Reflections on My First Semester at Harvard Business School (Fall 2020)

15 min readMay 28, 2021

Now that I’m in the midst of our six-week interlude between semesters, I’ve had a chance to reflect on this indelible first year of our new decade. I wanted to share an update of my experience so far, and some reflections after my first semester.

This year has been a tale of two relatives: it is sad to miss out on business school activities we ordinarily would have experienced such as Oktoberfest or our Winter Gala, but incredibly rewarding to forge new relationships, in-person experiences, and learnings during a pandemic. For me, the anchoring element through this all has been finally living with Supriya in our Harvard University apartment and getting to explore a new city together.

It all started on March 31st. I had been home with my parents for a few days, after my planned move from NYC to meet Supriya in Buenos Aires was scratched due to the pandemic. At 9am PT, I logged into the admissions portal from my bed. After seeing “the answer is YES!”, I walked outside where I told my mom who was working in the den next to my room. She shrieked so loud that when I made it downstairs my dad assumed there was a mouse in the house. Shortly after, our Director of Admissions Chad Losee called me to congratulate me and remind me to thank my parents.

From there, a lot changed in the world, and HBS did a phenomenal job adapting. They changed the class structure (admitting 730 students rather than the typical 930), safely reopened and effectively operated a small city (providing each of us at-home covid tests 3x/week), and created arguably the most innovative educational experience during covid (check out our hybrid classes). Socially, getting to know our class via many small group interactions as opposed to large events also worked well. And throughout, it was cool to see how similar the co-located Zoom class structure was to what we were building at MissionU.

Of course, the semester hasn’t been all roses. While I was eager to explore anti-racism, the election, and the pandemic in the HBS setting, these topics take a large emotional toll and can at times be more divisive than productive. There was something anticlimactic about finishing finals and spending the night in just watching The Departed as we quarantined before heading home for the holidays. And most of all, I caught covid; while the symptoms were not all that bad, it precluded us from spending Thanksgiving with family and I have still not regained my sense of smell after 7 weeks.

One skill HBS has pushed us to cultivate is the ability to distill generalizable insights. At the end of a case, our professors wanted us to walk away not with “what would we have done if we were the protagonist,” but instead “how will I manage differently based on what I learned in this case.” Professor Joly pushed us on this the most, constantly encouraging us to put the “icing on the case,” along with his many other quotable phrases. As such, I figured I’d share some of my generalizable insights coming out of my first 18 weeks in Boston. I’ve included one that was inspired from each of our five required first-semester classes along with a related story from my experience so far.

An individual entity can be much more valuable as part of a whole

FIN was a great class to have over Zoom since our professor could build models in front of us while we were updating our own models on a second monitor. We also covered a whole semester’s worth of my undergrad Haas course in the first third of our semester, and then were onto portfolio theory and the CAPM model. One of my favorite cases in this latter part was on Massachusetts General Hospital (though HBS ensures the cases are weighted across industry and region, there’s a slight bias toward Boston companies).

One key concept we covered was the difference between idiosyncratic risk (specific to a firm) and systematic risk (impacts all firms in a portfolio). To a diversified investor, idiosyncratic risk can be diversified away by including enough uncorrelated firms in a portfolio, so all that matters when valuing companies is systematic risk (a firm’s beta).

However, the individual firm must consider both the idiosyncratic and systematic risk when evaluating new projects, implying a higher discount rate and therefore lower valuation when assessing the present value of their future cash flows. This creates a discrepancy where a diversified investor will value a firm more highly than a firm’s own management might. Since there are many diversified investors, these individual firms are able to capture most of the delta in value when selling ownership. The effect has been greater risk-taking and innovation, in this case encouraging more early-stage biomedical research.

This concept feels similar to the value of the case method, a core pedagogical approach that differentiates HBS (and also the method I used when creating my class Navigating a Complex World at MissionU). Instead of the learning coming from a professor lecturing, the learning comes from the professor orchestrating a discussion that captures our collective perspectives and experiences. As such HBS structures each class — and each of the ten Sections within a class (go Section E!) — to have a diverse portfolio of students.

Coming into school, I was very eager to share my experience across a range of company stages, roles, and industries, but I was not expecting the opportunity I would ultimately have to broaden my Section’s perspective. One of our Marketing cases was written about the exact project one of my Bain case teams worked on — a third of the case was on the workstream I led several years ago! As such, Professor Joly saved the last ten minutes of class for me to put the icing on the case (a big deal, since we generally get to speak about a minute every two classes).

Getting to share the takeaways from six months of work to a class that had spent about two hours thinking about this problem was one of the highlights of my class experience so far. But this was not unique to me; it felt like once a week we had a classmate in a similar position that was able to share the perspective of months of work on the exact problem we were addressing. In these moments, we all felt like we were doing our part, creating more value as part of our diversified whole than any individual could by themselves.

Continue pushing even when results do not feel proportional to your effort

Our Professor for LEAD skipped 30 under 30 and went straight to 40 under 40 (despite amazingly only being 29!). While I found it to be a miss that the only required leadership course did not emphasize much on interpersonal skills, it did hammer home an HBS principle of diagnosing a problem and developing an action plan. One of my favorite cases was on the company Rakuten, a tech conglomerate based in Tokyo. The Founder & CEO, Mikitani decided that to remain competitive in a global marketplace Rakuten should change the default language in the company to English, which was meant to support global collaboration and acquisitions. His 7,100 employees, only 10% of which could speak English, had two years to adapt.

Relative to other courses, LEAD really went all in on frameworks. Most of the time these were unnecessary, however I did enjoy the one used in this class (Exhibit 1). The idea was that for majority of an initiative, the perceived results are much less than the effort exerted. The role of the leader is to continue to build the buy-in and capabilities of their employees even through this effort-results gap.

This resonated with me as I had just experienced this phenomenon as the Ed(ucation)-Rep (along with my Co-Ed Rep, Richard) for our Section. In our role, we are responsible for working with our Section-mates and Professors to maximize our educational experience. I was especially excited about this since I knew I’d be able to leverage my experience teaching over Zoom at MissionU, and since this position would be all the more important with so many changes this year.

One class experience that changed with Zoom was how we raise our hands to speak, which is important when participation is 40% of your grade. In a normal classroom, you’d raise your hand in a way that we’ve been doing our whole lives. Over Zoom, there is a hand-raising button that you click and a sidebar that populates all the raised hands. Quickly, we recognized some downsides to this: it was easy to forget your hand was raised leading to more stale comments when Professors called on you, and it seemed disrespectful when several hands were raised as an individual was speaking.

This was the exact type of case that I was eager to tackle in the Ed-Rep position. First, we needed to decide whether we should even have a Section norm where everyone lowers their Zoom hands when someone was chosen to speak or leave as is. There was general consensus amongst our Section that a new norm was the best approach, with some hesitancy that it might diminish how much we were listening to a comment if individuals were just waiting for a comment to be over so they could be the first to raise their hand.

We decided to ask the Section to consent to this new norm, so we could at least experience how this worked in practice and have the option of either approach. This proved far more difficult to implement than we were expecting. First, we were implementing this change after a month of classes, so old habits had formed. Next, there was a clear advantage to not following this norm, since leaving a hand up made a student more likely to be called on by a Professor. Once some students saw others taking advantage of this (oftentimes unintentionally), they too decided to “play the game.” This norm would only work if the whole Section was bought in.

We continued to reiterate the norm to the Section, confirmed that the vast majority of the Section was in favor trialing this new change, spoke individually with the offending students, had our Section President champion this alongside us, and worked with Professors to not simply call on students whose hands were up first. Despite all these efforts, after a couple weeks, Richard and I continued to receive multiple messages after each class expressing discontent that the new norm not working. We felt ready to give up. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, it just clicked. We’re not entirely sure what happened, but one class everything fell in place, and for the remainder of the semester, our Section benefited from this new norm.

It felt like we had lived the effort-results 2x2. In this case, we succeeded in making it to the upper-right, but this also feels especially pertinent to me since I am not always the best at follow-through, particularly in creative endeavors. I think back to Safe Spots or Zombie House from this summer, where after investing hundreds of hours across the two, I have nothing to show for either (though I can’t complain with how we spent our Month in Hood).

Counterintuitively, success and opportunity can cause you to stray from your true north

Marketing was a fun class, largely since it was more concerned with how CEO’s think about growth than the role of the CMO, and since we got to take it with the legendary Hubert Joly, the type of Professor that you come to HBS for. He humanized what management means, taught us to lead a company from the head and the heart, and was invested in helping each one of us achieve our dreams (in 8-person “tea chats” he hosted to get to know us, he actually asked each of us to profess our dream).

One of our cases touched on an interesting dynamic that many growing companies face: in chasing opportunities for growth, companies lose strong product-market fit with their initial segments of customers. In the case of Starbucks in 2007, they had grown substantially since their 1992 IPO, but had also got caught in the middle of serving two distinct segments: those who wanted a premium roast, and those that wanted convenience. They began to lose to smaller craft stores on one end of the spectrum, and to fast-food chains like McDonalds on the other end. When this happens, it’s often because companies lose touch with their noble purpose (for Starbucks, creating the third place).

This case felt similar to the one actual task we have while in business school: finding a job. I came into HBS with a decently clear vision: I wanted a full-time role managing a team in the media or hospitality space, and an internship that sets me up for this ideally somewhere internationally. On the day before my birthday, I got to sit in on one of HBS’s most popular classes, BEMS, where the soon-to-be newsworthy Jason Kilar encouraged us to pursue whatever we are naturally curious in. This advice did not come in a vacuum; earlier this week Maurice Levy and Angela Ahrendts both stated something similar: they had never aspired for the CEO role, but they were lifted up by others into it. For me, I distilled my goal as producing shared experiences that broaden perspective and bring us closer together.

Of course, HBS falls squarely into one of those experiences. As such, I’ve found myself getting quite involved with the HBS administration this semester. I’ve taken roles as a Health & Safety Rep (since this felt like a way to exercise my interest in operations and strong perspective on covid-safety from Safe Spots), Ed-Rep, and the marketer for the HBS Show. Part of the reason I was excited to attend HBS this year was for the opportunity to get more of a glimpse into HBS administration decision-making when there is so much change. Through these, I’ve learned that it’s a delicate balance between delivering an experience and getting customer input (especially when your customer is also your product), and that a well-designed environment fosters serendipity. I hope that when I’m graduating in 18 months, I have stayed true to my north star.

Bad news needs to travel at least as fast as good news; ensure you have your Andon Cord

Probably my favorite course of the semester was TOM (Technology & Operations Management), where we were taught by the course head Mike Toffel. Some of the most storied HBS cases come from this class. Take our cranberry case for instance. It’s been around since ’74, RCs (first years) know that it’s a big case, and lore has it that Jamie Dimon was one of the only students to crack it, spending the first 15 minutes of the class walking through the answer. To me, it was a good reminder that not all problems can be solved in Excel, and sometimes you just need some old-fashioned pen and paper.

Another legendary case on Toyota. The context is there was a manufacturing defect in their first US factory, located in Kentucky. They are determined to solve the problem using principles of the famed Toyota Production System, TPS. One of these is the idea of an Andon Cord. The word Andon comes from the Japanese word for lantern, and the idea is to illuminate issues. This physical cord hangs above all the workstations on the manufacturing line. Anytime there is an issue, the worker pulls the cord and lights start flashing and music starts blaring. The whole line stops, and nothing resumes until the problem is fixed. At first this slows productivity since the line is constantly stopping, but over time, having this physical mechanism and culture of seeking improvement leads to better outcomes.

As I thought about how I would manage differently with these learnings, I recognized having a mechanism and culture where mistakes could be called out is critical to a continually improving team. This was especially important for me since I am absolutely uniquely terrible at delivering bad news. However shortly after reading this case, I was tested on a team I was part of at HBS, TCB Productions (for Tim, Cam, and Brian).

Our team was formed to organize some backyard sports of our Section, such as Ultimate Frisbee, Capture the Flag, and for when we return, a structured snowball fight. Part of the draw each morning was delicious morning treats. For the first one, Supriya volunteered (or more accurately, was volunteered by me) to make fresh bagels. But when we awoke the morning of, our dough that we had set out the night before had not rose. We (and by we, I mean Supriya) attempted to salvage the situation, adding instant yeast and putting it into the oven. Things did not look good.

And then I did it. I pulled the Andon Cord. Even though it was such a simple thing to do, it was so hard. I texted Tim and Cam to tell them fresh bagels did not seem likely. Fortune had it that Tim was just passing a Dunkin and was able to grab bagels. And in the serendipity fueled environment that is HBS, one of our classmates Chris also brought a whole box of donuts from Blackbird. We fueled up with sugary morning treats and then burned it off as we realized we were all very much out of shape playing frisbee. All was good, thanks to our Andon Cord.

Even with a shared mission, it’s still not always easy to align incentives

In FRC (financial reporting & controls, aka accounting), we spanned my two undergrad accounting courses in about two-thirds of one semester, and then dove into governance and controls for the remaining third. Throughout the semester we had several cases explaining concepts through Tesla, which was fitting given its stock run this year. One of these cases was on Elon Musk’s compensation package. In a basic sense, Elon would only get paid if Tesla achieved wildly ambitious milestones, but if they did achieve them, he would get paid handsomely. To me, I was fully behind this compensation package (even without being the biggest Elon fan) since incentives seemed to be largely aligned. Surprisingly, this case (which I’ve attached at the bottom) split the class, a hallmark of a great question.

One area I’ve been involved with HBS has been supporting as a Health & Safety Rep. This is largely new territory for HBS, setting policies (beyond what is required by the city or state) around the length of quarantines when returning to campus, the number of students that can congregate in one setting or travel together, and the types of behaviors required on campus. It’s been a rewarding role proactively identifying grey areas in existing practices and representing the voice of the student body.

One issue where we constantly feel at odds is managing social gatherings. At a high level, incentives should be aligned: we all want a safe, transformative experience. However, the school biases toward preventing cases on campus whereas students are willing to accept more risk since we want to make the most of the two-years and are in a relatively low-risk population. The current policy limits social gatherings to 10 (6 when traveling), but even when these guidelines are followed, individual students could still see many different groups of 10 in a single day, leading to situations where individuals had 30+ primary contacts during contact tracing. Currently the school is exploring the use of pods (a confined group of 10 that you see throughout the week), but these are not likely to get student buy-in. If you have any thoughts or tips on how we can best structure policy / incentives, please send them my way!

The next time I share an end-of-semester update, I’m sure the skill I will be working on is brevity, but I hoped this shed some more light on what $50K/semester gets you. For all the “insights” so far, I’ve probably been left with more questions. Some top-of-mind questions are the relationship I want to have with work (since joining HBS I’ve ironically found myself less attracted to C-Suite roles), how to balance discipline with responsiveness (I already hear Professor Joly encouraging me to turn this “or” into an “and”), and finding practices that support mental health (for starters, this will come from reducing the 80+ hours per week I spend in front of my laptop during school).

Exhibit 1: Efforts-Results Framework