on them. But somehow all of them stopped at GCSE and by startingat A level, I simply bypassed them all.

Furthermore,I was also a couch potato who not particularly good at either sports or music,nor did I have any leadership positions ever. If anything, I was the exactopposite of the well-rounded student British education system try to raise. Butthat turned out to be OK as well as Oxbridge didn’t look at any of them duringits admission process. It was the academics and academics only that counted.That half an hour interview I somehow manage to light a bulb outweighed thethousands of hours other students spent on extracurricular activities.

In fact, ifI was to design a system that gave myself all the advantage I could possiblythink of, I probably could not come up with anything better. And more amazingly,the whole thing repeated again at Cambridge: one exam at the end of the threeyears program determined that I would graduate with a first-class honour eventhough both myself and my tutors thought I was going to fail two years out ofthe three. On paper and paper only, I even managed to look quite like Aly, withthe same degree, same result and then working for the same firm. I still didn’tknow how, but the lucky star kept shining over my head, enabling me to make onelong shot after another. Even in the recent GMAT exam, I got a higher score inEnglish than Maths with an overall score way higher than I ever got in themocks.