Closure

Here it is, four years later, and the story I told in this blog seems like a lifetime ago. I never expected to post again, but I was recruiting at Fuqua last year, and a student there told me about this blog he'd read where some guy had a decision to make between Sloan and Fuqua. I was amazed that anyone still read this blog after I left it, and he was amazed that I was "Nick."

So where am I now? Honestly, I'm exactly where I wanted to end up when I wrote this blog. I work in global marketing for a top pharmaceutical company, preparing to launch a new oncology drug. I've completely changed careers from Wall Street to pharmaceutical marketing (and my timing was good there!). I am happy with my job, with where I live, and what I do. I am challenged every day, and after a couple of years in my role, I truly feel like a marketer.

My Duke experience was tremendous as an education, as a chance to make connections with some lifelong friends, and as a two-year break from the ordinary. And that daughter who was about to be born in my then-final post -- I just registered her for kindergarten yesterday!

Do I have any regrets? Not really. I made the right choice for my career goals. I'm sure I would be in a different place had I gone to MIT's BEP, and in all likelihood, as satisfied with the outcome. It was hard to go wrong there, but you have to pick your path in the woods.

That broader brand equity of a school is no small matter. Duke and MIT have very different brands, and for me they represented different paths. When faced with a lack of detailed knowledge about a school's strength in a particular area, people will fall back on the broader knowledge of the school. This is the essence of a brand, and it's what we strive to achieve as marketers every day. But a brand alone should never steer a person into a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt and a completely different career path.

As an aside, Cornell called me later to offer a full scholarship. When I answered the phone, I was in Durham, moving into my new house. It was a bit late, and by that point, I already knew I'd made the right decision.

A few words of advice from having been through the process, and even now that I'm on the other side of the interview table:

• The talented people I've seen were talented before business school. They did well in school, then they continued to be talented people in their future careers. No one is turned into top talent by two years of B-school. Every school has a pool of terrifically talented people, as well as some people that you might not want on your team. In general, the better schools have a better ratio though.
• Rankings and such matter only in the sense that they drive the best people toward a set of schools in the "top" tier. Rankings are valid as a self-fulfilling prophecy, for better or worse. But they are certainly nothing to obsess over. They are incredibly inaccurate, and they mainly represent the biases of their designers.
  
• You need to pick the school that is right for you. Ask yourself two questions. 1) At what schools do the companies I want to work for recruit? 2) At what schools will I be surrounded by a critical mass of people who have similar goals to me?
• When picking a company to work for, consider that it is generally much easier to move from a large company to a small one. You see people move from big pharma to biotechs all the time. The skills you learn in a big corporation are invaluable, and the resume impact of a "name brand" is huge. Going the other direction is swimming upstream. Excluding people pre-business school experience, I can think of only one person I know of who has transitioned from a small biotech to a big pharma company. And it took him about six years. Don't get me wrong you can learn a lot working in a small company where you have broad responsibilities. I know I certainly did. But when it comes to getting a job, the big company experience is a known quantity.
  

So there you have it. For a while there, choosing and getting into the right B-school was my focus. Then once I was in school, choosing and getting an offer from the right company was the focus. Now (and probably for the next thirty or so years), executing on business goals, learning new skills, and growing my career are the focus. This is the main goal, the reason we go to business school. It's been a long time since I sat down with B-school brochures and dreamed of where I would end up someday, and now that I'm here, I have to say that it really did live up to my expectations.