What careers did you imagine for yourself when you were in grad school?
When I was little, my mom said,
"John K!"
(My dad was Big John, I was John K.)
"You'll make a great engineer."
And so, for a long time, I was like,
"Yeah, I'll make a great engineer."
Sometimes I forgot what that word was
and I'd say, "Oh, my mom believes in me,
I'll be something great."
But I really didn't know what an engineer was,
and I never really got the memo
of how to become an engineer.
I didn't know any engineers.
My mom and dad were both lawyers,
everyone they knew were lawyers,
I didn't know what an engineer was.
Turns out my uncle actually was an engineer,
I've learned,
but he lived in Schenectady,
which I didn't know where that was.
I didn't spend much time with him.
So, I went to high school and I graduated.
I went to college and I graduated.
But instead of diving into grad school,
I just started being an entrepreneur.
I went into education
with all these other teachers
and all these other clinicians
and all these other MSWs, social workers.
But I wasn't a clinician,
I wasn't a teacher,
I was an entrepreneur,
and I wanted to change the next generation of schools,
and I realized that by being a little different
than the community,
that was sort of my grad school.
And so, I worked hard,
I started an organization,
I've grown it.
You know, there are 500 people,
$35 million operating budget,
8 U.S. states.
I still didn't go to graduate school.
My graduate school was running an organization.
And then in 2008, when I was an old man,
I went to graduate school.
I got a fellowship.
I became an officer of an elite university,
Harvard University,
and I got to take courses
in every single graduate school.
I took seven classes at Harvard Business School,
six classes at the Graduate School of Design,
a class at the School of Public Health.
I went and lived in Favelas in Mexico.
So, I could have gone and got an MBA
right out of college,
but I would have been a dime a dozen.
Instead, I was one of ten mid-careers
at this great university,
and I was seen as an asset,
not just this, a lost leader,
because the graduate school needed money
to pay for the graduate students.
So, if I were to give some advice on career stuff,
don't just dive into graduate school to get a credential
because you don't know what you want to do.
My brother got a perfect score on the LSATs
but took a year off going to law school
because he didn't know why
he wanted to go to law school.
So, I just dove into education,
built something really special.
In doing so, I built up a network
that was pretty freaking tremendous.
And I think in the next generation,
folks should think about
how they can be a connector of people
from different places.
And graduate school,
you can go there and build a network,
but build your social graph by activities
and by your reputation
and by collaborating.
And graduate school can get in the way of that.
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