Harvard is my hump
March 2009: Three hours to go before my interview with the admissions council of Harvard Business School, where I am applying for a two-year MBA. You know those huge rollercoaster drops where some intangible part of you gets left behind in mid-air, while the rest of you falls down? This feels exactly like that, except somehow it’s all happening while I’m sitting tight in a stationary chair. It’s the revenge of the sacred time continuum: we’ve defied it by containing life-altering episodes into 30-minute interviews.
I was 12 when I first stepped onto the Harvard University grounds. I don’t remember much about it, except for this quaint little bookstore that smelled of old print and dusky maps. Like most Asian parents who dream of higher education for their children, my dreams were fixated on a single institution: Harvard. They never really forced us to do it — years of experience have taught my parents a lot about reverse child psychology.
Besides, although there are many things you can force on your children, Harvard isn’t one of them. Since acceptance is based on merit, we have to constantly work hard for it — and the only way for that to happen is if we want it badly enough ourselves. It cannot be a half-hearted, “Oh, we’ll see” kind of goal. It should be a long-term plan, a bright undying star in the changing scheme of things. No matter where the dream came from, you have to own it for yourself with absolute personal conviction. You have to find your own reason to do well on every college exam, to look for a noteworthy profession, to live through each crawling day with the desperate hope of what is to come. You have to convince yourself that it is not impossible for someone of your background and history to make it alongside graduates of Ivy League universities.
On the first day of our first US trip, my parents brought us to Harvard, gently nudging us onto the soft grassy lawn from which beautiful red brick buildings seemed to sprout. Students wore sweaters of a deep crimson shade while throwing Frisbees into the air. This was really the American dream — not the Bermuda grass that always seems to be greener on their side of the world, not the big mansions or luxury cars. The American dream for me is that these students can be anything they want to be. They don’t have to be business majors to find decent jobs or to raise a family. They can be C.S.I. detectives, rocket scientists or marine biologists. When a six-year-old says he wants to draw cartoons for Disney, we don’t gently smile knowing he’ll eventually realize it’s an impossible goal and suggesting he take up a management course instead. He can be exactly what he says he wants to be. I fell in love with that school and its campus where, for the first time in my life, nobody could tell me I wanted the impossible.
I stood there on that sunny day of crimson sweaters that seemed like tiny replicas of crimson buildings. I knew I would come back someday. First I would have to hide all my six-year-old dreams, stuff them in the backseat and pretend I’ve forgotten about them just like everyone else. Then one day I would return and take them out like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat. Now, a decade later, that day has come.
I know, I know: I’ve been told many times. This is not a matter of life and death. Life will go on whether or not I’m admitted — but have you ever reached a point in your life, when you are absolutely certain that there is this one thing you must do? It’s this hump in the road that you just have to pass before things go back to being simple and certain. Well, Harvard is my hump. Of all the roadblocks to have, I somehow managed to pick the one that Barack Obama had chosen for himself.
The application process is grueling for any MBA program, much less for the legendary B-school I wanted. The metrics are entirely different from college where you’re simply scored based on your high school grades. MBA applicants have been out in the “real world” for a while now, and so the application should answer a surprisingly tough question: What have you been doing with your life since finishing school? You then spend at least three months preparing for a computerized exam that automatically becomes harder when you get the first question right (so if you find the 10th question easy, it means you got all the previous questions wrong). You summarize your entire life in 600-word essays: past present future become devoid of adjectives.
The waiting is the hardest part and you are perpetually paranoid: Was my GMAT score high enough? Do I get an interview? Will they call at 2 A.M. because of the timezone difference? The main goal of the process is to test your preparedness: are you absolutely sure that the MBA experience is right for you now, in this particular institution? By the time I submitted my file, the stakes had been dangerously raised: I could no longer imagine doing anything else at this point in my life. What happens if I don’t get in? Every other option will just be because I could not have this one, a constant reminder that I failed at the one big shot I had.
Harvard results came out last April 2, and what do you know? I got in. I got in! Only 900 applicants are admitted out of 10,000 from all over the world: investment bankers, UN diplomats, cancer-curing surgeons — and little old me somehow found my way through. Where does one even begin? You find yourself miraculously getting the one thing you asked for, and more often than not it turns out different from the way you thought it would be. It wouldn’t be as great, or as exciting as you had shaped in your most indulgent delusions.
But what if it is? What if it manages to exceed your wildest thoughts? I now sit in Harvard Yard, leaning against one of the big ancient tree trunks. My feet are freezing from the cold I have yet to get used to, goosebumps running all the way down to my thermal-wrapped thighs. But I don’t care. This is everything I want right now, my transitional place, my shifty ground. There is nowhere else I am meant to be at this very moment.
It’s different now from what it was 10 years ago. My goals are more concrete: what I expect to get out of the experience, the skills I want to achieve and the friendships I hope to build. I know what classes I want to take and which summer internship I’m applying for. Still, amidst all that certainty is the 12-year-old who was not certain of anything, except that this was a place where nothing seemed impossible.
People tell me I will come home after two years and realize that what I’ve been looking for was here all along. They’re probably right — but you need to go somewhere else to understand that. This is the kind of experience that makes you believe (maybe foolishly) you can do absolutely anything in the world — and because of that foolish hope, maybe you really will. For now, at least, I have found my place, my yard, my tree. I will learn, and work, and roam and find.
I remember my interview. They asked me why I insist on writing despite my career in investment banking, an anomaly in this world of perfectly drawn certainties. What I told them is the very reason you are reading this now: I wish to write about possibility. Whether we are meant to find it at home or some 9,000 miles away, there is a world waiting for us, waiting for our courage and our lack of self-restriction. We cannot help but be creators — of books, skyscrapers, wars or dynasties — and the best of who we are can only be found in the hope they leave behind.
We all have our own non-impossibles. And really, what chance did I have against those NASA astronauts and genetic scientists who are dreaming of the exact same thing? Since that crimson day, I’ve kept one single non-impossible against a million bigger impossibles — and I’ve found that we, dear readers, could actually be the stuff that dreams are made of.
