Suhail Abidi, Stanford GSB MBA 2013

What would you do if you had to pay absolutely nothing to do your MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB)? Suhail Abidi, a Stanford MBA 2013 from Lucknow, who joined with a full waiver of tuition and expenses due to the Stanford Reliance Dhirubhai MBA Fellowship chose to study a course in computer programming at the Stanford engineering school instead of doing a summer internship so that he could communicate with coders better at the startup that he plans to found after graduating. He talks to PaGaLGuY about his experience.

———

What is your background, why MBA and how did you land up at Stanford GSB?

I am a chemical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. After engineering, I joined PricewaterhouseCoopers and stayed there for four years. I then had some failed attempts with a couple of startups for less than a year. I had applied to Stanford GSB meanwhile where I got an admit and landed up here.

I had always thought I would study an MBA sometime after engineering. In fact, I had joined one of the good institutes in the country, the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow right after graduation. But after reaching there, I found that I was as clueless as I was when I had joined IIT Kanpur. So I quit it after a week. IIM Lucknow was near my house and my family stayed close by. But I was so confused and there were so many intelligent people around me who knew what they wanted to do. I was just feeling out of place there and I left it. Then, after two years, I was about to join IIM Calcutta after making it through the CAT for the second time, but didn’t as I was still confused.

But after working for four years at PwC, I understood myself better and realised what kind of skills I had missing in me. One, I had no idea how technology products were built even though I was working as an IT consultant for PwC on good government projects. I had had no exposure to the private sector where the real work was happening. Thereafter, working in a startup made me realise that there was a lot I needed to learn before I could actually run a company on my own. I had no idea about leading people, product design, product marketing, product entry or even basic financial modelling. I thought this was the right time for me to go for an MBA because after the startups I knew what I wanted to learn.

During this time, I came to know about the Stanford Reliance scholarship and I applied for it. They help you take the GMAT and also help your Stanford application financially. You write an essay as to why they should select you. They shortlist the top 50 finalists and pay for their GMAT and Stanford application fee if you apply in the first round of admissions. That took away a lot of friction I was facing in taking the GMAT and also in applying. They were already paying for both. I know this is not the best reason to apply but it was one of the catalysts.

Did you apply to other schools?

No. I started with Stanford and fell in love with the application. The first question in the application was, “What matters most to you and why.” It took me more than a month to answer it.

So what matters to you the most?

Creating opportunities for others and providing them with the awareness and the resources to avail these opportunities. That’s what drives me. There’s a lot more to it but in a nutshell, this is what it is. I applied to Stanford and fell in love with my essays. I then showed them to one of my friends and he helped me improve them. I had no time to apply anywhere else, nor did I feel the need. I was so much into the Stanford application writing process that I felt already connected to the school and I wasn’t ready to go anywhere else. I felt that this was the place for me. I told myself that even if they didn’t take me this time, I will apply next year.

So then you got through and realised it was going to be a free ride for you due to the Reliance scholarship.

The admissions director Derrick Bolton calls people up if they make it to the MBA class. I didn’t get a call till the evening and I was really sad about it because everyone else in my circle was getting calls. The number I had given on the application was not functional any more. So I called up my friend and we both went to the Vodafone store and reactivated the number. I then got a call, “You have been selected for the Stanford GSB 2013 MBA batch and you’re a Reliance finalist.”

I was so happy that I didn’t even think about the implications of being a Reliance finalist. After a day or two, I got a mail from Stanford GSB explaining that all my expenses would be taken care of.

Knowing that you wouldn’t have to pay for the school yourself, how did you think your MBA experience was going to be?

I didn’t really analyse this. I was never in a position where I had been selected for Stanford without a scholarship. So that was not a consideration. But over time, it has affected me. For example, I didn’t do a summer internship after my first year. I instead registered at the engineering school at Stanford for the summer quarter because I wanted to learn how to code. I think without a scholarship, I might not have done this. I would’ve taken an internship for the money. It has taken the pressure off me in a limited way. It is positive. It’s not bad to have a scholarship.

Has the comfort of the scholarship led you to take any risky decisions that your batchmates wouldn’t take?

I don’t think that the people here feel a lot of pressure of paying back the loan. GSB gives a lot of financial aid to students who actually need it. The payment terms are not that difficult and people know that they have a safety net, that with a Stanford degree they will always land up a job. Paying back the loan is not their biggest concern. I don’t think anyone decides which courses or activities they will take up thinking they have a loan to repay.

A lot of people here come from private equity and investment banking backgrounds. I don’t think the loan affects them at all. In my case, I ended up paying a lot of money for that Stanford engineering school course instead of earning a lot of money from a summer internship.

At Stanford GSB, MBA students don’t pay for what they do during the summer quarter as such, as they are all interning for those two months. When I told them that I wanted to join a course at the engineering school, they didn’t even know how they would charge me… whether it will be the engineering school fee or the GSB fee. Nobody from GSB had done anything like this before with the engineering school. In the end, it all worked out and I paid the GSB fee.

Were there other students who took courses elsewhere?

People at the student office told me that it has not been done before. That’s why they were confused about how to bill me for the summer quarter. I still haven’t figured out how exactly they have billed me.

What was your summer school experience like?

It was a typical undergraduate engineering school structure with basic programming courses. CS145 is the code name for the class for Introduction to Databases. Anyone can take the class. There were engineering school students, both undergraduate and graduate, mostly from computer science backgrounds but some from electrical as well.

I joined engineering summer school because I wanted to learn to code. Being an IT consultant previously, I had to talk to techies all the time and when they talk back, you don’t understand them well and that’s a little embarrassing. Even in my brief startup experience, the same thing happened. I would talk to the tech person and he would come back to me saying this is what he can do and this is what he cannot do, and why. If you’re not able to understand why, it’s a little difficult given that I wanted to work in technology. Some basic knowledge of computer programming is essential. You might not be the best coder but you should be able to talk to people who code for you. So I took the most basic programming courses, front-end technologies and Javascript and worked on HTML, Javascript, C, SQL and a bit of PHP.

You could have learned basic programming skills through books. Why invest two months in a classroom for it?

You have a point. But given that all these resources were available to me before I took up the class, the truth is that I wasn’t able to do it. It’s like asking why one should go to school when everything is available online.

In a classroom, the learning is exponentially different. Besides, Stanford professors are the best technology faculty in the world. They are the best at their conceptual understanding and teaching that to people. I was sitting in a class with so many intelligent people and working on well-designed deadlines for different projects, grasping each concept one-by-one in a scientifically designed manner, by the best people who are always there to help you.

If you’re stuck, one bug in a program can take hours and hours to solve. Here you have 24-hour support on the internal forums from professors, teaching assistants and classmates. I guess this is a very different learning environment. But then, this sort of class structure is the key reason I know computer programming today.

What do you plan to do after your MBA and how did Stanford prepare you for it?

I’m working on an idea and I plan to do something of my own (he explained his idea in detail but didn’t want it to be written about). Let’s see how things shape up. I will probably stay in the consumer tech industry. For that, I took up courses in Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital, Angel Investing and Venture Capital, Formation of New Ventures, Strategic Management of Technology and some of the Strategy courses.

If somebody wanted to be an entrepreneur, which course should he or she definitely take up at Stanford GSB?

There are a couple of courses. I bid for them but I couldn’t get all of them. One of them is Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital. It teaches a lot and you get to interact with people who’ve built big businesses and done well with them. Peter Wendell (founder and a managing director, Sierra Ventures) teaches the course along with Eric Schmidt (Chairman, Google Inc).

You have to bid for them and there’s a lucky draw and in a random order, people are allotted the courses they asked for. You might or might not get your favourite course.

Which clubs did you join at GSB?

I’m the president of the Gift Committee, which is a committee for students for giving back to GSB. When you graduate, you pledge some money that you will give back to the school over a period of four years. The Gift Committee coordinates that and at the time of graduation, we provide a cheque of the money collected from our alumni to the dean. I am also the president of the SASA (South Asian Student Association) and I was member of the senate. I was also a part of the Tech and Entrepreneurship Club and the Private Equity club.

The tech club organises a lot of BBLs (“brown bag lunches”). Speakers come and talk about what they are doing while students have lunch in brown bags, hence the name. The entrepreneurship club also has a lot of BBLs.