How I Got Into Business School, Part 2

Having told Richard the story of how I blundered into advertising, he next asked me this:

Richard: "We don't get a lot of applicants from the advertising industry. Tell me, what made you decide you wanted to apply to business school, and why are you applying to Yale?"

Me: "Well, I was lost in the desert, in Arches National Park..."

It was the summer of 1996. My dad had had his stroke back in late May, just before my 24th birthday and just after buying a used second car for the family. He had been mostly taking the bus to and from work so my mom could have the car. That was nice of him, though I sometimes suspect that my mom would have traded some of the use of the car for more of his assistance in the many child-rearing tasks that she needed the car to perform. But my dad was raised in India, and had an old-school Indian view of fatherhood as providing, and motherhood as raising kids.

With my dad's career unexpectedly and suddenly ending, and the family income essentially reduced to his disability checks, my mom was not in a position to be able to afford the payment on the car, so I volunteered to take over the payment for her. At that time, I was making $19,600 while living in Los Angeles, which is not a cheap place to live, and paying student loans and trying to finance a very rewarding, but very expensive, competitive ballroom dance habit. So I ended up taking on a second job tutoring for a company called The End Result. Since I was using the proceeds to pay for my mom's car, she suggested that I should have that car, and I could give her my car: Mr. Perkins. Mr. Perkins was a beat up old blue Plymouth Sundance, and I gave him his name because he was the most average, nondescript car you've ever seen, and therefore deserved an average, nondescript name.

Trading cars was an exciting idea for me because it meant not one, but two road trips. Sarah and I did the first one, flying to StL and driving the new car back. It was a white Hyundai Elantra that rode low and had a ridiculous little spoiler on the back. I figured I looked like a total cholo driving it, so I named it Julio. We took the southern route, taking I-55 down into New Orleans, and then I-10 across the bottom of the country.

Laszlo and I did the trip to take Mr. Perkins to StL. For that, we took a northern, meandering route through Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Iowa, and down into Missouri. And among the places we stopped was Arches National Park, which neither of us had ever been to before.

Arches National Park, as you might expect, is sprinkled liberally with a lot of, well, arches. By design, none of said Arches are super convenient to the road that goes through the park, since many of the arches are very delicate and would not necessarily respond well to the vibrations from a lot of vehicular traffic. The arches in this park were formed by wind, rain, and alternating cold/heat, rather than flowing water, and as a result many of them are extremely fragile. Flowing water, being a pretty brute force, tends not to leave behind such fragile structures.

Given the many and varied places we planned to stop on the trip, in our limited time frame, we decided we would start at the visitor's center and pick the most spectacular arch, see that one, and then push on. So at around 11a.m. we found ourselves at the trailhead. It being July in the Utah desert, it was already quite hot, and rapidly getting hotter. We only had one small bottle of Evian between us, but we figured we would just go on a very quick hike, so it would be OK.

From the trailhead, we had two options. Option 1: take the paved, easy difficulty, 1hr round trip trail to the arch. Option 2: take the unpaved, moderately strenuous 2hr round trip trail to the arch. Or, as we viewed it: option 1- be girlymen, or option 2- be Men. So we decided for option 3- be Manly Men, taking the unpaved, moderately strenuous trip and doing it in at most 90 minutes.

We headed out on the unpaved trail, with our one little bottle of water, and made very good time. The trail was marked only by the occasional little pile of stones, and these were not very close together. And so, since we were having ourselves a most delightful conversation, and taking small side trips to explore neat piles of rock/cliffs/cavelike formations, we never really noticed that it had been a while since the last time we had seen one of those helpful piles of rock.


Neat rocks! (Laszlo gave me a scanner this week, and I found pics from this road trip and scanned 'em in...)
















At some point, one of us, I don't remember which, said: "When was the last time you saw one of those piles?" That's the point when we realized we were off the trail completely. We had been walking for quite a while, and the landscape all looks exactly the same there, and it's rock so there're no footprints, and so we really had no idea where we were relative to anything.

At that point, Manly Concern started setting in. Not panic, mind you- that's what happens to girlymen. But definitely some Manly Concern. Off to our left was a small mesa, and so our inspiration was to head over to it and climb it; once there, on the high ground, we would be able to spot the other trail, people, the parking lot, something.

This being the West, the small mesa off to our left was some distance away, in direct sun, and as we started to climb it, we were really getting hot. And cranky. We finally stopped to take a water break in the lee of a huge boulder, which provided the only meaningful shade around. After each taking a sip of our water, it was clear there was only going to be enough for one more water break, where we would each get half a gulp. And so, with a moment to stop and really feel the extent of our predicament, naturally we got into an impassioned discussion about Whose Fault Was This Anyway?

Laszlo: "I can't believe you got us lost."
Me: "ME?? I 'm not the one who got us lost. YOU got us lost!"
Laszlo: "I didn't get us lost. You were leading."
Me: "We were walking together. I most certainly was not leading. At best I get 50% of the blame here."
Laszlo: "No way. YOU got us lost."
Me: "Kiss my ass. I did not get us..."

Let us leave 24-year-old Gus and Laszlo in their rapidly escalating cycle of mutual recrimination and recap the situation. It is July in the Utah desert. By now it is about 1 in the afternoon, so it is scorching hot. We have 1 adult-sized gulp of water between us, and we have no idea where we are relative to other people. We figure we can't possibly be too far away, since we've only been going a couple hours, but we only have the vaguest idea of which direction would be good to go in, there is NOTHING out here, and all the scenery looks the same.

But the most worrying issue is the water. We have a serious water problem, and so we could do any of the following things:

1) Go as long as possible without touching the remaining supply
2) Take super-teeny sips in an effort to spread it out over a long period
3) Each drink half the remainder and hope it keeps us going long enough to get us back to civilization

I put those 3 in the order I would prefer to do them, but any of them could be considered reasonable approaches to our water situation.

Let me tell you what we did instead. Or rather, what Laszlo did. I return you now to our regularly scheduled argument, already in progress, about who got us lost...

Me: "This is what I get for letting a Jew lead in the desert."
Laszlo: "Ha ha. That's real funny, Indian boy. Why don't you dance us a little rain dance, so we can get some more water. It's your fault we're in this mess."
Me: "It is NOT my fault. You know what, let's settle this. Let he who is without fault in this situation bring forth water from this rock."

I thought that was pretty clever. Tied in to the whole Jews-lost-in-the-desert Old Testament theme, and, I figured, neither one of us can actually make water come from the rock, so we can finally stop this stupid argument and figure out a way out of this.

So Laszlo looks at me, then down at the water, and then looks up at me again, and gets an evil smile on his face. Then, he takes the water, our last gulp of precious, precious water, and dashes it on the face of the rock, where it almost instantly evaporates in the dry desert heat.

Laszlo: "AHA! Look, I called forth water from the stone! YOU"RE the one who got us lost!!"

Me: "$%#^& ..... %^#&*QO% ....... ^#&*@^%)@%)&_%&_@ ..... WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??????? THAT WAS OUR LAST GULP OF WATER, YOU FUCKING LUNATIC!!"

Laszlo (suddenly looking sheepish): "Uh..."

Me: "OH MY GOD! WE ARE GOING TO DIE OUT HERE, BECAUSE YOU HAD TO MAKE A JOKE?????"

Laszlo: "Well... but it was a pretty _funny_ joke, right?"

Me: "Oh my god, we are going to die."

With no more water, we decide we had better push on. We continue climbing the mesa, and when we get to the top, we can see off in the distance, bearing 10 o'clock, a lone hiker, moving quickly. A person!! We immediately start climbing back down the mesa and put ourselves on a collision course with the unknown hiker.

When we finally reach him, we explain our predicament and he points out the way to the arch. Apparently we're only a half hour away or so. It so happens that this guy is wearing a Yale SOM shirt, and Laszlo is considering applying there this fall. They get into an intense discussion about business school in general, and Yale in particular. At this point in my life, I have never once considered business school; in fact, I had always considered it the graduate degree with the least intellectual content out there. [FYI: now that I have an MBA, I'm sure I was right about that.]

The part of the conversation that I perked up in hearing concerned the fact that the guy had just graduated, and was going to work for Sikorsky aircraft. Sikorsky is an aerospace company, with a particular specialty in helicopters. As it happened, I had been trying for several months now to make a move from advertising into aerospace. Although I was doing very well at Katz, I knew in a year's time that it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life, and I thought aerospace would be an interesting field to be in.

As he talked about how Sikorsky, and its parent company, UTC, loved to recruit at Yale's campus, and how he hadn't had an engineering background before business school, and how it was a big industry sector shift for him, I realized that business school might just be my ticket into aerospace. I mean, I wasn't having any luck cold-calling aerospace companies and explaining how my 2 years in TV advertising were a perfect preparation for a career in aerospace...

After a 20 minute conversation in the searing heat, the SOM guy continued on his way, and Laszlo and I headed in the direction he had given us. Sure enough, in half an hour we had found the arch.

The arch. Worth seeing. Take plenty of water. And take the marked trail.









We spent maybe 10 minutes at the arch. Once you see it and take a couple pictures, there's not much else to do. And if you have no water, and it's hot, and you're about ready to kill your travel buddy, you're mainly concerned with getting back to the car.

Laszlo: "OK, I'm leading back to the car."
Me: "Fine. You lead, Mr. Smart Guy. I'm just going to follow you."

And so we headed back. Ten minutes later...

Me: "Are you sure this is the trail?"
Laszlo: "Shut up. You got us lost last time."

An hour later...

Me: "Seriously, where the hell are we?"
Laszlo: "Uh, I'm sure it's over there somewhere..."

Yep, we were lost again. I'm sure we were off the trail within 10 minutes of leaving the arch. We ended up climbing around the edge of a mesa, into a small canyon along its side. We were walking on a ledge about shoulder-width, about 30 feet up from the canyon floor. The Utah desert can also be quite windy, and this canyon was like a wind tunnel. At one point, we reached a place with a 4 foot gap or so in the ledge, which we had to jump over. "4 foot gap?" you say, "That's not that wide." Sure, but try jumping it with a 30 foot drop on one side, in a stiff headwind, with a sheer towering cliff on the other side. There's not much margin for error. That bit was terrifying.

When we emerged from the canyon, we had this view:

2 important things here: (1) you probably can't tell, but that's the road in the distance I'm pointing to, and (2) look how much more hair I had then





Sweet Jesus! The road! It was way far off, and took us forever to reach it, but we finally did, and discovered that it was the original road we had driven in on. So we ended up approaching the car from behind. Since I'm having fun playing with my new old scanner, I've drawn a picture of the trails, and a rough idea of the path we followed instead. The thing at the top of the picture is the arch:


All told, a 3 hr hike that we were going to do in 90 min took us 6 hours.











When he finally got back to the car, at 5pm, I knew 2 things:

1) You should never let a Jew lead in the desert, unless you're prepared to spend the next 40 years there, and

2) I was going to apply to business school, and specifically to Yale, so that I could finally make the shift into aerospace.

That's the story I told Richard. With minor bits like the racial epithets deleted, obviously.

Richard: "OK, walked into the wrong building... lost in the desert... to be honest, I'm almost afraid to ask this, but..."

And then he asked his third question.