Business School Statement of Purpose 2021
CITIZEN ZERO PUBLIC CORRESPONDENCE: An open letter to MBA programs out there..
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Editorial Note 2023.02.13: This 1700-word essay below was intended as 'Statement of Purpose' by Citizen Zero for a Business Education Course at University of California at Berkeley, and was not further pursued on account of the high fees structure of these programs. The letter is placed here for public-domain access.• [2021.12.20] • It was nearing 7 years that I had remained out of employment. The world out there had gotten to seem out of focus, complicated, judgemental, & even frighteningly hostile to return to. I had returned to a strange dystopian state of dependency on the people & places I had left behind as a child, while my heroes my friends I had made as a young adult in my time of independence waited for me on the other side. For specific reasons I hope to elucidate through this essay, I had struggled to readjust my bearings returning from America looking for something I could not see my environment provide me with & so, falling in that special kind of a fall where the one falling is not permitted to hit bottom but keeps falling, I was quite literally stuck at salvation-holdout-central trying to petition the lord or plan to attend graduate school as a means to be able to return to the workforce. Beginning of 2007, I had started at my first full-time job in America having graduated by then with a Bachelor's & Masters' degree in electronics, communication, & computer engineering. Every academic checkpoint I had crossed & educational loan I had taken until then seemed to have resolved on its own by the virtue of my arriving there in Silicon Valley California. Here was Oz, where everything techno-magical in the world was built, & with a salary that put me in the top 90 percentile of the income-earning population of the world, I was for the first time in my life freed of various encumbrances from academic rigours to social customs. My mind-body so far trained to competitive necessities of life in India arriving but as a seed of ambition matured in the American soil into a little plant of many latent wonders, and central to my happiness became my friends, the San Francisco Bay Area life, & my job which was the glue that held these things together. Over the next seven years as a Computer Engineer in behemoth corporations, I had developed the technical experience & special knowledge of Network Systems applied to data-centers, ethernet-switching, & enterprise-routing as a wallflower in myriad software & hardware departments from design, verification, bring-up of in-house-designed ASIC microchips, kernel & operating systems, device-drivers & boot-rom development, board-prototyping, manufacturing diagnostics, quality testing, & the occasional party-planning committees. In addition, my daily work in The United States involved collaboration with teams in India & China, & this helped me develop the long view supply-chain logistics prevalent with original-equipment-manufacturers in the world of present-day, & this particular broadening of my horizon felt somewhat specially esoteric at that time. I had from my vantage a bird's eye view of Moore's Law in progress as I witnessed transistor gate-length approach nano-scale from micro-scale in hardware-description-language & vendor-fabrication technologies, & of the overall hardware-product lifecycle that was 2-3 years ahead of software builds, releases, & licensing. These experiences were by no means a steady unhindered climb to the top, rather it was like being dragged through the mud to the bottom of the company where no one wanted to be, endured as I did in the process workplace intrigues, organizational lay-offs, salary caps & no promotions until about 5 years when I found the right team that valued the arcane knowledge I had built up. I was just beginning to settle. Life in San Francisco offered then an unparalleled work-life balance- being one of the prettiest big-cities in the world, with global diversity of culture, nearness of the pacific ocean, plethora of bars & restaurants, weekend camping getaways & national parks in every direction, not to mention beaches, hills, bicycling lanes & wiggles, easy public transport, tennis courts, & even dog-parks nearly everywhere. Of course, I could only realize & reminisce what a good thing I had going till then when in 2014 I returned to India, after some 9 years away. I had had a realization of a health emergency in my life, & struggling feeling marooned somewhat like the blinking cursor on the screen at my daily job, resigned & came back hoping to convalsce in India. But nothing would ever be the same again. Not only had my hometown transformed to a chaotic bustling big city in its own right, where I would be ever so disoriented without the ocean I had gotten accustomed for a reference, & knowing no more than the neighborhoods where I had grown up a somewhat sheltered life with my grandparents, but also I found that my job specialization had left me somewhat siloed to the work in California. It isn't to suggest that there were no jobs good enough for me or that the appropriated salary was not high enough for my expectations, (though according to a world bank study India ranked 100 out of 194 countries in job-income levels.) I certainly didn't try as hard as I would have liked to, but it was what I observed in the nouveau-riche professional working-class of the land that left me easily despondent about my prospects of continuing my career the same way here. The harsher work-life conditions of the 60-80 hour work weeks, the daily commute that seemed to border on crazy-making, the absence of closeness with nature; but somewhat more disheartening was to see engineers & business graduates educated in varied specialities gravitate for a paycheck towards the software job market of outsourced work or say, online retailing for MNCs; & importantly, that this kind of work if not mediocre never led to innovations in the science & technological progress of the country. I took to traveling about India for few months a year having covered some 18 out of 31 states thus far in my life. Nearly everywhere I went I witnessed the country rocketing towards development & modernization- city metro train networks, national highway constructions, proliferation of mobile phone technologies, banking, & e-commerce. Even the AADHAR the nation's biometric project had reached nearly a billion people & chanced to facilitate individual empowerment of many government & corporate services. It was the wave of the future & these things needed long term vision, planning & policy for overall success in scalability, stability & security. I was really stoked to learn that India is the world's third-largest generator of electric-power capacity in the world, read an editorial that domestic supply had reached staggeringly 99 percent of the total towns & villages. That while domestic per capita carbon-costprint in a some wholesome good way, was a lot less than than that of highly-industrialized-nations, & India's manufacturing sector accounted for less than 30 percent of the economy. The Indian economy in resource/reality seemed at least as large as the economies of nation-states constituting the EU economy, though its utilization efficiency had lagged on account of the slow progress of industrialization, federalism, & economic liberalization, & though those cautionary years seemed justifiable in view of the consolidation of the newly emerged world's most populous republic, to me, it was just the starting line. Yet every case for development made a stronger case for environmental protection & betterment. while India was the world's third largest producer of coal, that the levels of air, water, ground pollution & temperatures were rising precariously close to global warming dangers of rising sea-levels & on being as it was the world's largest peninsula. To me energy independence was critical for India's environmental well-being & national security, & to ensure these India needed to leapfrog in design, manufacturing, development & capacity for solar, renewable & clean energy technologies. But this was the bright side — India to my discovery was a microcosm for sustainable development grand challenges for anywhere in the world. Even the success of a pilot project within India would imply as large-scale a solution as befits any other nation in the world. It was clear to me that India presented opportunities to foray into so many sectors that working in the United States on a work-visa had thus far restricted. But I had already come a long way & spent many years in technology specialization, while veritably seemed to lack business talent, & experience to make bold choices & hope the mighty forces would come to my aid. Or, if I didn't lack foolhardy bravery I was clueless on where & how to apply my intelligence. At this point in my life, looking back upon my personal debacles I realized that the devil-may-care attitude in my budgetary-indiscretions, resource-planning, time-management to be utterly shocking, irresponsible, whimsical & that particular fall from grace was nothing like I ever had to encounter in my entire life. I regarded now with some relevance my experience working as an engineer in cross-functional & international teams, even as being a fringe part of the project-planning & product-roadmap strategy meetings. I see the best way to retrieve the time that's lost & to return to some standing among my friends & colleagues would be to gain a business education. I think the Berkeley Professional Certification programs in International Economy & Businesses, is the apt segue for me to return to the fold of things, in the place that I love, & in being able to share a worldview with the people who I regard would keep me challenged & innovative. The first time I was in Berkeley was at The Coliseum for The Pavement concert, & it was the first concert I had attended in America, & I vividly remember the atmosphere being electric, buzzing with optimism & a strange fearlessness, & I thinking how special the people here. A few years down the road, stranger than fiction, as it turns out - I got on a yellow magic bus with some people I met at a bar in the Mission District of San Francisco, & we drove back across the Bay Bridge to the Berkeley Campus. These merry pranksters were then graduating students of the university who I learned had broken-off from the mainstream & started the Berkeley Food Co-Op. They grew their own food, brew their own wines, crafted their own musical instruments, & later that night we sat on tenement rooftops contemplating Jazz & The El & Everything. As the party went on into the early hours of the morning, they had formed a human circle holding hands & would run around & whoosh in & sway out, & everyone singing out aloud the Bohemian Rhapsody song - I joined in. So here's hoping for the best, do select me! •
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