About Christine: Christine Sasaki (‘24) completed her undergraduate studies at Emory University where she received a Bachelor of Business Administration with concentrations in Marketing and Strategy. Following graduation, she returned to her hometown of Los Angeles where she worked in advertising brand strategy on accounts in the consumer, TMT, and automotive industries. Christine plans to pivot her career from advertising to management consulting, and chose Anderson for its highly collaborative and student-led culture.

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I’ve always heard that business school moves quickly, but oh wow, how time flies! It’s mind-boggling to think that my cohort’s first year is already halfway complete when the first day of orientation seems like it was just a couple weeks ago. Yet, here we are, a little wiser in accounting, economics, and R coding (among other topics), and well under way in recruiting, our club director roles, and finals.

As the quarter comes to a close, I find myself oscillating between feeling immensely energized from the personal and professional growth I’ve already had at Anderson and needing a nap. However, I would be remiss as an MBA to not round out this digressive monologue with a “so what” and a few takeaways. So, here are three of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from my first fall quarter:

Lesson 1: Asking good questions is a trainable skill. Throughout life, I’ve heard phrases like, “there is no such thing as a bad question,” yet in reality, developing questions that facilitate deeper connections and perspective sharing is far from an innate ability. While conducting research and studying course material is foundational to spurring inquisition – after all, you need to know something to be able to probe on it – the ability to maximize the value of any interpersonal exchange requires tactful communication strategies and active listening skills that can and should be practiced regularly. 

Lesson 2: Perfection is the enemy of good. For this learning, I’ll borrow a concept from our core economics course: the law of diminishing returns. In an ideal world, everyone would have unlimited time and mental bandwidth to create masterpieces out of every single thing we cross paths with. However, my learning team and I quickly came to the realization that business school is definitely not that ideal world. Prioritizing efficiency became more imperative as our somewhat fast-paced summer quarter ramped into an even faster-paced fall quarter. For me personally, this meant internalizing that law of diminishing returns – realizing that sometimes, the first (or second) draft of something is sufficient and that time boxing tasks is a friend and not a foe. Which brings me to the last lesson from this quarter…

Lesson 3: Time is the only true zero sum in business school. Many people perceive MBA programs to be cut-throat environments created by a finite quantity of internship spots, a competitive curve, and an over-selection of naturally ambitious people. However, for this learning I’ll directly lift a lesson from our negotiations module in Organizational Behavior: the value pie more often than not increases in size through collaboration. That is, there’s always more value to be captured through working together instead of competing. I’ve learned over the past quarter that every hour spent operating in a silo was an hour taken away from collaborating with peers, professors, and even alumni to maximize the value pie. And thus as I continue forward, I’m finding myself prioritizing opportunities to increase collaboration to continue growing that pie among my peers.

This may come across as hyperbolic, but I can’t recall a time in my life that’s felt more busy than these past four months at Anderson. And while the workload is challenging at times, it is everything I’ve hoped for in my business school experience. In fact, one of the reasons I chose Anderson was for its highly engaged student community – I wanted to be able to feed my wide ranging, and sometimes random, interests with academic, extracurricular, and social stimuli. And I’ve had more than enough opportunities to do so through the seven student-run organizations I’m a part of and through my ever-growing network. Thus, one could argue that this running-around-like-a-headless-chicken state of being is exactly what I signed up for – and I look forward to the remaining five quarters of exactly that.

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Student Blogger: Christine Sasaki ‘24

Undergrad: Emory University (’17) – B.B.A. (Concentrations: Marketing and Strategy)

Pre-MBA: Brand Strategist, MullenLowe

Leadership@Anderson: Director of Admit Events, Admission Ambassador Corps; Director of Community, Management Consulting Association; Director of Admissions, Asian Management Student Association; Director of Santa Ynez Excursions, Anderson Wine Club; Executive Vice President, Section C