From Big Four to New York Finance: Do MBAs Require Partying? ft. KC

Updated 2026/10/16

This post is a condensed transcript of my podcast episode. Click here 👉🏻 to listen to the full episode (in Chinese).

If you enjoy it, please leave my podcast a five-star rating on your platform 🌟 (transcripts take a lot of work 🥹)!

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Hi, and welcome to Jason’s Career Folder. I’m your host, Jason, and I’ve been sharing content about careers and studying abroad for a long time. Here you can open the folder and explore people’s stories, and you can also help me edit it: add to your experience, pick up new perspectives and learn something new.

🎤 Guest: KC

Instagram | @kc_usmba

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In this episode:

📂 Why KC applied to an MBA, the application process and its challenges, and job hunting in US finance

📂 How long the MBA application took, and which part was hardest

📂 The MBA experience: did it match his expectations?

📂 What a typical MBA day looks like, and whether he spent a lot of time networking after class

📂 What he gained most from the MBA (soft skills, hard skills, mindset, personal plans, values and so on)

📂 MBAs are famously expensive: how stressful is it to worry about not finding a job?

📂 How he prepared for the job search, and which strengths or skills helped him land a job in the US

📂 What he did during his summer internship to get a return offer

📂 Which traits and abilities US finance firms care about most in interviews

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Part 1: Why an MBA, the application process and its challenges

I’m really happy to have KC here today to share
why he applied to an MBA, what the application was like and the challenges he faced, what the MBA itself was like,
and what he learned job hunting in New York finance and running his own social media.
If you’re curious, keep listening!

KC introduces himself

Hi everyone, I’m glad to be on Jason’s podcast today. Jason and I met through Instagram, where we both started out posting about studying abroad. I graduated from the Michigan Ross MBA at the end of April 2023, and I now work in Corporate Finance at a financial company in New York.

When did you start planning an MBA? After a few years of work, or did you already want to study abroad in college?

Good question. I think my path is a bit different. Most people decide to apply for an MBA after they’ve worked for a while (MBAs usually expect 3 to 5 years of work experience, and the average age at most US programs is around 28 to 30).

For me, I’d wanted to study abroad since I was very young, but back then I didn’t know what to study. I just knew I wanted to go into finance, because I was really interested in it, especially financial analysis!

So after college and my military service, I started preparing for the GMAT and the TOEFL, which you need to apply to US schools. My goal at the time was actually a Master of Finance. But while I was preparing for the GMAT, I joined a study group at a prep school, and most people there were preparing for an MBA. I didn’t know much about MBAs then, and I kept wondering why everyone wanted one.

Through the GMAT prep I got to know more of them, and I realized an MBA was different from what I’d imagined. What it offered was actually closer to what I wanted. So after the GMAT I made up my mind and got a job, to build up the 3 to 5 years of work experience an MBA needs. I really went to work for the sake of the MBA. Otherwise my plan had been to go abroad right after the exam.

How long did the MBA application take, and which part was hardest?

Since I started working right after the GMAT, I was preparing the whole time. I don’t mean writing essays, since you usually only write those in the last few months. I mean going to MBA events, meeting people who’d done an MBA, and learning what an MBA really is, the details, and how it could help me get to what I wanted to do. So I did a lot of research and a lot of preparation.

That’s when I found there’s much more information on English-language websites than in Chinese. I know Jason also uses a study abroad website, and I found more information in English too. Reading English isn’t the problem, since anyone planning to study abroad is probably comfortable with it. The hard part is that their backgrounds are different from ours, so even after reading their stories, it’s hard to use them to write something of our own.

That’s why I think what Jason is doing is great: he built a study abroad forum, OfferLand, where people can share their own information. That was also why I started blogging in the first place. There was so little in Chinese that I decided to write down what I’d learned along the way.

So I think the hardest part is really “finding a school you truly want to go to”, because every MBA class leans in a different direction. Jason’s Columbia MBA, for example, has a great location (in New York) and lots of finance resources. Like I said, New York has a lot of resources, and an MBA is very much about networking, so each class can be very different. If a lot of people in one class go into finance and finance is what you want, that MBA will help you far more than others would, say more than a West Coast MBA. The difference is very clear! So the hard part is working out what you actually want to do, and which MBA programs fit that direction.

Another hard part is the GMAT. It was OK for me, but for most people it takes a while. If you’re working, you really have to carve out time. If you can find three to four hours a day to prepare seriously for the GMAT, that will probably help. Some schools waive the GMAT, of course, but I’d still suggest taking it if you can. If your score really won’t go up, then think about a waiver. From what I’ve seen, people with higher GMAT scores seem a bit more likely to get scholarships. That’s not a rule, though, just what I’ve seen among people around me.

Apart from preparing early for the GMAT, what other difficulties did you run into? If you could redo your application, what would you change?

Good question. Like I said, I prepared for a long time.
Most people suddenly decide in the last year or two that they want an MBA. I decided very early,
and I took a job for the MBA. So I wish I’d known about MBAs even earlier.
This may not apply to everyone, but if I’d known what an MBA was in college
and had already known I’d do one, the way Jason started preparing in college,
that would have been great. The earlier you prepare, the better, because you see what you can avoid.
For example, my goal back then was to go straight to an MBA, so I studied for the GMAT full time without a job.
I spent several months of my life doing nothing but studying for an exam,
and that feels a bit wasteful now. If I’d known from the start that I was preparing for an MBA,
I would have gone straight to work and prepared on the side, since I’d know the MBA was three to five years away.
So looking back, if you’re listening and you’re a college student,
start researching right now: why you want an MBA and which MBA you want,
and then work backward to what you need to prepare now.

Part 2: The MBA experience

Once you were in the MBA, was it different from what you expected?

I’m on the conservative, pessimistic side.
What I mean is, when people say something is great, I discount it in my head and ask whether it’s really that good.
That’s my habit, and because I’d already discounted it,
the MBA turned out pretty much as I expected.
I do think most people make it sound too good. That’s understandable: you worked hard to get in,
so when you talk about it you share the good parts. Talking about the bad parts would feel like admitting that something you chased so hard
turned out disappointing. I prefer to tell it straight.
I’m not saying others are wrong. Maybe they really had a better experience. I was lucky too, but I want to share what it’s really like for more people.
OK, first: an MBA is not a magic pill. A lot of people think that after an MBA you can get into
big companies and switch careers. That’s unrealistic.
When we switch, there are three things you can change: country,
function and industry.
You can usually only change two. Changing all three at once is really hard.
That’s the truth. Since moving abroad already changes the country, you can either change function
or change industry. If you were already in tech, going back into tech is easier. If you were in, say, consumer goods
and not in that function either, and you want to change both and suddenly become a tech PM, that’s clearly unrealistic.
Either you were already in tech or you were already a PM. Even outside tech, at least one thing has to match
for it to be much easier. So my first piece of advice is: don’t assume that after an MBA
you can switch all three. I’ve seen very, very few people do it, unless they go into something like consulting.
Consulting doesn’t really care about your background, and maybe IB (Investment Banking)
doesn’t either, but IB is a different story, and we’ll get to IB later.
Anyway, first, don’t treat the MBA as a magic pill.
Second, people say an MBA is a place with
lots of parties and lots of networking. That part is true.
It really is like that. Everyone here makes friends,
and honestly there’s a bit too much drinking. For me, I don’t want to drink too much, but once I’ve had one,
I keep going and lose control a bit. So yes, that part is real. But if you don’t drink,
or you just don’t like networking, that’s fine too. Plenty of people skip those events,
and there are other ways to network. You don’t have to do it that way.
To build friendships, you don’t have to go to drinking parties. That kind of networking is more for work,
like company events. But for keeping in touch with friends,
at Michigan we’d sometimes go to someone’s house, and someone would bring their dog.
There’d be a big yard, and we’d hang out, play board games or chat and drink.
Very chill. You don’t have to drink.
I still drink, but you don’t have to. If you don’t like drinking
or you’re shy, you can definitely find your circle. So don’t think you need to be super outgoing to do an MBA.
Not at all. Plenty of people are introverts, and that’s fine.
It suits all kinds of people. That’s roughly it. Oh, sorry,
one more thing, because this year is unusual. MBA hiring depends heavily on the job market.
Whether the economy is good or not directly affects our job search.
This year the job market isn’t great. As far as I know, in consulting,
which is usually the biggest MBA destination,
the industry that hires the most MBAs, so most people go there,
consulting has been hit by the job market this year. A return offer
means you intern there, they think you’re good, and they give you an offer
to come back and work for them after you finish your final MBA year.
That’s why your summer internship matters so much,
the one between your first and second year.
It directly decides whether you have a job lined up after graduating. In a normal year, in consulting,
as long as you don’t mess up badly, about 90% of interns get return offers. This year, from what I understand, it’s under 40%.
So MBA hiring is very sensitive to the economy, and you should keep that in mind.

What does a typical MBA day look like? Do you spend a lot of time networking after class?

Every day is different, very different.
People say you have to read a lot of cases and it takes forever, and that’s true.
Especially at the start, since we’re not native speakers, reading can take us several times longer than a native speaker.
So at first we have to put more time into classes. At least I did, because I wanted to fit in.
That’s the first thing. Second, there are far too many networking events.
You can’t go to all of them. If you did, you couldn’t keep up with anything else.
For us, the most important thing is the job search. Some networking is really just
hanging out and making friends with classmates, so you can decide whether to go.
My priority at the start was the job first, school second,
and then networking with friends. That was my order. Everyone can choose differently.
I knew I couldn’t do everything, so the job search came first.
With the job search first, I was always either polishing my resume
or networking, the virtual coffee chat kind,
talking to companies online and learning about their culture.
Once you’re in the industry, you’ll see how important networking is. Ideally, by the time they interview you,
they already know you, the people around them know you,
and they’ve heard positive feedback about you.
So you have to network. It’s necessary, a necessary evil, though actually “evil” isn’t quite right,
because I understand why it works this way. If two candidates are equally strong,
and I already know one of them well from networking in person, and I see he’s networked a lot,
doesn’t that suggest his commitment to the company is higher and he’s more serious?
It goes both ways: you’re looking for them and they’re looking for you.
So if your commitment is high, it can raise your chances of getting hired.
I think there’s a positive relationship there. So it’s necessary for both sides to get to know each other.
In the US about 70% of jobs come through networking, and that number seems to keep rising. I think that makes sense,
because when everyone is about equal and there’s one position, if your commitment is higher than others’,
that suggests you might be more interested. So yes, I think it’s necessary.
The rest of the time is for hanging out with friends. That’s about it.
The job search came first: finding openings to apply to, networking, sending
cold emails asking people for a chat, or going to corporate presentations.
Back then they were all online, and most probably still are, since companies realized flying people in was kind of pointless.
Online is easier. Companies are a bit lazy about it: they put it online and schools across the US join at once.
They only have to do it once and save a lot on travel expenses, so it’s convenient. With the rest of my time I read cases,
because reading cases still improves your English and your work knowledge. Especially
projects with hands-on experience working with a company, I took those assignments more seriously,
because they felt like an internship before the internship.
So I worked hard on those. At Ross we have something called MAP, where you work with a company
on a hands-on project, and I thought that was very important. Third was making friends and hanging out,
and the more casual networking.

You’ve shared your English study plans on Instagram. How did you improve your English before starting the MBA?

Great question. Like I said, I’m a pessimistic, conservative type,
so no matter what people said about my English, I still wanted to improve it. Before going abroad I kept taking
online speaking classes. I chose HiTutor, but I’m not saying you have to use it.
Find one you like. I still take classes now, on a platform called
AmazingTalker, which has all kinds of teachers. Find one you like and try a trial lesson.
Keeping yourself in that environment helps a lot. But even after I’d practiced for a year,
a year or two of online English classes before going abroad, once I got here I still found it wasn’t enough.
At least for me, and I think for most people, there’s still a gap.
Especially in business school, unlike engineering or computer science, we really need strong speaking skills.
Written emails are something everyone can basically handle.
Think about it: we’re competing with Americans. What’s going to make you stand out?
If your speaking is already weaker than theirs, your other skills have to be stronger, and your speaking can’t be too far behind.
So yes, that’s really how it is. While I’ve been here I’ve kept working hard on my English,
even making a few native speaker friends, and I’ve also taken more online classes,
for example to fix my pronunciation and linking sounds.
I still pay attention to this. People ask why I bother since I’m already here, but I still want
to keep improving. I’m already here, so I want to keep getting better. And the fastest way
is still finding friends and having conversations with them,
more casual ones. Honestly, my English improved the most during my internship and work,
when I was using business English every day.
Not everyone has that environment, of course, because you need the internship or job first. So you just have to
keep improving. Keep up habits like talking with friends
or watching shows or anything else that keeps you
in that environment. I’ve seen quite a few people who did an MBA or another master’s
and barely changed, as if they’d just moved somewhere new. They don’t use much English, especially here in New York.
There are a lot of Chinese speakers in New York, so some friends never really
step out of their comfort zone and create that environment for themselves. It really happens, especially on the East and West Coasts,
in cities with large Chinese-speaking communities. So you have to push yourself to
step out of your comfort zone and make a few native speaker friends.
Even if they’re not native speakers,
that’s fine, just people from other countries. Don’t communicate only in Chinese. I think that helps a lot.
Go to more events. On my side I also put in extra work,
like the online classes. Awareness matters too.
When people use certain words, some just hear them and move on, but I try to learn
their expressions. In business, some people use really nice words, and I try to memorize them
and learn them, as many as I can. That kind of awareness matters a lot. That’s how I do it.

What did you gain most from the MBA (soft skills, hard skills, mindset, personal plans, values and so on)? How did you change?

Great question, because a lot of people still don’t quite understand MBAs.
Like I said, there really isn’t much in Chinese. What the MBA changed most for me
was soft skills. As for hard skills, in my current job
the MBA helped, but I could have learned that on my own. Mostly it was soft skills:
working with people of different nationalities on a project,
and seeing how people from other countries approach work, which is
very, very different from Taiwan. I learned a lot there. Another great thing
is, and I know it’s a cliché, it really did broaden my horizons. Because
your classmates are all very talented, and so are the people at your internship and full-time job.
Everyone is extremely capable, and the international students were probably among the best in their countries before they came over.
So it’s a good competitive environment. When everyone around you is that good, you want to be
just as good or better. It’s really motivating. You get that in Taiwan too,
but it feels different. I have to say Taiwanese people are
very… honestly, sometimes I find it a pity, because many Taiwanese are very talented.
First, there’s foreign language ability. Second, Taiwan’s work culture is still
a bit too grueling, at least in my experience. It always felt too grueling to me, and that makes it hard to keep talent.
People feel they can’t take it. So when I see very talented Taiwanese people abroad,
I feel it’s a pity for Taiwan.
If all these talented people went back to Taiwan, imagine how much they could help.
But Taiwan’s work environment is a bit too grueling, or the packages can’t be as
competitive as abroad, so it can’t keep talent. I find that a little sad. In terms of mindset, after coming here
I feel like I’ve stepped outside a box. In Taiwan, at least among the people around me,
most people are very capable, but the frame tends to be narrow.
A lot of conversations are about how young you are, which big company you’re at, how much you earn, whether you have a car and a house,
that sort of thing. It feels like success has already been defined, a bit limiting. That’s just my personal view,
and I find it a pity. In the US, we care about those things too, but
at least my classmates and colleagues here seem to care more about work-life balance.
Like I said, Taiwan doesn’t really have that kind of working culture,
which is a pity. Here, besides money, many people care about other things too. For example,
taking a gap year to travel or meet different people. There are also more ethnicities here,
so people think more differently, and you get more exposure to different people and things.
It feels broader, and people value different things. In Taiwan most people seem to focus on
which company you work for, how much you earn, and that feels more limiting.
This opened me up. I realized we have lots of choices, and we don’t have to climb into a big company to count as
successful. The definition of success is broader. That’s what changed most for me.

Part 3: Job hunting in US finance

MBAs are famously expensive. Were you stressed about not finding a job in the US?

Good question. It really is very, very expensive.
But I got quite a lot of scholarship money, more than half of my tuition. Let me explain
for anyone who doesn’t know. MBA tuition is expensive. At Michigan Ross, tuition is about 73,000
to 74,000 a year, so for two years you multiply by two, almost 150,000.
Columbia or NYU are even more expensive. If I remember right, they’re about 82,000 to 83,000,
a good 10,000 more, so about 170,000 to 180,000 in total.
That’s NT$1 million more, very, very expensive. I got a good amount of scholarship money,
so first of all, it cost me less than most people.
So I didn’t have the kind of pressure people without scholarships have.
I felt I could earn it back, so the pressure for me wasn’t about money.
I was OK. But some people around me had no scholarship, and their stress level was very, very high.
Especially some who just finished their internships and didn’t get a return offer.
They’re under even more pressure. Even without a return offer you can keep looking in your second year,
but they put even more pressure on themselves. Think about it:
tuition of roughly NT$6 million at NYU, and the cost of living here is higher too.
You might spend NT$1.5 million a year, so NT$3 million over two years.
Add the NT$6 million and that’s over NT$9 million, almost NT$10 million for two years. If that doesn’t get you
a job that pays it back, the pressure is real. And NT$10 million is
hard to earn back in Taiwan, I have to say. So most people are very stressed, but I was OK,
partly because, like I said, I got a lot of scholarship money, and also I got a return offer from my internship.
So I didn’t have that much pressure.

Taking Michigan Ross as an example, where and in which industries do Asian students usually work after graduating? Is US finance harder for Asians to get into?

Yes, but it depends on the function.
If you’re more quant-oriented, for example, that’s not an issue. It depends on the function.
I work on the corporate side, inside the company,
and it’s not as bad there as I described. The hardest is
IB, or even VC and PE. Those are the
hardest, especially for Asian men. Why do I say that? I’m going by the data,
really by the data, plus some friends’ experiences. So I’m not necessarily right,
it’s just what I’ve observed and the feedback most people gave me. Investment banks won’t admit it,
but they have diversity goals. They want their people to be diverse
in ethnicity and even gender. As everyone knows, investment banking is mostly male,
and more specifically, white men are the biggest group.
So they want to make it more diverse, and sometimes they give Hispanic candidates
from Central and South America, and Black candidates, reserved spots, and they can apply first, through things like
early applications that only those two groups can use. And if you’re a woman, at least at my company,
those three groups get to apply first, and they also have reserved spots.
As men, we’re not in any of those three. On top of that, as I said at the start, this field relies a lot on speaking,
especially IB, and we’re probably not native speakers. So from what I’ve seen,
if you didn’t study in the US, Canada or Hong Kong, or work there,
going straight from Taiwan into an MBA and then into IB is really, really hard.
I don’t know many people who did it. I can count them on one hand. It’s very difficult.
So if you want to get into these fields, you’ll have to work harder and be better than others,
not a bit better, a lot better. That’s what I’ve observed, though it isn’t necessarily the same every year.
It isn’t necessarily the same every year, but in recent years there seem to be very few Asian men like us, born and raised in Taiwan,
who did a two-year MBA here and went straight in. It’s much harder.

How did you prepare before job hunting in the US? What strengths or skills helped you land a job there?

My situation may be different from many people’s. Most people,
at least many of the Taiwanese around me, most want to do
consulting, tech or IB, and they weren’t in consulting before,
hadn’t done IB and hadn’t worked in tech. They want to use the MBA to switch,
so it’s harder for them. For me, I’d always wanted to do corporate finance. It was my
Plan A and my Plan B. I had no other plan. Most alumni and the school told us
to have a Plan A and a Plan B and not put all your eggs in one basket. But I know myself well and I was sure this was what I wanted.
I didn’t want to do anything else, so I didn’t apply to any other function, not a single one. Everything I applied to was corporate finance,
because I knew that’s what I wanted. My skill points had always gone into this area too.
I have an accounting (CPA) license, I took the CFA, and in college
I took a lot of finance electives. So all my points went there, and for me
the switch wasn’t as big as for others. That gave me a real advantage.
Another thing is that corporate finance isn’t a major MBA path, so there’s less competition and it was easier to stand out.
At school we have a club called the Finance Club.
Most people there want IB. People like me who want corporate finance were fewer than 10 at our school.
Our class has about 400 people, and fewer than 10 want this path, so if you work out
the percentage, it’s very low. I think it’s similar at every school. It’s not a very fancy job, but it’s what I want to do and what interests me.
So I had fewer competitors. But less competition also means less supply and fewer options.
I searched for a long time, and not many companies were willing to sponsor a visa. If you already have status, there’s no problem,
but I needed work visa sponsorship, so the search was harder and mostly at large companies.
So the applications were still very competitive, because everyone wants to go to the big companies. For this, I didn’t
train for a few months. I’d been building these skills for years, because I knew this is what I wanted to do.
So for me it was OK. But I know many people, like one person who wanted to move into tech PM.
In Taiwan he wasn’t in tech and he wasn’t a PM.
So he decided to switch one thing first. He became a PM first,
a PM in finance, because that was easiest for him to get into, and now he has a tech PM job.
So like I said, switching all three is a bit unrealistic. We’ve already switched countries, so
you have to get one of the others sorted first. Then it’s easier to job hunt here.

What did you do during your MBA summer internship to get a return offer? In US finance, which traits or abilities do interviewers care about most?

Let me answer the first question first, what I did.
I think there were two things. First, I asked a lot of questions. That’s a big change the MBA brought for me.
Everyone asks questions eagerly. In one class there might be
thirty or forty questions, hands up, in maybe two hours. So many questions, and gradually
I started loving to ask questions too, because I really wanted to know why. So in meetings, or
during walk-throughs with my manager when they explained things, I kept asking questions.
They encouraged it, and the positive feedback I got was that I wasn’t afraid to ask and asked good questions.
Asking questions also shows you’re interested in the subject, which is my second point.
I was genuinely interested in this work from the inside out. I actually asked my manager about it.
For my role, they hired only one person in the whole US,
only one in finance, and they’d never hired for it before. At our company
this isn’t a common MBA program. We only started hiring MBAs around 2019,
and that was finance’s first MBA hire. I don’t think they hired again this year, so so far I’m the only one.
So I asked him, out of so many people, why did you only pick me? He joked first, he’s funny.
He said, are you trying to show off how great you are?
Of course it was a joke. I said no, I just wanted to know. Then he said teaching someone
finance skills isn’t hard. These skills and this mindset,
building them from zero isn’t that hard. You know, especially in business,
you learn by doing and do by learning. That’s how it is.
He said what’s hard is making someone who isn’t interested become interested.
When he interviewed me, he felt I was genuinely interested from the inside out,
and my background fit too, of course, so that’s why they hired me. So I think those two things
were the key to getting my return offer. First, I asked good questions. Second, they felt
I was genuinely interested in the work. When someone is interested in something, you can’t fake it.
You really can’t fake it. So that’s the first question. The second one, you asked
what traits they look for. That’s hard for me to answer. I think every company wants something different,
and every function too, so I can’t really answer that. But again,
especially for IB, though my role isn’t really an IB role, if you’re going into IB you really need to network well.
You need to put a lot of effort into it. IB is definitely the job with the most networking.
Then build whatever hard skills you can. For finance,
they’ll say they don’t care about background, but if you already have a finance background, that’s best, or some skills,
like a CFA. It doesn’t have to be that hardcore. Some people
don’t have that, but they took finance courses at school, which can be enough to show you have a foundation.
I don’t think they need really hard skills, because they can train you. But they still want
… they hire a lot of veterans. If you come here you’ll see many roles open to veterans,
almost like a reserved track. Veterans are tough in a way, and they don’t quit easily,
so what they want is people who can stick it out in this environment.

What should you watch out for when job hunting in the US? How is it different from Taiwan?

This is very, very important! This was what I struggled with most when I first arrived, because I had no idea how job hunting works in the US. We didn’t know how to network, because nobody networks in Taiwan. At least I didn’t. In Taiwan networking is mostly friends of friends, who you happen to know through someone. Here it’s different. You may really have to send a cold email or message someone on LinkedIn and actually network. That’s the culture here.
So there’s a lot to learn about networking, how to write a thank-you letter, and even how to write a cover letter. Interviews are the hardest! Their interview style is completely different from Taiwan’s. Here you need what we call the Odyssey. Not every school calls it that, but ours does. I think it’s from a Greek story. Basically it’s your self-introduction, your story, so you have to tell your most important stories in one to one and a half minutes and hit the key points. We trained on this for a long time. Don’t underestimate that one minute. It’s not improvised. You really have to hit the key points.
They also ask a lot of behavioral questions, like “Tell me about a time when you faced a difficulty.” You have to tell an example with a lot of setup, and we practiced that for a really long time. So interviews are definitely one of the hardest parts. Then, as I mentioned, thank-you letters, cover letters and networking all have their techniques. For example, when you ask questions you keep it within 30 minutes, prepare 6 to 7 questions, research the other person’s background, ask questions based on that background, and avoid questions you could just Google. Your questions should sound smart! That’s true. Don’t ask dumb questions, though dumb questions aren’t completely off limits. But you need to do your homework and let them see that you did, instead of treating them like your own Google. That really costs you points. There are lots of little details here, and people put a huge amount of time and energy into them.
Getting a referral from someone inside the company
still has a higher success rate, so you really need to spend a lot of time and energy learning all this.
It’s worlds apart from Taiwan. In Taiwan I’d just send a resume, see if they want me, and then interview.

Part 4: Running a personal brand (multitasking, and his book on leveling up after work)

How did you balance social media, the job search and writing a book about leveling up after work? How do you manage your time?

This part is interesting, because it’s one of the big reasons I wanted to do Corporate Finance:
I have a lot of other interests, like the education side I just mentioned. When I started blogging,
I felt there was an information gap, and I wanted to write that information up in Chinese
and share it with more people. I’m really interested in that, so over the past year or two
I’ve done a lot of things.
A lot of people in Taiwan write English resumes that miss the point. When I wrote mine in Taiwan,
a consultant had already edited it, and I thought it was fine. But when I got to the MBA, I realized it wasn’t presentable at all. The gap was huge! The resume that got me into the MBA from Taiwan
looks terrible to me now. It was really that far off.

KC wrote a best-selling e-book about leveling up after work. Why did you want to write it, and what’s in it?

And as Jason said, I wrote a book. It’s about how, during my three or four years of work in Taiwan, I worked a lot of overtime. At a Big Four firm I often stayed late, but I still kept doing a lot of other things, like blogging, and during the MBA I made online courses and kept all of that going.
The main reason is that I’m genuinely interested in it, from the bottom of my heart. Interest is also why I chose Corporate Finance. Going back to what I said earlier, I chose Corporate Finance because it has good work-life balance. Besides being the finance area I love, it gives me the work-life balance I need to keep building these things after work. I used to work a lot of overtime, and when it got really bad, I realized that wasn’t a state I wanted to stay in long term.
I could do it for five years, but I couldn’t keep it up for ten or twenty, so I factored that in when I chose this path. My interest is partly in education.
I’m very interested in education. Back in Taiwan my job had very long hours,
but I kept producing anyway. I think the most important thing is interest. When you’re truly interested in something,
you find a huge amount of energy and inner drive to keep at it.
Like Jason: he has a job too, but he keeps doing the podcast and running these websites
because he has a mission he wants to accomplish. No matter how tired you are, you’ll still save time for it.
Even working on weekends, you might feel tired, but you also feel fulfilled.
You feel really fulfilled.

Inner motivation matters, of course, but I think a lot of it still comes down to technique. So the book combines all the practical techniques I used at the time. I love listening to podcasts and reading classic books, and I blended those ideas with my own experience to write an approach I think suits most Taiwanese people better. So it’s not only inner guidance (which, I won’t deny, is important). The reason I dislike chicken-soup-for-the-soul books is that after reading one you feel good but don’t know what to do. This book won’t leave you like that.

I don’t like that, so for everything I write, there are steps telling you how to do it better. I don’t want you to finish reading in a good mood without knowing what to do. That’s not what I’m after. It’s all small techniques, and when you stack them up, that’s everything I’ve built up to now. All my secrets are in there!
Some classic books are well written, but I honestly can’t do what they say, at least I can’t.
So I didn’t include those. I wrote what I can do, and what most people can do. Some books say things
that sound nice: if you really want to do something, you’ll give it everything. But sometimes that’s not how it goes.
Sometimes you come home from work and just want to rest and do nothing. What then? I wrote methods for that.
Some methods help you, you know, the long term matters, but the short term matters too. It’s not only a long-distance run.
A long run has some sprints in between, and that’s how you get there gradually. So it’s a bit like a practical guide?
Yes, a practical guide. There are some
ideas, but it’s also a practical guide. And I’m really happy doing all this.
It’s hard and tiring, because you have to find extra time. I don’t know if Jason has run into this,
but sometimes you meet people who are a bit rude, or
who ask questions that make you uncomfortable, or who treat you like Google.
That can leave you speechless. Of course, when you reach more people you’ll sometimes meet
people who don’t respect you much. That’s unavoidable, and it’s something I’ve had to learn to deal with.
But overall, it pushes me to improve myself, because I want to write better articles,
so I want to keep getting better. The two feed each other. I love doing this, but I want to do it better,
and I want to improve myself. The better I get, the more satisfied I feel. So it’s a positive cycle, and I love what I’m doing now.
Thank you, Jason, for inviting me.
Thank you again for your time, Jason. I think what Jason is doing is really meaningful,
because there really isn’t much in Chinese. OK, thanks. You can check out OfferLand,
whether it’s the admission results lookup (in Chinese) or the practical articles. Whether on OfferLand
or in KC’s blog and Instagram, you’ll find useful information and experiences to learn from.