It was a cold, windy and rainy afternoon in Chicago, the kind of day that Chicagoans dread and that makes West coast dwellers swell with pride about their choice of residence. I was sipping on my coffee, occasionally looking through the window to see if the rain had relented. My colleagues were hard at work on their computers, the noise of fingers working on keyboards interspersed with revenue discussions across desks. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the day so far.
But things were about to change a lot. I was about to turn to Google Search to look for resignation letter templates. Oh, the irony! I was going to ask Google to help me draft a letter that would end my four and a half year long stint at Google. The moment will stay with me forever. I typed a short note and sent it over to my manager, but as I had had a word with her earlier, she wasn’t surprised. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and so did my time at Google.
I was fortunate to have received offers from a few good schools in the US and UK, and after racking my brains for a little over a month to weigh up my options, I decided to get my MBA from Cambridge Judge Business School. The thought of walking down the same hallowed halls as immortals like Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin would once have kept me up at nights, and now it was going to be a reality. My wife secured a place at a school in London, and the exhilaration of pursuing academic advancement together in another country was palpable.
One of the primary motivations that drove my choice of the Cambridge MBA, is its proximity to the “Silicon Fen”, a large cluster of high-tech businesses focusing on software, electronics and biotechnology. Many of these businesses have connections with the University of Cambridge and the area is now one of the most important technology centres in Europe. This is supported by the founding of Cambridge Science Park, in 1970, and the Cambridge-MIT institute, set up in 2000 by the then Chancellor to the Exchequer Gordon Brown and allows the University of Cambridge to leverage the expertise of MIT.
It may be this proximity to the Silicon Fen that helps the Cambridge MBA Careers office to partner with some of the most sought after technology employers in the world. Many MBA candidates are set to start working at major technology firms upon completion of the program, and this might be attributed to Cambridge’s alliance with the southern tip of the English Fenland, Silicon Fen.