Education
What's it like being a student at Stanford GSB? [Show summary] Ilana Walder-Biesanz’s eclectic background includes engineering, opera, product management, ballroom dance, data analytics, and theatre. In this episode, she shares why she also pursued an MBA from Stanford GSB. Should you include interests and experiences that are not directly business-related in your MBA application? Absolutely! [Show notes] This show's guest is a true Renaissance woman, currently interning for a company in Nigeria, after earning her MBA from Stanford GSB as a member of the Class of 2020. She also has a fascinating series of experiences before arriving at Stanford. Ilana Walder-Biesanz earned her bachelor's in engineering from the Olin College of Engineering in 2013. As a student at Olin, she also had an arts and humanities concentration in theater and founded the Olin Opera Organization. After graduating, she pursued her masters at the University of Cambridge in European Literature and Culture and was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She then studied for a year at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as a Fulbright Scholar. Returning to the U.S., she worked for three years for Yahoo as a Product Manager and joined Stanford's GSB class of 2020, where she was a Siebel Scholar and an RJ Miller Scholar. She just became a data analyst marketing intern, working remotely for a Nigerian-based company on behalf of Stanford Seed, the Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies. And what I've told you is just the tip of the iceberg. Ilana has traveled extensively. Per her LinkedIn profile, she speaks English, Spanish, German, and Italian reasonably well, and some Japanese, French, and Hebrew. I'm not exaggerating when I say she is a true Renaissance woman. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? [2:26] I grew up in Portland, Oregon to two parents who had both studied theater in college and had started their careers as actors. So they pretty much pushed me onto the stage as soon as I could walk and talk. I think that's been a through-line of things I'm interested in throughout my life in engineering and business: I've been an avid actress and theater-goer. Dance came a little bit later. I was horribly graceless as a child, and my mother (who was actually also a dance teacher on the side) despaired of me and pulled me out of dance classes because I was so bad at it. But at some point later in life, I found my feet and really developed a passion for ballroom dancing. Can you go into a little more depth on how you developed your interest in engineering and analytics, along with your interest in opera, dance, and the humanities? [3:27] The humanities and opera and dance definitely came first. I actually discovered engineering through Girl Scouts probably when I was eight or nine. My Girl Scout troop went to a Lego Robotics sampler. Just a day where we all built robots out of Legos together. I thought it was the coolest thing. I signed up for Lego Robotics after school and eventually graduated to building robots out of metal instead of Legos. I did that throughout middle school and high school and that was what sparked the interest in engineering and in building robots, which is pretty much what I did for my four years of my engineering degree. Why did you decide to go for an MBA? [4:25] I was working in tech as a product manager, and I think there were two things that sparked the MBA decision there. One was I felt like in my role as a product manager, a really solid grasp of business was what I was lacking most. I had the communication skills, I had the technical background, but product managers make a lot of business strategy decisions. I felt like I was Googling around for things and didn't really have a solid framework or understanding of the best way to approach those. I also had a hypothesis that I wanted to move out of product management and be more directly involved in the business side of things and swit...