Very tricky situation: telling employer about b-school admit

Hello, dardes999. First off, congratulations on the admit to a top school. Perhaps you could write a debrief, if you have not already, of your GMAT™ experience for others to appreciate. Concerning your specific situation, what comes to my mind is a line from an Emily Dickinson poem that I read long ago:

"Tell all the truth but tell it slant"

That is, be honest, but not too blunt or direct in your honesty. I feel kind of guilty saying that, but in my work experience, being too open and honest has always worked against me. Consider the following from my own life:

1) I was put on an assignment at a university police station to go back through leave records, which for some reason were still being calculated by hand and which had been given to a lieutenant who made more mistakes with said records than accurate calculations. For example, this lieutenant might accidentally give one person's leave time to another because they were a line apart on the printout, which would affect that worker's leave time thereafter. As another example, earned leave of, say, 4 hours and 30 minutes would be entered as 4.30 on the calculator... which of course led to discrepancies over time. (Pun intended.) Anyway, I went back through boxes and boxes of old printouts to fix all the leave times, always taking note of when any problems occurred and working out the correct times instead. Everything was fine until an auditor came in. The police force executives did not want to look incompetent, putting a student worker in charge of fixing all the leave times, and the lieutenant was especially defensive. I pointed out to the auditor that if such-and-such a point were taken as the starting point upon which further calculations would be based, then some members of the force would stand to lose hundreds of hours in leave time that they had actually earned. I had the numbers all worked out, and I wanted to do the right thing. The lieutenant pulled me into a side office and reprimanded me. I quit that same week.

2) I was brought on as a temporary worker at a business while a graduate student, where I worked diligently for more than a year and a half, even winning a city-wide Employee of Month award, but was never asked to work at the business as a regular employee. After a time, I became curious as to why. One of my contacts told me that it was because in the beginning, I had said I was pursuing a degree and did not know what I would end up doing after I had earned it. Thus, in the eyes of the company, I was a great worker who could not be counted on to stay, so I was forever relegated to the temporary zone.

3) I was involved in what could have been a fatal car crash with a tree (a product of black ice, wind, and a road that was winding between mountains)--the car tipped onto its side at the last moment, and the tree harmlessly went into the roof instead of me. Anyway, I was thinking of the big picture a lot more after that experience, and I told my boss that I was planning on leaving his tutoring business, where I had worked for more than three years, after the school year. Everything changed thereafter. He stopped giving me assignments, he asked me to sign a non-compete agreement (one that was way overreaching), and when I went away for a week, he asked me to hand in my key to the facility, not to get it back, supposedly to make "a smooth transition."

You talked about burning bridges. The truth did that for me. It is not that I jeopardized everything at all these companies--the police chief actually asked me to join full-time as office staff, and he tried to lure me in with the promise of free education benefits, and I also left in good graces from the office in 2)--but that telling the full truth never worked to my benefit. I would stress caution in your situation. Your plan sounds fine. Just keep dropping hints now and then: "I think I will prepare for the GMAT™, just in case I need something to fall back on"; "I might want to go to business school down the road"; and so on. Nothing overt, and nothing in depth. Most people will probably not even notice. But in a few months, if your back is against the wall, you can add a couple details. (I would still avoid "spilling the beans," as it were.)

Good luck.

- Andrew