Mom, Dad, I’m here today to tell you that I’ve learned something about myself—started to learn something. You know that feeling some people find out in nature, developing a new craft, or building close relationships? I get that when I’m using jargon to obfuscate that I don’t really know what I’m saying. or when I’m getting bullied by a middle-aged programming genius. I want to implement next-gen AI solutions. I dream of B2B sales. I want to be around my peers—people who say “bootstrapping” like it's one word and do product management—those are my heroes.

I’m here to say: Yes, I’ve found my calling. It’s business school.

For me, a fresh excel sheet offers endless promise. A blank deck is the root of inspiration. Net promoter score surveys suggest the presence of God. I want to take a class on innovation taught by someone who’s never innovated. I want to learn about negotiation from someone who doesn’t negotiate. I want to assign numerical values to subjective information to justify my positions as “data-driven.” I need to study pop psychology with Adam Grant.

It’s true: I got into Wharton.

When I’m in a meeting room filled with 8-12 people, all of whom are trying to project authority and value-add while also avoiding taking any kind of ownership for steering the task at hand, I think: this is what life is all about. Corporate re-org? I’m hard. (Sorry Mom.) Give me a forty attendee Zoom meeting where half the people have their cameras off and the other half are clearly reading something on their screen over human connection any day. Business school is the only way to get ahead in this environment.

I want to stay up until 4:00 AM working and then have my boss respond to the result of my efforts at 5:30 AM with a text that says “sloppy. pls fix.” I wanna pull an all-nighter to fix it and then have him say, “scrap it. we’re pivoting.” I wanna work at a money losing start-up led by a barefoot billionaire who bankrupts us and still collects a ten-digit paycheck. I wanna cry at my desk for weeks so that Jeff Bezos can afford to buy his fiancé infinite boob jobs. I long to belong to a community: the community of MBAs.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you gathered up all the people in the world who are both reasonably intelligent and completely dependent on external validation for their self-worth and made them compete for entry level consulting jobs? It’s a good way to create functioning alcoholics, career coaches, and people who are willing to move to Dallas. We get to recreate the high school experience: binge drinking, clubs, group travel, and petty cliques. Except guess what? We don’t even get public grades!

Some people do go to B-school to learn hard skills. That’s not really what we’re talking about here. I’m going to network, to meet other people who know how to raise capital from their parents. Who knows? One day, I might be bootstrapping myself.

If you look around at the business leaders of today, it’s true that most of them didn’t go to business school or in some cases even graduate from college, but when you look at the next tier, the people who are those people’s bitches, most, if not all, of those guys and gals—they have MBAs. An MBA sets you apart in today’s career marketplace. It says, “I will work hard as long as someone else tells me what to do.”

Mom? Dad? I’ve come to you today with a pitch: What if… you could get in on the ground floor of me?

I ONLY need three hundred grand.