5 Things I Learned in Business School
No, it’s more than just interpreting financial statements or term sheets
Around this time last year, I just left my full-time job at Impossible Foods in the United States. I went back home to Indonesia for the first time in over 2.5 years and prepared myself for what was to be my biggest change in a while. As I was preparing myself to move to London and acquainting myself with the pre-study materials Imperial College has given its prospective students, one looming question I had in my mind was whether or not I have made the right decision; even more so, I asked myself if this would allow me to be as impactful as I wanted to be — which was the key driving reason why I left my technical-based job in the first place. One year later, as the Master’s program is ending, I had gotten the answers to my original questions. Below are the 5 things I learned over the past year, which I picked up as I was pursuing a degree from Imperial College Business School.
- Flexibility is key in group settings
While working for Impossible Foods, I learned the importance of flexibility when it comes to adjusting your schedule. Although that lesson I picked up still rings true as I bring it through my journey in business school until today, I learned a new meaning for flexibility in the past year. In my MSc Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Management program here in business school, group work was emphasized heavily and for every class that I took, there will always be group work that made up a significant chunk of the class itself.
Throughout the various group projects that I undertook, I was fortunate to work with so many talented and knowledgable people, but who also have their own unique personalities and working styles. This is where I learned a new form of flexibility. Working with so many different people for different projects within the space of a year allowed me to be more understanding and adjust myself to the different working styles of different people. While it was hard for me initially to be as flexible when it comes to working styles, I am glad that I am doing a lot better now!
2. Brainstorming sessions are underrated
One of the reasons why this past year at the business school has been remarkable for me is the people. As someone from a STEM background, I have never been surrounded by as many entrepreneurial-minded people prior to this. Because of that, I was very ecstatic when I found so many like-minded people who are just as passionate, if not more, about entrepreneurship as I am.
Building off the various group projects I mentioned in my previous point, some of my most memorable moments have been brainstorming for an idea or solution for our projects. During these brainstorming sessions, we let our minds wander free and spit out any idea that comes to mind. While most of these ideas would be complete nonsense, it was very surprising how the most unexpected of brilliant ideas we would also come up with. Aside from this, I remembered particularly how a group of friends and I gathered this one afternoon to share some of our business ideas with each other to receive feedback from one another.
Listening to what others had in mind for their business ideas was genuinely interesting and receiving different feedback from them for something you wouldn’t have realized was truly priceless. One thing to add was given how in the past 5 years prior to business school I had only been surrounded by Food Science for the most part, it was an eye-opener to be surrounded by so many people from very diverse backgrounds whose perspectives were very different from mine.
3. Focus on the problem, and worry about the solution later
Prior to business school, I had occasionally thought of some possible business ideas that I’d love to pursue sometime in the future here and there. But when I came to business school, I realized the importance to understand the customers, of putting one’s self into the shoes of the customers. For someone who has been exposed to business or entrepreneurship, this might be common sense, but to me at that time, it made complete sense why so many businesses failed. Of course, there are so many other factors as to why a business may fail, but a majority of those can be traced back to the failure of properly understanding the customers.
In one of my classes in my Master’s program, Design Thinking for Innovation, the professor even required us to think about the problems we wanted to tackle for our group project without thinking about a solution until a few weeks later once we have completed the necessary steps to understand the customers’ pain-points such as using coming up with the customers’ personas and journey mapping. There will always be a solution to a problem, but there may not be necessarily a problem for a so-called solution that you come up with.
4. Lean startups are underrated
When you go on LinkedIn nowadays, you will most likely read some news of some startup raising an insane amount of funding at an even more insane valuation. While I am not against VC fundraising (which is definitely a way to grow exponentially), a lot of startups fail because they are immediately focused on VCs when their business models aren’t necessarily suitable for VC funding. However, this was not the way I thought of this before joining the business school. I remembered that prior to this, my default answer whenever someone asked me how I would fund my startup is “angel investors and VCs”. I learned that even if I were to pursue that route of fundraising through VCs or angel investors, running lean initially would allow me to focus on more important issues such as burn rate or positive cash flow and attain a better negotiating power if the time comes for me to fundraise through VCs or angel investors.
5. Don’t forget to have fun!
In the past few years after graduating from undergraduate, I immediately immersed myself in work and never really focused on making friends. Meeting new people mainly became networking with someone but no necessarily becoming friends with them. Not to mention how Covid made it even harder to meet new people, let alone new friends. Subconsciously, I began making networking my default way to approach someone new, which I carried on when I first started business school. Initially, I came to business school with the intention of networking as much as I can and find ways to see how my classmates would benefit me from a career perspective. It was very funny when I talk to my classmates now how awkward I was in their eyes initially because I was this network-y person in their eyes when all they wanted to do is to make genuine friends!
Alas, in the past year, I certainly did make new connections that would definitely benefit me from a career perspective. But more importantly, these new connections are now also people who I know will be my lifelong friends, who I know I can reach out to 10 or 20 years down the line if I have any questions let it be business or even personal life. Along the way, I re-embraced the fun part of making friends through fun activities we planned together without thinking whether or not these people would benefit me career-wise; which is definitely a privilege given how the world has been in lockdown essentially for the better part of the last 2+ years.
When my Master’s program started just 10 months ago, I did not envision myself meeting so many wonderful people or even for this program to go by so quickly. To answer the questions I had prior to joining the business school, I had definitely made the right decision when I look in hindsight. From the pitching practices to the endless socials, I had managed to see things from a business perspective which is an addition to the perspective of a more technical and scientific perspective I had gained prior to this. While I am still not able to say for certain that I will be more impactful after this, what I am able to say is that I know that I see opportunities arising from various different industries without having to stick to just food science. And for that alone, I am excited for what is next especially now that I know I am done with academia! 🚀
