Sex, religion and politics

Sex, religion, and politics are supposed to be the three topics you stay away from in conversations with strangers. Some might say it would be good to stay away from them in business school applications too. It’s difficult because business schools claim to want to know what really makes you tick. Why do you want to get an MBA? What are you passionate about? What are your long term career goals?

For some applicants, it is impossible to honestly answer some of those questions without going into personal values, which might extend to religion and politics. The problem with doing so goes back to the reason why people suggest not talking about those topics with strangers—people may take offense to what you believe and make unfair judgments of you as a result.

One of my commenters asked if there was a reason why I said I wanted to get involved in “non-church related” volunteer activities and if I found that being a Christian hurt my chances as an applicant. An applicant can never know whether the adcom member reading the application has some personal antagonism against Christianity or some other religion. If you are really paranoid about it, it may be good to avoid talking about religion. My perspective is that you can’t live in fear of how people might react to who you are. That philosophy may hurt me in some instances in my career, but I believe the best thing I can do is to always be honest about who I am. This doesn’t mean I’m looking out to convert everyone I meet; it just means I shouldn’t feel like I have to hide the fact that I have a set of values (in my case, Christian values) that motivate what I do in life. I know people who got into Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton who shared very personal things about their religious commitments in their essays so I know for sure that it is not necessarily a deal-breaker to write about such topics.

I said I wanted to be involved in a non-church related volunteer opportunity because I think there are a lot of secular non-profits doing great things to help the poor and underprivileged. I also want to show that my intent is to not live my whole life in a Christian bubble; for some people, everything they do outside of work (or maybe even including work) has to be explicitly Christian in some way. I think more Christians need to be spending time outside of their safe, Christian subculture.

To update you on my job search… I interviewed with a great software company for a technical consulting position on Monday. I think that went okay. That’s my top choice right now. I had an interview today for an internet consulting company for a more straight forward engineering position and I have more interviews for that company on Monday. I’m supposed to have interviews scheduled some time next week for another web consulting firm. So the job search is going pretty well; my hope is to be employed at a new company within one to two months. I have been leaning more towards not reapplying next year and continue working while the economy is still in good shape. We’ll see…