In this episode, we sit down with Hannah Zhang (WG '24) to hear how she went from investment banking in Hong Kong to tech in Mexico City before landing at Wharton. Hannah opens up about burning out in finance, why she wishes she'd taken the GMAT in college, and how her international experience helped her stand out in a competitive applicant pool. She also talks about choosing Wharton over Booth, navigating the pressure of business school recruiting, and how she built Career Hannah – a personal brand with over 100k followers that landed her a product marketing role at Allium. This episode is brought to you by Juno, the collective-bargaining platform that helps MBA students secure lower rates on student loans. Learn more at juno.us/m7a
Before business school, I started my career at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong. I did equity sales and then moved into investment banking, and then, like a lot of people do in finance, I burned out. So I spent a little bit of time away from work and then moved into tech, but also did that in a bit of a non-traditional way, because I worked at DD, which was a food delivery marketplace in Latin America. I was living in Mexico City for almost two years before business school.
Did you grow up in Hong Kong, or were you there just for work?
I was originally born in China, and then my family moved to the US when I was young. We moved around a bit in the US, but I spent most of that time in upstate New York. Quite boring - and maybe that was why I wanted to go abroad and explore in Hong Kong and Latin America.
Honestly, I first started thinking of business school senior year of college. I bought the GMAT book and I never actually took the exam. If there was one thing I could have gone back in time and done - and I really would say this to anyone in college - I really would have taken the GMAT then and there, because that ended up being a huge hurdle for me when I considered it more seriously.
After I quit investment banking, I was considering what I wanted to do next. A lot of people in that boat consider grad school, and business school was just a variation of that that made sense given my background in finance. Definitely a lot of peers were considering it as well, so that's probably when I first seriously considered it.
When I was first considering it, I always saw it as more of a way to pivot roles in tech and stay in big tech - which isn't to say that that isn't a rat race in itself, but that's the way I saw it.
It is a totally legitimate concern, just given that 30-40% of everyone in an MBA class is actually going in order to go into consulting and investment banking. There's a big sense, especially once you get on campus, of that hivemindedness: I paid so much, and I spent so much time applying to get into this degree, and I need to make the most out of it - and that is what pushes people into those routes.
Part of the benefit of choosing a bigger program, which is also what I was always looking for, was that there's a greater diversity of what people end up going to campus for and doing, which I very much found at Wharton. That was part of the reason I looked at Wharton as well.
I started business school in 2022, which is such a long cycle before you end up actually going. I probably started thinking about it in 2020 - I'm sure a lot of people were, just because the pandemic was such a time of transition. Then I really started preparing for exams and everything towards the end of 2020.
To be honest, and I think a lot of people who apply to top business schools are in this boat: I didn't truly decide to go to business school until I paid the deposit and started making preparations. A lot of people take the GMAT and apply as a form of optionality, and that's definitely something I recommend. Business school is one way to pivot your career, grow your salary, grow your network - whatever your end goal is. It is always worthwhile for people to evaluate what other routes there are. Even when I was applying to business school and thinking about it, I was also applying to other jobs and seeing if I could pivot into my target role in industry without the degree.
The GMAT was definitely the first thing - though I'm not saying it should be. The actual first step should be to understand why you want to go to business school in the first place. As not a particularly good test taker, I just lost that ability after college. I saw the GMAT as such a huge hurdle that if I couldn't surmount it, it wouldn't even make sense to think of anything down the road.
I definitely recommend first thinking through: why am I doing this? Is there a clear, concrete reason? Part of taking the GMAT early is also that it gives you a sense of the tiers of schools you should even consider, and that factors in.
I took my GMAT score and said, where can I apply with this score? I feel like I got in despite my test score in many ways. And I think another thing people don't think about is that test scores can really help you not just get into school, but after you get accepted, be eligible for certain merit scholarships and funds. So that's also another consideration if you want to beef up your test score - there is certain merit to it.
Did your undergraduate GPA factor in as well?
A stellar undergrad GPA from a stellar school helps a lot too, even if 720 is right at the median for a lot of the top schools.
For the final list, if you went to a top-tier undergraduate school, I think it really only makes sense to go to business school if you go to a top business school. That's not an elitist thing - that's an ROI thing. You need to go to a top school in order for it to carry a certain weight. For me it was going down the list of rankings and geographies. I saw myself either being in New York, being in San Francisco, or being in a major city, and just went down the list.
Geography is an underrated component. It's where you spend two years, and you do build your network there. So if you know you're going to be on the East Coast, maybe prioritize there, and vice versa. Geography should factor in, in addition to prestige.
My written "why MBA" was not the same as my real internal one - and that's something I candidly regret looking back.
When I was thinking through the why, and maybe this goes to explain why I'm a marketer now, I'm always thinking through what looks the best on paper, what is the best story to tell, what makes the most sense. For me at the time, it was a story around how I had worked in finance and then worked in tech as an operator. That story lent itself really well to a story around working in VC, and so that's what I had written in my essays. To some extent I did feel that that was something I wanted to do.
My more realistic MBA goal was to move back to the US with a softer landing, just because I had spent a lot of time internationally and didn't feel that I had as much of a business network in the US. The other goal was that I'd worked in these strategy and product-adjacent roles in tech and wanted to explore what being a product manager in a proper big tech setting would look like.
When I really took a look at things - and didn't optimize for an admissions committee and an essay - I realized I'm an operator, not an investor. I don't really want to do investing, even though that was something I was interested in exploring through fellowships, through clubs, and things like that. Who knows in the long run, but that's where I landed.
You want to tell a very compelling story with a thread you can weave throughout - and that narrative of finance, operations, and getting into VC was a good layup. At the same time, you want to balance it against what's genuine to you; it needs to be true to you as well. The post-MBA plan is never 100% what you write in your essay, by any means. It's a delicate balance.
The way I really view it is to think about it like a Venn diagram between you and the school. On one hand, what is really unique about you and your background, and then on the other hand, what is really unique about the school or something they really want candidates to latch on to and resonate with, and then where is that intersection?
To give you an example, a big part of it for me was that I had a really international background. I worked in Asia, I worked in Latin America, and I thought that was something that stood out. At the same time, Wharton has a lot of global programs - both semester programs and shorter programs - and that is something they care about a lot. So I wrote to that angle. Another piece was that I had worked in marketplaces, which is quite niche, and so I wrote to that as well. The more niche you can get in terms of the Venn diagram between you and the school, the more it feels like you did your research. Obviously the best way to inform all of that is to speak to actual people, because they can help you uncover things you just didn't know about.
When I think about my overall application - from GMAT to essays to resume to recommendations - the parts where I think I stood out above and beyond the rest were certainly my academic background, because I think that offset my standardized test scores, and definitely my work experience as well, given that I had quite a distinctive background, which obviously ties into the essay. I think I was generally pretty on point when I answered the questions, at least for Wharton. And part of the reason Wharton made sense for me was that I liked the straightforward style - tell us what you want to get out of the program and what you're going to bring - as opposed to the more "what matters to you" style, which felt more wishy-washy.
It really came down to geography. I've never lived in the Midwest and I didn't see myself building a life there. If you look at all the data, a third of Booth - and Kellogg is in the same camp - a third of the people end up in the Midwest, and I just didn't really see that for myself. Wharton is almost like a satellite city to New York, a lot of people end up there, and my family is also in the Northeast, so for a lot of reasons it made sense.
What's also interesting about Wharton - people put broad categorizations on different schools, like Wharton and Booth are the finance schools, which sure, they have strong finance programs, but Wharton also has an incredibly strong network with the big tech companies. All of these schools are working on the emerging and growing industries and branching out, and in some ways they don't rest on their laurels because they're working harder to compete with Stanford, which is seen more as the startup and tech school.
One reason I chose Wharton, even though I didn't end up utilizing this resource a ton, was the fact that they had a semester in San Francisco. I wanted to explore living and working and interning in San Francisco, so that was part of the draw for me.
Another reason is a very personal, human angle. I worked with a couple of different Wharton alums when I was at DDI. It was a super international company, and Wharton just had that more international presence. I really liked the people I'd worked with who had gone to the school, and they shared enough about their experience that it dispelled this idea that Wharton is the kind of shady, sneaky finance school.
Business school is two years, and the first year experience often feels very different from the second year experience. Especially at a huge school like Wharton - that's 900 people per year - the first semester and year can feel extremely overwhelming because you come to campus with these ideas and this vision of what you're going to do, and it's very hard to stay grounded. You're trying to build your network, trying to milk everything you can out of this expensive degree you just paid for, trying to get all the opportunities, and you're busy recruiting for your internships. Then the second year is when things settle down a little bit - you get to know your classmates, you actually build a meaningful network, and you figure out what you're going to do after graduation. That's how I view the timeline of business school in a nutshell.
In terms of what I found really valuable - not to be a cliché, and it's one you can't really write about in your essays because it's too generic, but it's genuinely true - it's the network. It's the fact that a lot of these larger schools have hundreds of thousands of alumni in various forms, and you do start to find that when you reach out to these people, whether through LinkedIn or at an event, the dots start to connect. Even now, having started a new job in a new industry, I'm surprised by the number of people I know who are Wharton grads or who I meet in the wild but happen to have some kind of affiliation with Wharton. That was both valuable and surprising - I thought it was more of a cliché and a general thing, but I do genuinely think it's true.
My career was a bit nonlinear before business school, and I thought it was going to be a little more linear during and post business school, but that just wasn't in the cards for me. I went in thinking that I would try product management in big tech, and I followed through with that 100%. I got an internship doing product at eBay the summer after my first year. I think I had a similar experience to a lot of people who work in a huge team in big tech - you're spending a lot of your time just optimizing a tiny part of a huge platform and really feeling like that cog in a machine. It was nice to have the better work-life balance versus being in a startup, but I really craved more impact. That brought me back to the drawing board in terms of thinking, okay, where do I go next? Do I do product at a smaller place? Do I try to do something else?
Given that recruiting was a bit tough my second year, I started second year basically open to a lot of different opportunities. Through interviewing and talking to people, I was asking myself: if I don't want to do product, if I don't want to do big tech, if I don't want to live in SF, what are the options? I returned to that Venn diagram of what jobs are really attractive to me versus what unique skills I bring to the table. I realized it made more sense for me to be distributing a product rather than building the product, because I wasn't extremely technical and I just felt I have a better competitive edge on the distribution side. That's what, long story short, led me to look at an opportunity as a chief of staff at a B2B SaaS company, on the go-to-market side of things. I ended up doing product marketing in that role, and I still work in product marketing now, so I guess that worked out.
It really started after the MBA, because I worked a 9-to-5 remote job for the first time in my life. I had never had that much free time in my entire life. On one hand, I needed a hobby, and on the other hand, I also felt that if I wanted to do product marketing, I had to actually put in the work - I had to have proof that I can actually do this. Not just someone who can do the strategy, but someone who can actually execute. And that was just the most immediate way for me to do that.
I built a personal brand on Instagram and on LinkedIn. It really started as just something I was trying out and experimenting with. I found that it was something I really enjoyed - sharing my own career experiences, missteps with people, and building a community around people who've navigated difficult transitions in their career, explored different things, and felt like maybe they weren't tied to one corporate ladder. It's funny - you can go get an MBA from a great institution and still be like, wait, do I actually know how to do product marketing? Let me actually get some more exposure outside of work to really get that confidence and know that you can crush it in both places.
I recently started a new job in product marketing at a Series A startup, which is chaos every single day. But it's been a great learning experience. I actually got this job because I built a personal brand on LinkedIn - the company found me through that. That's your proof of work, right? It's an avenue where I'm able to put strategy into execution every single day.
The broader piece of this is that more and more, we talk a lot in business school about entrepreneurship, about building a business - that's the point of business school for a lot of people. And I'm doing that every single day. It's building something that is not relying upon a corporation or someone external.
Maybe it's just that I'm in this world now, but I see more and more people who have gone to business school and took a traditionally more straightforward route who are exploring things like solopreneurship, building a personal brand, ways to monetize themselves outside of the corporate ladder. I am still not sure where business school fits in that picture, but the people who have done both certainly share an interesting thread.
If you're just starting out in the journey, or thinking business school might be a good next step, there are three questions to ask yourself. Number one: is this going to help me pivot my career? The second one is how is this going to change my long-term compensation picture? Business school is fun and there are a lot of soft reasons to go, but it should definitely also be a ROI-calculated decision. The last piece is that a lot of people go to business school to grow their network, so think honestly to yourself: is that something that's actually valuable to you, is business school the best way to do that, and how are you going to take advantage of the resources? If you're able to answer those three questions in a way that really affirms that you should do this, it's also going to give you a lot of direction in terms of figuring out where you actually should apply to maximize those three things.
So many of the things you learn in business school are around people who started businesses and people who took a more entrepreneurial route. Another thing I learned in business school was just how many routes there are to do that. It's not just raising VC funding and going to start a company - it's also search funds and entrepreneurship through acquisition, which is something I completely didn't know about before business school, but is now a career path that a lot of people are exploring. I've taken a middle path, where I have a full-time role at a very entrepreneurial company, but at the same time I'm also trying to build leverage for myself, because at the end of the day, if you learn business, you realize that working for a salary is only going to get you so far. You have to build leverage in some way, and that's maybe my biggest meta takeaway as well.