High-school students rarely spend time considering the future, not so much out of inability to do so as pragmatism. Freshmen have all the challenges of high school ahead of them, with college still four years away; seniors scramble at college applications with no time to think about what comes after. But we all know that school is not forever and that adult responsibilities lie ahead. Parents and institutions promote acquiring work permits and attending summer internships as preparation, although students may instead think in terms of earning quick cash or improving chances of acceptance at a reach school.
Many students are already set on going to college as a default option. Once you earn a four-year degree, though, the situation becomes much more open-ended: you can devote yourself to several grueling years earning a graduate degree, or you can face the professional world as an adult. The advantages and disadvantages of each option are unclear to most high-school students. When someone says they plan to get a PhD, do they know why, or what that entails? When someone says they want to make money on Wall Street as soon as possible, do they have informed reasoning behind that? More often than not, the answer is “no.” High-school students are busy with the linear flow of their lives and dwell on the present rather than an uncertain future. It is nevertheless important that at some point before graduation we realize the details of our options and understand why we should take one path or the other.
As someone who enjoys learning, I have always seen myself staying in academia in the foreseeable future. This viewpoint was based purely off instinct—with no experience in a real job, the scope of factors that I considered was very limited. So this past summer I interned at a Beijing-based startup called Woo Space for two weeks in hopes of learning more about life after college. I was able to talk to the CEO and his employee about their business experience and the decisions that led up to it.
The interviews in this article are conducted from a business-focused perspective. The interviewees’ statements should not be taken as absolutes, but rather as advice from someone who has been in your shoes.
Undergraduate studies have transient influence.
Woo Space can best be described as a makerspace that rents out its office space to other startups. Since its founding in July 2015, it has rapidly expanded across Beijing and established five branches in addition to the original office. Woo Space held its first anniversary publicity event on July 24 for over 1,000 attendees.
The CEO of Woo Space is a man named Randy, a Class of 2012 Cornell graduate known for trotting around his facilities in a T-shirt and loafers. He’s the casual type of boss who would be indistinguishable from a regular employee on the basis of demeanor or dress; his success with Woo Space at such a young age, though, speaks volumes about his ability. I had the opportunity to ask Randy some questions about his path and opinions on grad school.
Randy’s time at Cornell was rather unexciting. He chuckled as he described Ithaca as “very middle of nowhere” with “not much to do unless you have a car.”
“Mainly, I think, my college experience, what’s memorable about it is that I did a semester in D.C. and a semester in Beijing; I think those two were actually the standout for my entire college experience,” he said.
Still, Randy had been pushed in a very particular direction by his college environment, and after graduation had initially decided to go into consulting with a degree in economics.
“I was always interested in business, but when I got to Cornell, I realized that everyone who was interested in business goes into investment banking or consulting. There’s really just two paths, no one really was into corporate,” Randy said. According to Randy, this kind of tracking for career paths is a common occurrence at all Ivies. Business majors specifically tend towards investment banking and consulting because those are two of the best jobs for making money right out of college, and everyone tries to compete for them.
Now, with the rising popularity of startups in the past few years, the options in business have opened up.
Randy’s first job was at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG)’s Beijing office. It was a stable job that most people would be happy with, with the only off-the-beaten-path factor being that it was in China. As a dual major in China and Asia-Pacific Studies (CAPS), Randy was confident in his choice to leave the U.S. “In China, you have state-owned enterprises, you have private enterprises, and you have multinationals. So, all these; they’re very different. And BCG was a great chance for me to be in the culture of a Western company but have a chance to interact with state-owned enterprises.”
For someone as ambitious as Randy, though, staying at BCG wasn’t good enough, and he quickly turned to China’s emerging startup industry for a venture. He was only 25 years old and three years out of college when he decided to open up Woo Space as a brand-new startup. “I realized how in your 20s, it should really be all about first your experience, and second your network,” Randy said. “So the fastest way to get both of these is to actually do your own thing because as you’re pushing your company to grow, you’re pushing yourself to grow, because if you can’t grow then your company is going to stagnate.”
As it turned out, Randy would be leaving BCG—and consulting—for good.
The influence of peer groups and professors may dictate the first steps you take after graduation, but things are perpetually in flux and your decisions should inevitably align with your personal goals once you figure them out. At the end of the day, undergrad isn’t as all-important as it is made out to high-school students. For those whose jobs deviate from their university studies, it may even be forgettable, like it is for Randy.
Experience means networking.
To actually get a venture company started—or succeed in getting any high-pay job position—you need perseverance, patience, and some key connections. Although ostensibly Randy was on course with an ordinary job at BCG, in retrospect, the time he spent there can be seen purely as preparation for his present position. Being in China for three years with BCG was enough for Randy to build up a comfortable network to the point where he felt that the reward from venturing with a startup exceeded the risk should it fail. “[Networking helped me to] one, get an investment, because one of our investors I’ve actually known for three years, so it’s not just like the first time we met. Second, [networking] also helped me in terms of being early to get the startup marketing, and things like that,” Randy said.
He proceeded to give an example applicable to any sort of job in the U.S. or China.
“So I think there’s an assertion in the West; there’s a negative connotation with connections. But it’s not necessarily true. It’s actually the same everywhere. So for example, if your dad works as a managing director at Goldman Sachs in New York, you are for sure going to get an interview. Like, you know how bankers choose resumes, right? So if you are interviewing for Goldman, they essentially just throw out the resumes of everyone whom they don’t know of, because everyone, on paper, looks amazing. But at the end of the day, if they know you, it just makes you stand out a little bit more, okay?”
The college environment is relatively sheltered and actually prevents you from getting the kind of business network you need to quickly succeed on the entrepreneurial level—or at the very least, slows down your progress significantly. One of Randy’s employees and longtime friends, Diana, told me about her own time at college. Growing up in the U.S., she attended college at UC Berkeley as a prospective business major. “I think freshman year, you take a lot of fundamental classes that you don’t really feel like have any real life application,” she said. “Sophomore year I actually took a gap year, cause I met this entrepreneur and I was kind of sick and bored of taking a lot of classes and not knowing what to do with them.” Corroborating Randy, Diana looked back on her gap year away from school as the highlight of her college experience. She spent three months working on overseas operations and marketing at the entrepreneur’s San Francisco office and then moved to Shanghai, where she worked on game development for the rest of the year. That first startup experience in the “real world” completely changed her view of her future path, and when she returned to Berkeley, she took the initiative in getting involved with other startup efforts.
“I think real life and school are very different,” Diana said. “The ironic thing is that first of all, I didn’t really study after my gap year; I worked most of the time. But my GPA was higher because all of a sudden, you’re trained to learn and do things more effectively and you kind of feel like you know what everything’s worth. You understand like ‘Why am I taking this class,’ right, like in this class, I get to learn about this and how I can apply it to my life or my work.”
Like it or not, getting accepted at any job past your first requires you to have connections and the network to reach out to them. That is what working experience is all about. Picking up skills and intuition in the field along the way is a bonus that makes up for any missed academic education.
Graduate school and business mesh poorly.
Randy and Diana are both people who like to be in charge of their own pace. Randy had a clear vision of what he wanted to do: from the very start of college, he was focused on business. After her gap year, Diana realized that she was more interested in the experience and network startup has to offer than her unfocused studies.
I was curious if either of them had considered going to graduate school. Both of them had. Diana in particular had actually taken her GREs and prepared for law school, but ultimately decided against it, referring to law school as her “backup plan.”
“I used to be very keen on getting an MBA (Master of Business Administration),” Randy said. “That was actually one of my life goals.” He told me that after graduation, he had initially planned to spend three years at BCG and then two years at one of the U.S.’s top business schools—such as Harvard, Stanford, or the University of Chicago—but reconsidered after he started up with Woo Space. “I realized that two years for school is actually a very, very long time. There’s so much you can do in two years if you’re trying to do your own thing,” he said. Diana more or less echoed his sentiments: “I think startup is a lot of [skills] that you’re not gonna learn in school. It’s more of, you learn through a lot of experiences and like actually doing shit. And I think doing startup really trains your learning curve ability.”
This type of thinking is undeniably results-oriented. Randy and Diana speak from the perspective of two young entrepreneurs with a developing startup that is experiencing dramatic growth. What matters, though, is that on a personal level, both of them looked back on their choice to take a chance on Woo Space and were happy with their decision. Instead of being in school learning the material for six or seven more years, they were able to experience it for themselves and succeed in the real world. They made the “right” choice when it came to graduate school because their decision had been informed by working experiences juxtaposed alongside their regular college experience—for example, if Diana had not taken a gap year, she could very well be in law school right now. The payoff in that respect varies with an individual’s personality and goals, but Diana would probably be worse off had that been her track.
Graduate school may be a tempting option for some, but first you need to have a clear objective in mind. If you know you want to continue studying all your life and become a professor, you can consider going for a PhD. The return on other graduate degrees is much less defined, especially if you plan on going into industry like Randy.
“I think Master’s actually has no value. Whatsoever. Please do not waste time on getting it. There’s only one good reason for getting a Master’s, and that’s that you didn’t get a job as an undergrad,” Randy said. “I mean, if you’re talented enough then no one’s gonna say ‘You don’t have a Master’s, we’re not gonna hire you,’ especially if you’re in the States. In China, they might do that [chuckle]. But in the States they’re not.”
According to Randy, getting a Master’s or MBA or other professional degree is only relevant if the process is used as a conduit for networking, which can be done more efficiently anyway if you go into the field instead. The network built up from an MBA is also not necessarily helpful for ambitious projects such as startups, since you don’t just want people on the same level as you. In the professional world, people have to be judged solely on their accomplishments rather than their accomplishments plotted against their age on a Cartesian diagram. In that sense Randy’s track can be seen as a “get rich quick” type of mentality, where you want to get on a high level professionally in as short a time span as possible.
“Once you hit 22 years old, you graduate; you’re in the same landscape as someone who’s 50. That’s just the reality of it, right. So there’s just no point in me being proud of being mature for my age or doing well for my age,” Randy said. “In terms of grad school, that just delays you from going into the real world and from actually doing things—actual things, versus a school environment. Because a school environment is always a bubble. It’s a huge bubble, especially the Ivies.”
Past the risks, the entrepreneur experience yields immediate reward.
If you plan on following in Randy’s footsteps and going into startup, there’s a lot to take in first. Like with grad school, a vision and a clear plan of action are a must. Unlike with grad school, you also need countermeasures in case the worst-case scenario occurs and the startup is a bust. Everyone knows the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg stories of a genius student dropping out to chase their own startup dreams and winning big because of it. What you don’t hear about is the innumerably larger amount of people who tried the same and failed—because they failed. When that happens, you can’t count on getting a decent job anywhere just based on your school. That only works for your first job. Once you have any work experience, that’s all you’re held accountable for, and if that experience involves crashing with a startup company, it’s a tough sell.
“As a student, if you want to do startup, don’t drop out. Just take a gap year. It’s actually the safest thing you can do. And if your startup is actually doing really, really well, that’s when you can think about dropping out,” Randy said. Although Randy wasn’t a student when he began with his startup, he still made sure to have backup plans. “Honestly, at the time I was starting it, if it fails, it’s okay. I can go to [business] school, I can get any corporate strategy job, I can go back to BCG. Right now I have a lot of great choices where it’s all pretty high pay and I don’t need to worry about it. But if I didn’t have BCG, I just had Cornell, and I did a startup and it didn’t work out—I’m f**ed.”
But Woo Space did work out, and it’s expanding fast. Randy’s making significantly more money than he would have had he stayed at BCG, and at age 26, he has already made a name for himself in Beijing’s business sector. The rooms of Woo Space are filled with fledgling startups and bustling activity. Like the architecture, the atmosphere is friendly and open.
“I think what Woo Space does very differently is that they actually build a very vibrant community, so all the people here—well, at least most people here—are very close with each other; like you see me saying hi to everybody because we all know each other,” Diana said.
I asked her and Randy for some overall impressions on their startup experience.
“I think definitely getting involved in startups is a fast way to kind of see how industry is,” Diana told me. “I think I would recommend to just dive into industry that [you’re] interested in and just hang out and chill there for like half a year and see how things slide. And I think afterwards [you’ll] find more direction as to what [you] want to do. And in your whole entire spec of life, one year is nothing. It’s really worth it to do it. And you also learn a lot of skills there, so either way it’s definitely worth it.”
“I mean, it sucks to be a startup entrepreneur, right? It’s just stress all the time,” Randy said. “And it’s actually a weird feeling because we have over 50 employees now, and technically, I pay them, right. So it’s quite strange of an experience to do something like this as such a young person. But at the same time it’s very exciting because you see all of this going and you see everyone’s drive; how everyone has the same goal and is trying to make the company better.”
“I think I will probably be a serial entrepreneur for the rest of my life,” he added.
How do you make your decision?
I didn’t really do much at Woo Space apart from the research for this article. But just being in the business environment and seeing the organization, how people interact, and conducting the interviews gave me a lot of food for thought.
Much of what Randy said applies less stringently to most people. Most people do not plan on going into business. But his in-field experience and retrospective on college let me see where he and people like him are coming from. Like all high-schoolers, I can’t hope to make an informed decision based solely on my previous knowledge because of the uncertainty of how things will end up. Although I’ll probably end up making the same decision that I would have had I not taken this internship, talking to someone who was in my spot just seven or eight years ago and is now the CEO of a successful startup helped with my situation. I realized why I wanted to do what I currently want to do, with some amount of experience informing my beliefs.
I suggest that all students do at least one internship before going to college. It’s unlikely that it will dispel any preconceptions, but it’s important to see all sides of an issue before forming an opinion. That’s something that is universally applicable, whether it be occupational, journalistic, or even trivial. Hopefully in this way you too will find success in your future endeavors.