Should You Do an MBA? Interview With A Stanford MBA Student / Successful Entrepreneur

“Worst comes to worst, you're exactly in the same position that you were and best comes to best, you get into the school of your dreams. And even best of the best, you get into the school of your dreams and you decide that you're still not going because that's not the path that you wanted to go!”

If you've landed on this video, chances are you're considering pursuing an MBA. I'm Angela Guido, the founder of Career Protocol and today I'm going to help you answer that question. If you're new here, this is the Career Protocol Channel where, every Monday, we talk about business school admissions tips and on other days we talk about other cool things. Today is another day. So, we're talking about: Should you get an MBA? It's a question that people grapple with right up until the moment they hit submit. Actually, some people, like our special guest today, struggle with it even up until the moment they arrive on campus. At Career Protocol, we're all about helping our clients discover and share their inspiring stories. So we thought it was high time that we started sharing some inspiring MBA stories on our YouTube channel. Today, I'm talking to you women. Women who are already successful, already have a great life, but are asking yourself, “Is there maybe more that I want for my career?”. And if you're asking yourself that question, it's probably leading you down the road to consider an MBA. Today, I'm joined by an incredibly successful businesswoman and rising Stanford GSB student Daniela Bahamon. Let me let her introduce herself to you.

Daniela: My name is Daniela Bahamon. I’m originally from Colombia. I have been living in Paris for the past ten years and I am an entrepreneur. I launched my company five years ago because I wanted to fulfill a lifelong dream of mine, which was to build a fashion brand. Even though I'm not a designer and I never worked in fashion, I took a leap of faith and tried and I was able to successfully build a business out of this dream that I've been working on day and night for the past four years.

Why Would A Successful Businesswoman Pursue An MBA?

Angela: So you may be thinking, “Daniela, you've already achieved a dream that a lot of people have. You've built your own brand, your own business, and it's conformed exactly to your values, exactly to your esthetics. You've already achieved the end goal of what most people aspire to in their careers. What more could you possibly want? What value could an advanced degree in business possibly hold for you?”. And again, if you're like most women considering business school, that's probably one of the big questions you're asking yourself.

DB: For me, it manifested many of the things that I miss that I want. I miss being with other people. As an entrepreneur, it can be a lonely journey. I miss being inspired and challenged by different points of view. Having worked in fashion for the past four years, you sort of get just the same information all the time. I miss a different attitude, a more positive attitude. I gave myself the chance to explain to others and thus explain to myself why was it that, after successful milestones in whatever it is that you were achieving, you were still looking for something else and something crazy happens? Is that when you start trying to convince someone else? You start realizing “I better agree with what I'm saying, because if I don't, then it won't work and I won't be able to convince.”. And you start looking for these real answers within you. So for me, I realized that I wanted to have a bigger impact. That what I was able to achieve on my own, that I have a desire of transformation that is beyond the product in itself and that I have matured professionally in a way that I can see how the things that used to be very important are not my main motivators today. And if I want to seek those new ones, then that requires – for me – a whole new set of leadership skills. It means also just business confidence overall. It means being exposed to new ideas and the resources, having the opportunity to tap into resources, to test those ideas, to double check, to confront them and then to have the community that will support you into making that happen.

AG: Daniela had a lot of the same reasons that most of our clients have for wanting to pursue an MBA. They're looking for something more, and it's usually more in the realm of impact. It's wanting to be able to help more people through your career, or design more amazing products, or build bigger and more exceptional companies. It's wanting to go far in your career, into a path of leadership that might be less attainable or take a lot longer to arrive at without an MBA. If you follow Daniela's advice, if the MBA is even a possibility on your horizon, your first step is to start progressing down the path. To start considering how does it fit into your life? Which schools might you like to apply to? And then how can you begin actually constructing your career game plan and your rationale for getting an MBA in the first place? And as you go down that path, you'll start to develop clear and compelling reasons for yourself. Even if they're not exactly clear when you start the journey, as Daniela explained, once you get into conversations, it starts to become very clear to you why the MBA is, in fact, the thing that you really want. Once you've even begun down this journey, however, a lot of interesting things are going to happen. What most of our clients discover, even those who are in supportive environments surrounded by at least a couple of MBAs, what they discover is that they encounter resistance from different places in their lives. Even if your parents have always supported you in what you've done and your friends and family, believe in you, applying to business school can sometimes bring out things about you that people have assumed or that they believe are true of you, that that maybe really aren't.

DB: And quite surprisingly, I woke up one day – after the world went into shutdown due to coronavirus, but still – woke up one day and told myself “Remember that idea that you had had deep, deep in your heart, that you wanted to pursue a degree in advanced education, in business, and have that experience and meet all these people and hopefully to some degree and some extent of your capacities change the world for a bit for the better?”. And it seemed absolutely crazy. Not only for me, but for everyone around me because, well, I'm thirty-two years old. So absolutely everyone thinks that – thirty-one turning thirty-two – and everyone thinks that time already went by. And also, most people around you just are comfortable putting you in the box that they see you at that time. So I had had – before being an entrepreneur – I had had a career in multinationals. I was very happy. I worked in perfumes and cosmetics. I was developing new product launches. So my vision of myself is I have had two different lives in my life, professionally, and I can have a third and fourth and a fifth, but it's definitely hard to tell everyone. So I decided that I was going to try it out because what do you lose? And worst comes to worst you're exactly in the same position that you were, and best comes to best you get into the school of your dreams. And even best of the best, you get into the school of your dreams and you decide that you're still not going because that's not the path that you wanted to go.

AG: It's really good advice. In the end, nothing great is accomplished without the courage to dare. And for a lot of women, even initiating the MBA application process takes a ton of courage. You have to break out of preconceptions about yourself. You have to break through the ceiling that you've set for yourself. You have to really see beyond the ceiling that other people have envisioned for you as well. So, for a lot of people applying to business school and, in my experience, especially a lot of women, it feels a bit like an uphill battle every step of the way. Then there's the GMAT, there's the recommendations, the essays, the resume. It's really a lot of work, even just to submit a quality application to one school, never mind multiple schools, as if you hang around on this channel, you know, we really believe in. I could see a million things about how to keep your stamina up and about how to keep going when things are difficult, but I have a feeling that Daniela might put it a little bit better than me.

DB: While I was doing the process of application, I told myself, well, actually, even if I at the end I don't apply, because there is a nerve-wracking moment, it's a nerve-wracking process. You’re six months trying working towards one specific date in which you know that you will be getting an answer. But all of those times in between, I kept seeing what were the milestones that I could achieve of these two weeks, of this one month, of these two months of these three. And for me, it was being able to explore why it was that I have, in my heart of hearts, this inkling, like this gut feeling that that's something that I want to explore.