Welcome to the MBA baby!

Having now been back at uni for 3 weeks and been subjected to a few too many low-level MBA/NBA gags from my friends in London (“Are you sure you’re tall enough?” etc.), I discovered there are actually a number of convenient parallels I can draw between the NBA and the Cambridge MBA.

I follow basketball as much as the average Brit in that I don’t follow it at all. For some reason though, the Chicago bulls have always held a certain allure. In the ‘90s they were at the top of the game with Scottie Pippen, the colourful Dennis Rodman and the legendary Michael Jordan leading them to 6 NBA Championships. Their profile was also helped by Michael Jordan leading the Looney Tunes to a glorious victory over the Monstars in Space Jam in 1998, ably helped by Bill Murray.

Luckily in January 2015 I had the opportunity to see them live at the United Centre on a work trip to Chicago so I could see what they were all about in real life. I got to watch Derrick Rose and co take down Miami Heat and loved every minute. I still don’t watch basketball, but it lived up to all the expectation I’d built up as a kid.

I felt very much the same about Cambridge. I’d heard a lot about Oxbridge and I knew of Magdalene, Kings & Trinity Colleges from University Challenge. I’d heard about punting and knew some of the Harry Potter films were filmed here. I read the Daily Mail articles on students wearing robes and jumping fully clothed into a river every summer. I knew Newton, Hawking and any scientist worth knowing went to one or the other but I didn’t know that much about how it all worked - it just held a certain allure.

Arriving has been eye-opening and fascinating. The Cambridge Union have already had Bill Gates, Judge Judy and former Aussie PM Kevin Rudd in to talk. The people on my course range from US Navy officers to international triathletes. I’ve met people leading their fields in research. I’ve had candlelit dinners in a college dining hall that looked and felt like Hogwarts. I’ve been trained by professional rugby coaches and played rugby alongside two ex-internationals. I’ve worn a gown and loved every minute doing so. My room overlooks the uni cricket pitch – it’s not the Chicago Bulls, but it’s a decent sporting arena to wake up to each day and it feels very Cambridge.

I’m loathe to fall into clichés and describe it as a whirlwind, but it’s been very intense and I've barely had a minute to myself which has actually been very welcome.

Arriving at my college, Hughes Hall (Hughes is a post-grad college with only a few lively undergrads thankfully) I found my room next to the university’s Director of Research Translation who’s remit covers finding ways to bring technical research in the university to the wider world for use in commerce, government policy or other public use. My first dinner was spent sat with 2 PhD students - one in Computer Science, one in Neuroscience, both studying in their second language.

My brief encounters with all of them made me realise I was in for a year of speaking to people who are vastly more knowledgeable and interesting than I. It also justified my decision to come here. According to the rankings, there are better business schools in Europe, but they don’t have the breadth and history simply because Cambridge is much more than just a business school.

The thing that has hit me hardest was the vast opportunity. Colleges, departments, clubs, societies, research projects, alumni networks and links with businesses appear at every turn. I’m here for an exploratory year but have quickly realised I’m going to have to be very selective about what I choose to explore and what I don’t.

Our first two weeks were induction-heavy: meeting the other 200 MBA students (I'm one of only 10 Brits cross the cohort); meeting faculty; familiarising myself with facilities and the admin of the course. We’re now into the academics and it’s proving challenging and fascinating. There’s a load to learn and a lot of assignments due in November and December so the workload is ramping up quickly.

The course focuses heavily on leadership and management. We’re working through our Business Stats course but, as opposed to just learning the use of regressions and t-scores, we’re forced to focus on their application and the questions we’re trying to answer. Stats can show you whatever you want them to – the big challenge is being able to make sure that the numbers you’re looking at relate closely to the business problem you’re trying to solve. That’s one of the big differences between my undergrad business course and this – we have endless practical examples from our class of the academics in use.

Similarly with our Management course – something I’ve always found can be a bit fluffy – we’re taught frameworks about how to manage teams and projects in every day situations and how we can adapt our management style according to the stage and complexity of projects. For innovation projects, especially where information is more widely dispersed amongst a team, in order to encourage creativity you may want to take a more facilitative approach and allow the team to self-manage more. In simple projects it’s likely that being more directive and delivery-focused is appropriate. It’s not ground-breaking but it’s the sort of thing that you learn and can apply to work situations past. The course helps provide actual experience so you can learn to identify when and how to change styles.

Any economist will have studied game theory but it’s been insightful to then analyse it in practice, looking at Boeing and Airbus over decades and understanding how game theory can be used to predict competitor strategies and therefore direct your own.

We’re still at a high level but it’s moving fast and I’m trying to retain as much as possible while also using it to direct myself down the right career path.

Internship and full-time applications are open already for top-tier banking and consulting firms and some deadlines have already passed so it pays to be fast if they’re your target for post-MBA. Some of the cohort are already applying but many, including me, are taking our time to work it all out first. I’ve sent off a few more speculative bids for internships next summer just in case but I'm here to learn - the job search will come in time.

I’ve also been keeping busy outside the course. I joined the rugby club as soon as I arrived and have already been to Montpellier for a pre-season tour with the LX club (the LX or Sixties are the university second team, the Blues are the first team) learning how to hang out with 20 year olds who still drink snakebite. Arranged through a Cambridge alumni, we had training sessions with ex-England fly half Alex King and another with former Scotland coach Vern Cotter, both of which were awesome. For the rugby fans out there, we had a great session with Vern who spent time teaching us how to carry the ball one-handed to improve our offload game. In 20 years of playing rugby I’ve never been coached to actively try a one-handed offload. It felt like an insight into Southern Hemisphere coaching and how it differs from up here. They were also both happy to hang around after and share some insights into player management, recruitment and the psychology behind elite level rugby which was fascinating. It might not have been Bill Gates but the stories were pretty cool and relatable.

Post-tour I managed to get a call up to the Blues squad and played a match on Monday alongside James Horwill and Flip Van der Merwe, both recently retired international rugby players who are doing the executive MBA and are also aiming to make the Varsity match. That sort of thing feels frankly ridiculous. I watched James Horwill playing for Quins and captaining Australia for years and now I’m playing alongside him so I feel incredibly lucky every time I'm at training. Tomorrow I’m making my first start for the Blues so fingers crossed that goes well and I can stay up there.

There’s a whole load more I could talk about but I hope that’s given you a flavour of what’s happening in my year off work so far. Next up I'm starting a new venture project with a Real Estate/Tech investor in London, essays start, our first college formal dinners come around, University Challenge legend Bobby Seagull is running our trials and I’m going to see if I can make some time to try out rowing. I’ve also joined the Harry Potter society so there should be some interesting things coming up in the next few weeks both academic and non.

So far, it's been great even if I've felt out of my depth at times. That’s when you can draw inspiration from another NBA legend and Space Jam star, Muggsy Bogues. He is one of the NBAs most famous players, not for his ability but because he stands at just 5 foot and 3 inches tall and yet spent the 90s cutting it with the best of them in an industry where the average height was 6 foot 7. He wasn’t the biggest but he made the best of what he had. So, out of place or not, here's to a year of dreaming big.