{"id":51054,"date":"2021-02-14T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-14T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/?p=51054"},"modified":"2023-10-10T04:16:14","modified_gmt":"2023-10-10T11:16:14","slug":"what-post-mba-life-is-like-during-covid-and-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/what-post-mba-life-is-like-during-covid-and-beyond\/","title":{"rendered":"What Post-MBA Life Is Like, During COVID and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
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Applying the lessons of MBA school to the reality of COVID-19 [Show summary]<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Al Dea, a tech product manager who earned his MBA from UNC,\u00a0dives deep into what life is like after business school<\/a>, including how the pandemic has impacted the post-MBA experience.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

What steps can businesses take to help employees thrive during COVID? How can MBA programs help students thrive during this time? [Show notes]<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Our guest today is a tech product manager, member of the UNC MBA class of 2015, host of the MBASchooled podcast, and author of the book\u00a0MBA Insider: How to Make the Most of Your MBA Experience<\/em>. Al Dea earned his bachelor\u2019s in marketing and theology from Boston College in 2010. He then became a Deloitte analyst and consultant until starting his MBA at\u00a0UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School<\/a>. He earned his MBA from Kenan-Flagler in 2015 and returned to Deloitte for a couple of years, then started in product management for a leading high tech firm in 2017, and today is a senior manager in product marketing at that company. On the side, he launched his website, MBASchooled, in 2015. A year ago, he published his first book,\u00a0MBA Insider: How to Make The Most of Your MBA Experience<\/em>, and started the MBASchooled podcast.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It\u2019s been about a year since he was last on Admissions Straight Talk, and we discussed in that interview his application experience and MBA experience at UNC. We\u2019re not going to cover those topics again, but if you would like to hear Al\u2019s perspective on the topics I typically discuss, check out the original interview,\u00a0MBA Insider Shares His Secrets in New Book<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

How did you adjust to remote work both personally and as a manager working in tech? [2:46]<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I\u2019m someone who works as a knowledge worker and for a tech company. Relatively speaking, we\u2019ve all experienced challenges, but my experience making the transition was rather seamless. Many of the people on my team have worked remotely for varying degrees of time, and in some cases, many are only remote based off of where they are, geographically speaking. It wasn\u2019t so much that we hadn\u2019t done this before; we just all hadn\u2019t done it permanently before. It was really about refining and getting used to this being an everyday thing. That said, even though we did have incredible resources to make the transition, even though we had some kind of norms for knowing how to collaborate over Google Hangouts and Google Meet and the like, it definitely was still challenging. Anytime you get a shock to the system, or you have to make an adjustment, it takes the body a little bit of time to adapt and evolve.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

For me, a couple of things stood out. Number one, the fundamentals in the ways of working. Fundamentals: these are the things that are critical to helping you be at your best and do your job effectively. If you think about a professional athlete, if I think about someone like LeBron James, LeBron James is amazing on the court because of all the things he does off the court in order for him to be at his best. That was something that I took to heart as I made the transition to working more remote and thought about for the folks on my team. What are those fundamentals that, in this new environment, we need to make sure we focus on so that we can do the best we possibly can each and every day? It was going to be different because the environment was different.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The second thing was thinking about the ways of working. These are the kinds of the things that you sometimes take for granted when you\u2019re working in an office every day, the ability to pop over to someone\u2019s desk and say, \u201cHey, what about that thing in that meeting that we talked about? Can you follow up real quick?\u201d Or being able to go to the coffee bar to catch up with someone and have that chat about what\u2019s going on. We paid attention to those as well and thought about how we reenacted those. All of us as humans are social beings, and those are really critical and important. Those were the things that I paid attention to and that I asked my team to pay attention to, to try to do the best we could. Though we\u2019re very fortunate, it still is hard to make a change like that no matter how many resources or how much you have at your disposal.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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As a remote team, it\u2019s challenging to have the kind of casual encounters that make for a good team experience. How did you encourage that? [5:35]<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

We are fortunate in that we have a lot of technology resources at our disposal. (Maybe too many at times; you can make the argument for that.) But it can be little things such as having a channel or a thread on whatever collaboration tool of choice just to talk about what everyone\u2019s watching right now. Or, what\u2019s a book recommendation, or a Netflix recommendation? A couple times on our team, our leader reached out and said, \u201cHey, everyone, take care of yourself today. Go expense a delivery meal of some sort and tell everyone what you ordered.\u201d It can be things like proactively scheduling time just to check in with someone, with no agenda, but just to ask, how are you doing? How are you feeling?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I\u2019m always someone who asks, \u201cHow are you doing?\u201d but during the first couple months of the pandemic, I always made it very clear before I started any meetings to ask someone, \u201cHow are you doing?\u201d Those are little things that may seem trivial, but, I found from my experience, people appreciate them. Also, they give you a little bit of boost. They give you a little bit of that feeling like you are on a team with other people who want to work hard but also care about you and are trying to help you do your best work.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Certainly, we had our virtual happy hours. Our broader organization, at one point, had a virtual Olympics of sorts where we had virtual competitions and a virtual scavenger hunt and things like that. Part of it for me, at least, is just getting people to come together to do something that makes them feel like they\u2019re a valued member of the team. And it could be just something small, like a thread or a chat, or it could be something like a virtual Olympics. Recreating that team environment is hard to do, but when you can do it, it\u2019s better than nothing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

When you\u2019re in a meeting, sometimes there\u2019s a persona that you have to put on to speak articulately, to make points, or to project confidence. But who you are at work and who you are as a person is going to show up in your work life. I\u2019m fortunate that I was able to do that before. I\u2019m on a team that is very inclusive, that is very accepting of others and really encourages people to be their full selves. But there really wasn\u2019t any other way to not do that, given the fact that, as everyone has kind of documented, your work life and your personal life were wedged together. We\u2019re literally working from home and have little ones wandering around, or little creatures running around, or other things happening. I hope that this gave everyone a little bit of a chance to recognize the humanity that exists in all of us, hopefully. I too appreciate the photos of the dogs and the grandkids and anything else. It always brightens up my day.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Do you think your MBA education assisted you in adapting to this new environment? And if so, how? [9:36]<\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Working in a large company like I do, and also working in a role like mine, which is incredibly cross-functional, means when I work on a project, I\u2019m usually never doing it alone. I\u2019m working with a lot of people. It is critical to have good communication and the ability to work well with others and drive towards an outcome. That\u2019s critical when you\u2019re in person. That becomes even more critical when you\u2019re all virtual and all remote. The running joke is that\u00a0business school<\/a>\u00a0is one big cross functional group project because you\u2019re constantly having to do that, whether that\u2019s in a study team, working on an initiative for a club or organization, engaging with other folks at your schools or community. All of those experiences in business school definitely were critical to how I showed up and did that before COVID, but they\u2019re even more critical in COVID, because it was all virtual.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Another thing that was really important was dealing with uncertainty. When you think about the MBA education, you think of something like the case method, or case studies in general. For those who aren\u2019t familiar,\u00a0Harvard Business School<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Darden<\/a>\u00a0are generally the two schools that really rely solely on the case method. Most MBA programs use cases in their classes. Usually in the case, there\u2019s a summary of the situation, and at the end of it, you\u2019re given the task of making a decision of what should happen. In a lot of cases, you\u2019re given some information, but it\u2019s incomplete, and there\u2019s some uncertainty. There isn\u2019t always a clear answer. I think we\u2019ve all had to deal with more uncertainty over the last six to nine months. In business school when you\u2019re taking a stretch project, or when you\u2019re doing something outside your comfort zone, all of those things matter to how you show up. In this COVID world, where we\u2019ve all had to do a lot of things that we probably never thought we would ever have to do before, I think that was really key.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The last thing is empathy. I\u2019ve always had a keen sense of empathy, but you get a greater sense in an MBA environment, I think, when you\u2019re exposed to people of different backgrounds, of diverse walks of life. If you do business school right, it really gets you to be much more thoughtful and curious about where people are coming from and who they are. That notion of empathy, I think, has been really critical and really important, particularly in these times when you can\u2019t always be face to face with someone to see their body language or to know exactly what\u2019s going on, or if you\u2019re working cross-function with people you\u2019ve never met before and you have to try to build relationships. I think those are the couple things that really stand out from my time at\u00a0UNC<\/a>\u00a0and getting an MBA that have been valuable to navigating this past year.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n