What's my story?

If you're applying to B-school, you've surely heard talk about honing "your story." When we applied to college, we didn't have to speak much about our future goals. Sure we talked a bit about who we were and the experiences we had in high school, but our professional goals weren't really at play. We weren't expected to have a concrete plan of what we wanted to do post graduation. Applying to b-school is a different beast. Business school is a professional school and you need to give admissions committees a clear idea of what you want to do after you obtain your MBA.

I'm reminded of an epsiode of Living Single. Sinclair (Kadijah's cousin and secretary) asks for more responsibility. When Kadijah asks her what exactly she wants to do, Sinclair whines and says she doesn't know. I'm kind of feeling like Sinclair -- but just kind of. After all, I embarked on this journey after taking some personal inventory. So I have a hazy vision of leaving my current industry and perhaps my current function. When I was brainstorming , I thought about which aspects of my job that I liked and enjoyed the most. In certain ways I work as an internal consultant. I'm not married to just one product team. I conduct market research and pre-launch market seeding campaigns to unearth information about the market for any given editor or to help an editor solve problems with their book list or individual books. It'd be cool, I thought, to do something similar outside of publishing. Then I thought, and thought, and said you know what, that using an external, fresh perspective and approach to solving a problems is what consultants do. I did an informational interview with one of my good friends from college (I believe I've posted about it here) and confirmed that my idea of what she really did was correct. I was fearful, however, of how well I'd be able to convince an admissions committee that I'd be successful in making a transition from publishing to consulting.

That fear led me to other avenues that seemed more predictable for someone with my background. What if I stayed in publishing and wrote about my goal to revolutionize the industry in my essays? This is quite a lofty and original goal. Thinking about your career goals in terms of how good your essays will be is kind of backwards, though, and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to convince an admissions committee that I was passionate about that goal. While my end goal is to leave the industry, I won't pretend that there aren't any aspects about it that I like. I also won't pretend that if I stayed in publishing I couldn't find a niche for myself that would be fulfilling. That said I'm giving some more thought to using my MBA to come back to publishing, but there are other industries and functions that have caught my eye.

One day I was waiting for a friend to pick me up and I wandered into a GAP, and I found another career inspiration there. I love marketing. I really do. I started my publishing career in marketing, and I took my current job because it was a hybrid between marketing and editorial. When I did a stint at Starbucks fresh out of undergrad while looking for a full time job, I used to study the marketing materials that were sent to the store. Starbucks' marketing and branding is totally integrated from the core. There's no element in a Starbucks store that does not serve to communicate Starbucks' benefits to its customers. This is also what I saw at the GAP that day (though they have been suffering in sales as of late). A light bulb went off. Perhaps retail marketing is really where I need to be. I had had a few drinks at happy hour no more than ten minutes prior, so the $5 wine could have been at work.


Then out of no where a few weeks ago, without the aid of $5 wine, my editorial mind resurfaced. While I don't necessarily want to work with books anymore, I do like the idea of cultivating a list of books or products. And that is very similar to what a brand manager would do with a particular brand's products. I went to Wet Fish to research. According to wetfish, here are a Brand Manager's basic duties:

1. Monitoring the competitive landscape of the category in which your brand resides.
2. Developing strategies to exploit market opportunities.
3. Executing those strategies with the help of a cross-functional team.
4. Delivering the sales volume, market share, and profit projections for the business.

Currently, I participate in a process that is responsible for all four of the above.

Now I have four career paths in mind and four career paths I need to explore in more depth. I would like to develop a clear picture of my goals before B-school not only for the sake of my applications, but also for the sake of attaining these goals. I understand that most b-school students wind up veering in a different direction than the one they charted in their applications. I might also fall under that umbrella, but doing personal inventory so I know what I really like to do, what I'm good at doing, and what makes me happy will still be helpful to me no matter which career path I ultimately choose.

Needless to say, pensive cat has some thinking to do....