In this conversation, Tyrel Sulzer HBS '22 shares his journey from working as a geotechnical engineer in Canada's oil sands to pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School. He discusses his unique background as an indigenous Canadian and how he crafted his application essay around his experiences bridging corporate and community interests in the energy sector. The discussion covers his strategic approach to the application process, including his decision to apply to only three schools and how he drew on his distinctive perspective on indigenous sovereignty and energy development.
Tyrel provides detailed insights into his essay writing process, which took an entire summer to refine, and explains how he positioned himself as different from typical engineering applicants. He also reflects on how his goals have evolved during business school and shares candid advice about dealing with skeptics during the application journey. The conversation offers valuable perspective on how applicants can authentically showcase unique backgrounds and experiences that set them apart in the admissions process.
Thanks for having me on the program. I'm a Canadian originally. I grew up in a small town in Fernie, British Columbia. It's a little ski and mining town south of Banff, near Calgary. I grew up there, born and raised. I went to undergrad at the University of British Columbia. In western Canada we make forestry products, oil, and mining products, so I chose geological engineering to cover two of those. I went to go work for a company called Imperial Oil, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, before going to business school. I spent four years working up north on an oil sands project as a geotechnical engineer there. So that's what I did before business school, and that's what brought me to Boston eventually.
Do you mind sharing with the listeners your stats, for example your GMAT score, your undergrad GPA, and what your job title was at the time of application?
GMAT, I had a 740.
GMAT score, I had a 88, or 8 out of eight integrated reasoning. GPA coming out of undergrad, UBC does out of a percentage basis, so an 83 percentage basis, and I think that translates to a 3.85 or something like that.
You were working for four years, or I guess three years by the time you were writing the application and four years when you came to school, is that true?
That's right, yeah, four years by the time I entered school. My title there was geotechnical engineer, which is pretty standard for oil and gas.
When applying, did you use a professional consultant?
I had a professional consultant look over my essay at the end just to make sure I hadn't missed anything, but at the end of the day I basically relied on friends who'd walked the path to guide me.
How many schools did you ultimately apply to?
I applied to three. I applied to Harvard, Wharton, and Chicago Booth.
Where did you get in?
I got into Harvard, goes without explaining. I did not get into Wharton, and I got waitlisted at Chicago Booth.
Would you mind reading your essay for the audience so they can hear a little about how you crafted your story for Harvard?
Yeah, sure. Reading out loud is -
The question you might be familiar with at Harvard Business School is, as we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program. So I start with a quote.
"Sulzer, you're up next. Remember your training," barked my sergeant in the pitch black Canadian wilderness of Northern Alberta. I quickly replied, "Yes, sergeant," and moved to take the lead in my section. It was 0200 hours on a navigation exercise during my Army basic military training course. I was tired, cold, and the youngest member of my section at 16 years old. I entered the Canadian Forces through a program for indigenous native Canadian youth called Bold Eagle. In that moment, my section trusted me to guide them back to camp and end a truly challenging but valuable field day. I was nervous because of this pressure, but also the "fix bayonets" command from our sergeant due to reported black bear activity in the area. Luckily, I had a knack for navigation, and I began leading the troops through the thick bush. In a few hours we reached camp. I was silently relieved. In this moment I found a passion for leadership and witnessed the ability of a team to achieve great things when bound by mutual trust.
Today I aspire to found and lead an indigenous owned energy company and believe business school will equip me with the training necessary to succeed. Western Canada is facing economic stagnation due to a complicated relationship with indigenous people, federal provincial governments, and resource industries. As an indigenous Canadian who now works for the energy sector, I wish to untangle this adversarial relationship. I aspire to build a prosperous, environmentally conscious business that is a model for success in the region.
Growing up in a small coal mining town in the Rocky Mountains, I've watched and been a part of the family tradition of mining. I've been a beneficiary of the scholarships and employment opportunities offered by oil, mining, and forestry industries. Where most people are frustrated and only see problems, I see an opportunity to both improve the lives of indigenous Canadians and protect the environment. Canada has always been a place of vast resources, and our history with indigenous people swings wildly between cooperation and conflict. My great-grandfather was caught in the middle as a Métis half-blood, a trader who was able to create advantageous relationships for both First Nations and colonial people. My grandmother dedicated her life to the advancement of Métis rights and cultural preservation. These values of respect, shared purpose, and connection to our First Nation's cousins are the foundation of my upbringing.
This background has allowed me to consider the human elements of business in Canada and break free of the introverted engineering stereotypes. I'm never afraid to approach and engage with people who oppose my viewpoint and search for common ground. I've experienced what it's like to turn open conflict into a productive, trust focused relationship. In 2017 I was assigned to a field rotation at a $25 billion capex oil sands mining project near Fort McMurray, Alberta. I was tasked with planning and working closely with our 500 plus person operations group, and after a turbulent asset startup, these employees were extremely frustrated and distrustful of any new engineering staff. Guidance from the planning team was frequently discredited and deemed impossible to execute. My father, previously an underground coal miner, advised me to spend time with the team. Determined to succeed, I spent hours with the field staff in their trucks and equipment to learn their point of view. Soon I adapted my planning efforts and gained respect amongst them. Within the year I received a recognition award from the "most feared" operations superintendent for improving our relationship. The accomplishment meant more to me than the paper it was written on because it showed I'd earned the trust of the people who inherently disliked my position and background. My ability to empathize and overcome being the most hated person in the room has served me well in intense situations.
Recently I volunteered at an indigenous youth summit that brought students from across Canada to discuss energy issues. I was seated next to a young woman named Ranna who was jailed the week prior for protesting a natural gas pipeline project. When I introduced myself as an ExxonMobil employee, she expressed her disgust by saying, "Your company ignores our people and threatens Mother Earth." I stuck to my values and replied, "Look, I believe in indigenous territorial control, and I'd like to hear why you feel that way." We soon found common ground on issues of sovereignty and respect for promises made to indigenous people by companies and governments. Her point of view was a window into a complicated issue, but helped me frame a meaningful strategy for cooperation, respect, and shared purpose.
Recent Canadian legal outcomes on resource projects have cemented that business in Canada equals business with indigenous people. The relationship has advanced beyond the mere cutting of a royalty check. Indigenous people are concerned with the long-term benefits and consequences of economic activity in their backyard. As someone who has lived on both sides of this equation, community and company, I have enjoyed the benefits and observed the consequences of resource development. I aspire to be a new type of business leader, one who can understand the broader perspective of indigenous people as well as asset profitability. Fundamentally, I believe acting on your values and beliefs builds trust.
Business school will help me round out my experience in areas where I have little experience, such as finance, law, and negotiation. My passion for operations management and indigenous relations will be furthered by courses like Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Authentic Leadership Development. The very backgrounds of other students will provide insights into indigenous relations in the business around the world. When a former colleague and HBS alum, Chris Kle, invited me to visit in 2017, I witnessed the sharing of unique perspectives in the classroom and became engrossed in the fast-paced discussion environment. The robust number of clubs and student activities like the Energy Environment Club, Outdoors Club, and the hockey team, the HBS Blades, greatly interest me.
I intend to found and lead an indigenous owned energy company so that our people can forge their own future. I want to navigate that business through the woods of an adversarial relationship to financial success and independence. I want to replace being the most hated person in the room with an invitation to equitable partnership. I want to become a role model for responsible development and transparency in my country and across my industry. I believe business school is my next step in this journey.
This is the product of a lot of revisions and thinking about it, and it's so hard to sum up your life, your life story and your life goals. Looking back at it, there's absolutely parts that have stayed true, but there's also parts coming out towards the end of this experience that have changed a little bit. So reflecting on that is telling, but also kind of fun.
Ultimately you're trying to tell a story. Previously I'd read the materials about - there's a great book called 50 Successful Business School Essays - and the ones that stuck out most genuine to me were the ones that started with a story and ended with a point. That's what I tried to do. One of the myths is that you're competing against everybody in investment banking and private equity or consulting, and I knew I wasn't one of those. Why I think that's a myth is you're actually probably competing against someone else in your category, so another engineer, maybe from Canada, maybe in the oil and gas sector. So what I tried to do was highlight something that was unique about me, a unique perspective I had, which is why I leaned in hard to talking about how I feel about indigenous sovereignty and indigenous equity. I think that perhaps pulled me out of the pile a little bit, in addition to having a very visual story to talk about.
The essay is one component of the application. How did you think about what you wanted to convey in each piece - the essay, your recommenders, the short answer - and what did you want to save for short answer and resume?
The essay was inherently like there's something unique here, and if you put me in a room with a hundred other people or 90 other people, I'll say something kind of unique. The energy angle you can expect - how I feel about oil prices and the carbon tax - but the indigenous sovereignty piece is a little bit unique. So that's something that the essay can bring out that GMAT scores won't, and grades and some of the short answer stuff as well. So that was the difference.
It took me probably a whole summer. I finished the GMAT, I got that score, but then I spent from like May through to September working and reworking it. The file saved as V8, but there were many more in between tweaks.
Who did you have read your essay during that time period? What was the right balance of the number of voices, and what was some of the feedback you got from people who read it?
I had a ton of people read it. I had my parents read it, my roommate at the time was a lawyer who read it, I had family members and colleagues read it. And there was no one who gave the same advice. Some people who looked at this went like, well that's silly, they won't understand that. And you have to walk away being like, okay, this is something that I believe in and I stand by, and they can detect that, especially when you get to the interview phase. So I had a whole number of people read it, but the more people that read it, be ready for more of the commentary that's not like, great job, I love it.
You mentioned you had a consultant read your application at the end. Did the consultant read this essay, and what was the professional feedback on it?
The consultant kind of just said, yeah, looks great. So maybe not the best advertisement for consultants. I appreciate that that was the confidence I needed to basically submit this. A couple things: they liked the fact that it's a story, it fit the format, the length. There were a couple of moments in that essay that maybe grabbed your attention a little bit, where I go from some story to basically being like, Western Canada's facing economic stagnation. That's a wait a minute, hang on. They also appreciated the smaller sentences. I think that plays really well, perhaps not to the spoken word, but when you're reading it, it breaks things up. It's not a big run-on.
Was this your first topic, or did you take a pass at an essay that was entirely different and scrapped it?
I had a kernel of it, wanting to touch on some things that were unique, but certainly a number of revisions and paragraphs went through. I had recounted a couple stories from the mine site I had worked on where things went wrong and either my planning or mistakes were made, and those are all great stories, but at the end of the day I trimmed it down to what I thought would make me unique.
The answer is, it all changes. You're looking for a transformational experience. What I was very certain and I still am certain about are the beliefs I wrote about in that essay. The path will change, and that's something that you probably shouldn't think too hard about. People are nervous about sharing their essay or talking about it because they haven't lived up to that path. If you were to take this at face value, you would say, "Well, Tyrel, why aren't you working in energy right now and an indigenous relations group?" And I think that's not really the intention of the essay or the point of the school. They understand that there's a number of paths to get there, to get that dream, but they really want to see, okay, who is this person, what are their values, what makes them unique, where are they going to end up 40 years down the line when we have a list of alumni. They want to make as many bets as they can to have impactful alumni while still preserving some stats and making sure that everyone lands on their feet in the near term. So that's probably what happens.
You were four years out of school by the time you started. Why was that the right time for you to apply?
Maybe I'll give a personal take, which is I was ready for a change. I had a promotion that put me up at site more often, to be up north. I'd gotten comfortable in that role but I also feel like I'd kind of achieved everything I needed to up there. I'd learned what I could and it was starting to become repetitive, so personally I was ready for that change. Institutionally I think I'm on the earlier end, but the stats probably show it's also in like a four to eight year time frame that people tend to apply. So I knew that there was this window of, okay, if we're talking to M7 schools, it's probably within this.
This was on the advice of a colleague. It depends on your situation, but three schools is a good number for me, and maybe for most people, because really the bottleneck is your references. For each of these schools you have to get two references, and they have to write a short essay. You might not think it, but that's really the hard part that comes down to the deadline: making sure that they feel informed and motivated. You have to often remind them a few times, and if you're applying to six schools it's kind of onerous to come to your supervisor and be like, hey, can you write six different essays?
Three around is pretty manageable. Otherwise you're running around to a lot of interviews, and each interview you need to try and make it like this is the only school for me, which is what they want to hear a little bit. So if you're applying to six schools and you get offers from all six and you have to go interview them, it's easy to get caught up in the noise and forget what makes HBS special, what makes Wharton special, and actually have it be genuine, so you're not just citing the case method, etc.
Did you feel like you were pretty consistent application to application, or did you have to make sizeable changes to your essays or application materials based on the school?
Yes, I kept it the same. It is different. I think I made a mistake in keeping it the same. I basically wrote the Harvard essay first, which is probably not the right way to do it. Wharton and Booth have a different process where it's two questions that they ask, so I just chopped up my essay from the Harvard one and made it work for those ones. I was invited to interviews in both, and who knows what happened behind the scenes, but was not successful at those. So if you want to maximize success, you might be better to start with an idea or start fresh on either one.
Anytime you can reach out, find somebody with some sort of similar background. I had a mentor who was ahead of me a couple years who was just totally invaluable in understanding what to expect. He invited me to come and visit, which then later allowed me to demonstrate my commitment to the school. I had a fellow Canadian message me on LinkedIn and say he was going to be in Boston, and this is at the height of COVID. He worked at Pepsi and came and visited for the day, and I was so happy I just toured him around. I would recommend trying to find somebody who's connected to the community and understand some of the nuances that you can't find on Wall Street Oasis or Poets and Quants.
I would say people may not always have the time, but I feel like they're always flattered when you ask for advice.
It's a holistic answer. You'd be foolish to think, okay, I'm applying to an M7 business school, this isn't going to improve my job potential or my earnings capability or something like that. But the essay is an opportunity to say that I get it, that there's a bigger picture, that if you're endowed with somewhat of an advantage coming to an M7 school, you're going to use it for something that's meaningful. The myth is that it has to happen immediately, but it's that you have this clear vision, or something you take a stake on, and that's what they're looking for.
Yes, absolutely. People always ask, "Covid, how has it changed it, has it diluted the experience?" And I think the answer is yes, absolutely it has, but life in general was diluted a little bit. It wasn't a choice between the normal world for anybody. So what do I think I got out of it is even despite a global crisis or global pandemic, I found a group of friends from a variety of industries with very different outlooks on the world. I found a career that I want to pursue that I hadn't considered, and a totally new way of thinking about the world: global capital flows, socioeconomic considerations. So all those have been amazing.
The part that maybe surprises some people too is they think, "Okay, MBA school, I'm going to walk out with a great job," but the academics are top-notch at all these top schools. You'll be blown away, and if you do dig into the material a little bit, you'll enjoy it. But that said, it's also not as rigorous as maybe TV and movies make it out to be. It's pick your adventure as far as how hard you want to work in that regard.
An HBS interview question that took you by surprise?
There was a question that's similar to the "what's your weakness," but it was posed in a really good way about what does your boss think about you, what would a peer think about you, what would someone who doesn't like you or doesn't think you're the best at work say about you. That's an opportunity to reveal one of those weaknesses and be a bit more humble about your application.
What stereotype about HBS has proven true?
All the travel and social stuff. If that's what you're looking for, you'll find it.
What's a stereotype about HBS or HBS students that proved to be totally false?
The classic one that everybody is rich. Look, you'll encounter - if you took a thousand people, you'll meet a rich one eventually. They exist, but it's not all of them. It's very, very few. So that's the myth.
Anything you'd do different on your application if you had a do-over?
I would have been more specific to the other schools. Take more time on your second and third choice.
What doubts about yourself did you have going into the application?
So many. You'll go through the whole period of am I worthy, what happens if it's a no, et cetera. And even once you get accepted, you'll feel that way.
Who's the coolest alumni or class guest you got to meet?
We had Andy Fastow, who was the CFO of Enron, come in. He was really interesting, gave a whole bunch of light. We had Toto Wolff of F1 fame come in last week. That was really cool too.
What's been your most embarrassing moment so far at business school?
Probably week one. I was talking to a colleague who came from private equity, had done investment banking, and I came from the northern oil patch. I'd only watched the HBS prep finance videos, and it was a British instructor, so she pronounced EBITDA "e." So when I was talking with this private equity fellow from New York, I said something about "EE-bitda," and he paused for a second and said, "it's EBITDA," and I was like, okay, thanks. So that was a little embarrassing. We all got over it.
Introvert or extrovert?
Extrovert.
Are you a procrastinator or do you get it done ahead of time?
Depends on what it is. When it's scheduling a doctor's appointment or calling my grandma when I should, it's probably a procrastinator. When it's something more related to school or work stuff or interviewing, definitely a planner.
Analytical or creative?
Analytical, probably. That's the engineering bias.
Would you describe yourself cautious or bold?
Cautious in that I went the traditional M7 MBA path, but bold in that I didn't go into consulting or investment banking and chose search fund.
If you're a Harry Potter fan, what would your Hogwarts house be?
Slytherin. It's true, it would be Slytherin.
When you're asked in a formal setting like a job interview what your biggest weakness is, what do you say?
Formally, you say something like I don't like to be micromanaged, because that is really a strength of being an independent thinker.
What's your actual, real weakness?
I can get overconfident and really believe in my viewpoint.
Anything you regret about your business school experience?
Not really, it's been great. At the beginning you're trying to meet as many people as possible, and then you get put into these sections, and it's tough to reach cross-section around that - these social structures are imposed. If I was to go back again, I'd spend a little more time on that, because in the second year it kind of unravels, and for the rest of your life it unravels. You're not just in section A, B, C, et cetera, it's cross. So spend more time doing that up front.
If you had to pick a new mascot for HBS, what would it be?
Cha Sambhar. It's not some caricature animal, it's a real person who has changed the game a little bit, and I think espouses the values of the school a little bit more than any bird can.
You're going to encounter people who don't believe in it, and they might be your family members, they might be your business colleagues. Don't be discouraged when you meet that person. You'll find people who say it's too expensive, et cetera, et cetera. You'll find people who haven't been through it, who are naysayers. Don't let them dissuade you, and just really try and focus on getting the application in. You probably stand a better chance than you think you have in your own head.