Never Settling for Less...

This is a story one of my college friends tweeted about recalling a recent conversation with his uncle…Very inspiring!!

My uncle is COO of Honeywell and he described his MBA pursuit to me over Christmas. I gotta tell you this story.  My uncle graduated from Tuskegee University with a Chemical Engineering degree and started work at Procter & Gamble. Sound familiar?  He worked there for 2 years and decided he wanted to go more to the business side of things. They weren’t presenting that option at P&G then he talked about going to get his MBA with a colleague and she told him she got into Duke. He figured he’s smarter than her so he’d do better He researched to figure out which MBA programs were the best in the US. He ended up applying to Harvard, Stanford and another I cant remember.  He got into Stanford and the other one and felt like he was good. Then he heard that Harvard wanted to interview him. He figured why not.  He went into the interview arrogant, basically telling them he got into 2 other top schools already so if you want me fine, if not whatever. He got in. So after heavy debate and pushing from others he chose Harvard instead and went into a big surprise. He found it much harder than undergrad.  He found that they didnt have a GPA system, it was a scale of 1, 2, and 3. 1 was top 10%, 3 was bottom 10%, and 2 was the middle.  And he soon found out that freshman year, everyone with 3’s was out the program.  so if you got a 95% but the rest of the class got a 96% or higher, you were in a semesters worth of debt with no job to pay it off with so going into this prep world with a bunch of rich kids he had to find a way to attend parties, make friends, and play the role. Everybody that didnt get out there and mingle got ostracized in classes and debates, lost confidence, and eventually failed.   But after he passed that semester it was smooth sailing. No more trying to prove himself, after that it was making it through.

                                                                          -Kevin Germain