Spring Break
Summer Stories - Raj Ramachandran, Discovering What You Don't Want
Issue date: 9/15/08 Section: News
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When I first met with my career coach, he asked me the ever-present question on the collective RC conscience- "What do you want to do?" After mentioning technology and startups, at the end of my answer, "Venture Capital" slipped out. "Did you say VC? Well, you have something in common with 899 of your classmates!" Aside from his dubiously encouraging remarks, the nature of my career coach's inquisitiveness would soon strike me as peculiar. In fact, almost everyone I ran into my first week of classes- classmates, professors, family, and friends- all would ask me what I wanted to do after HBS. Why didn't anyone ask me what I don't want to do upon graduation?
When I first met with my career coach, he asked me the ever-present question on the collective RC conscience- "What do you want to do?" After mentioning technology and startups, at the end of my answer, "Venture Capital" slipped out. "Did you say VC? Well, you have something in common with 899 of your classmates!" Aside from his dubiously encouraging remarks, the nature of my career coach's inquisitiveness would soon strike me as peculiar. In fact, almost everyone I ran into my first week of classes- classmates, professors, family, and friends- all would ask me what I wanted to do after HBS. Why didn't anyone ask me what I don't want to do upon graduation?
I had come to HBS after a career in investment banking and software development, and like many RCs, the option value of every career path was high. After talking with a number of people at HBS as well as industry, I quickly narrowed my career interests to tech startups and VCs, but had great difficulty deciding between the two. As I struggled to find a way out of this dilemma, a solution finally dawned on me- instead of trying to pick one, why not try to eliminate one? At first this seemed counterintuitive- after all, one should have a reason for doing something other than "I eliminated everything else." This was also very different from how most others framed my career search for me. When I looked at the problem this way, it became very clear that my summer internship was the perfect opportunity to try the option that was inherently more risky- the startup.
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