Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA ANNOTATION
Based on the daily diary Peter Robinson kept at Stanford Business School, and peppered with a cast of unforgettable characters and situations, Snapshots from Hell answers the perennial question "What is business school really like?" as it recounts the author's own precarious, exhilarating and sleepless quest for the coveted MBA degree.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Each year tens of thousands of America's best, brightest, and most ambitious consider going to business school. The enticement is the chance to earn an impressive credential, the highly touted MBA degree. To be crass, they all want to make money. And if they don't flunk out, go crazy, or otherwise crash, some of them may even get their heart's desire. As his thirtieth birthday loomed and his friends began to acquire such grown-up possessions as homes and European cars, Peter Robinson, then a presidential speechwriter, decided the time had come to embark on a different, and more lucrative, career path. To this end, he applied and was accepted into Stanford business school's prestigious MBA program. What he quickly discovered was that business school was a more confusing and overwhelming experience than he had expected. During his first year at Stanford, Robinson began keeping the journal of day-to-day impressions and experiences that evolved into this book, the writing of which he began to see as "a simple act of decency, like going back to the last calm bend in the river and nailing up a sign that reads 'Waterfall Ahead!'" Unlike any previous book or glossy catalogue, it dares to answer, honestly and insightfully, the paramount question of every prospective student, the only question that matters: What is business school really like? In Snapshots from Hell, we follow Robinson from his first harrowing days at "math camp" through his valiant, sometimes triumphant, sometimes futile attempts to navigate his way through a dizzying phalanx of core courses. We experience the horror of a "cold call," the frenzy of exam week, the challenges of learning the language of a strange new world, and the pitfalls and triumphs of the interview process. We see what business school does to Robinson's up-and-down, long-distance romance. We are also introduced to a remarkable cast of characters, ranging from Robinson's fellow "poets," students who lack a business background, to "joc
About the Author:
Peter Robinson spent six years as a
speechwriter in the Reagan White House. Among his speeches was the celebrated
"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech, which Reagan delivered in Berlin in
1987. Robinson is the host of the PBS television program, Uncommon Knowledge, and the author of two previous
books, It's My Party: A Republican's
Messy Love Affair with the GOP and Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an
MBA. A fellow at the Hoover Institution, he lives in Stanford, California.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
After six years as a White House speechwriter for Reagan and Bush, Robinson enrolled at Stanford Business School, wrestled for two years in perpetual exhaustion with often incomprehensible mathematical, organization and marketing concepts and, upon earning his MBA ``union card for yuppies,'' interviewed in the communications world of Robert Maxwell, Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch (who hired him for a brief stint). In the tradition of Scott Turow's One L for potential students who are curious about Harvard Law School, the author sets out with humor and perception to answer the question that no business school catalogue does: What is business school like? Then Robinson dismisses the value of an MBA degree in the economic downturn after the fat '80s; for him the degree did not pay off as a ``straight and easy road to riches.'' Robinson explains: ``Today I'm back to being what I was before I went to business school, a writer.'' BOMC and Fortune Book Club alternates. (May)
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