My MBA Blueprint
“Hey, I just got an internship offer in China.”
“What? In China? You know you have to take it right?”
“I guess you’re right…”
It started with an internship
And with those words I set off on an escapade that landed me on the other side of the Earth in Chongqing for my first visit to Asia. Excited and ready to tackle my summer marketing internship, I entered the office on my first day full of ideas. It was a chance to put all the knowledge I’d gained in my cross-cultural communication and marketing courses to work and help a real company generate real value. Young, ambitious and possessed with the overconfidence of an Ivy League college student, I walked directly into the CEO’s office at the end of my first day and laid out my list of changes the company needed to make to sell its software in the US.?
He smiled, and almost let out a bit of a chuckle, “This is why I love Americans… so much ambition. I’ll run this by the development team.”
Mr. Zhang assured me the company would take a look at my suggestions, and then he dropped the news.
“Please prepare English lessons for the team here. You can start tomorrow with the HR team, and the next day with the sales team.”
And that is how I spent the rest of my summer marketing internship. It was lackluster to put it kindly, but Chongqing was enchanting. Evenings after work I’d meander the city practicing my Chinese, trying to read characters on menus and strike up conversations with locals. Each day I’d head to the street markets to try to bargain with the vendors who’d gotten fond of the back and forth with the waiguoren (foreigner) who seemed to come back with one additional word of putonghua (mandarin) each day.
During those three summer months, while I taught English at my marketing internship and practiced my rudimentary Chinese on the streets of Chongqing, China captured my heart. I knew even back then that I would someday return to the Middle Kingdom.
Working for ‘the Mouse’ and Cornell’s Admissions Office
I went back to Cornell that fall to complete the final year of my bachelor’s degree. I landed a pretty good communications planning job (by leveraging a favor from one of my fraternity brothers) at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. It was an amazing experience working for “the Mouse,” and learning from leaders of what was at the time the world’s largest media and communication conglomerate. At Disney, I got the chance to help coordinate communications channels and design campaigns to help the parks retain magic in their language. It was a fun job, one that gave me daily accesses to ride the Rock ’n Rollercoaster two times a day if I wanted. But a part of me felt unfulfilled. I was searching for an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives, a calling which I found unanswered while serving Mickey, Cinderella, and Jack Sparrow. So when an old mentor from Cornell’s Undergraduate Admissions Office sent an email announcing that her role would be opening up as she headed off for graduate school, I jumped at the opportunity.
I must have wowed Cornell’s admissions office for a second time with gossip about the inner workings of Disney and rumors about the coming attractions in the parks. When the laughter had settled, however, I expressed my desire to re-connect with my alma mater, and help the university in its mission be a place where “any person could find instruction in any study.” I joined their Multicultural Recruitment Team, where I had the opportunity to travel the country recruiting students. I also had the opportunity to help the university in its efforts to admit and enroll its incoming classes. Cornell treated me well, I grew as a professional under the tutelage of people I still consider mentors and friends. But eventually I came to a crossroad where I felt that rejecting ninety students out of one hundred didn’t really answer the calling that I had to help people. Thus, on the eve of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and in the midst of the greatest financial crisis of my generation, I left a comfortable role with a clear career trajectory and the promise of a free graduate degree, for the risk of unemployment. If I could go back and smack some sense into the young romantic boy I was back then, I would grab him by the ear and explain the importance of an upward trending career trajectory.
It was a leap of faith which found me unemployed, and then underemployed for a substantial period of time. In hindsight it is easy to critique the decisions I made in those days, but I can also not deny that it was that period of frustration with my career that turned me into an entrepreneur. I sat on my bed one day and pondered how I could turn the insights I had gained during my time at Cornell, China, Disney, and Cornell again into a vocation to answer my calling for social impact. I decided then to become an independent education consultant, leveraging the networks and insights I had built as an admissions officer. I landed a few clients by offering really cheap advice to any parent with a child in high school. Eventually, I came across an email from another friend and my former boss at Cornell who had retired from her role and had started working in the education consulting industry in China. I had never been one to believe in a deterministic world, but that email felt like fate had manifested itself in a job description crafted specifically for me. No one else in 2012 had lived in China, experience in undergraduate admissions, and recently launched themselves as an education consultant. Once again I leveraged my network to become a college consultant in Shanghai; my rudimentary Chinese with a sprinkle of confidence and Chongqing-hua was extremely impressive to my non-Chinese-speaking American interviewer.
To China and the future
In China, I spent a year working as a consultant for the company that brought me to Shanghai before again leveraging my network to meet the three other gentlemen with whom I helped to found Blueprint International, an education consulting and management group helping students and their families connect with educational opportunities abroad. Over the past eight years, Blueprint has been my family and we have grown from a group of four who would meet at Wagas, or in one of our apartments, to a group of 20 educators with offices in Pudong, Hongqiao, and Minhang.
It was during the COVID lockdown when I realised what I wanted as the next step in my life. I wanted to build a bridge, one that would allow me to get back home to New York after a decade in China, but would also not have me saying goodbye to Shanghai, the city which I now also considered my home. I also contemplated how much I had deferred my dreams of obtaining an MBA, so I picked up a Manhattan Prep Book and spent the next few months dedicating myself to six to seven hours of GMAT prep per day for the next few months. Once I had the score, I became my own client and dove head first into MBA applications. The answers came really easily to me since I had a really clear goal of what I wanted for myself; to bridge my two homes by opening Blueprint’s offices in New York, providing education consulting services to students interested in educational opportunities in the US and Europe. This time I also hoped to help my fellow New Yorkers learn about the amazing and under-utilised educational opportunities for international students in China.
Thus far, 中国一级片 has been an amazing yet challenging journey. I still pop into the office at Blueprint, but as a partner I have great flexibility with my schedule, so after classes every day I head to the office to meet students. I entered 中国一级片 resolute with what I want to get out of my MBA journey, but every day I come across really enticing opportunities. I am taking this period of my life to learn as much as I can, make as many friends as possible, and continue crafting my strategy to build Blueprint’s offices in New York.
?
