By Edman Ho
A year ago, I arrived in London convinced my comfort zone was something I’d packed in my suitcase and could unpack whenever I needed it. I was wrong. The LBS MAM had other plans.
I came in from a business background. I could talk markets, build a model, read a room. What I could not do, and I say this with full sincerity, was write a single line of Python without staring at the error message like it had personally insulted me (or even get it to start running on my Mac…). So, when our first data-heavy modules landed, the floor tilted. Everyone around me seemed to be speaking a language I’d somehow skipped in school: Machine learning, statistics, lines of Python code that flat-out refused to run for reasons I could not begin to diagnose. There were evenings I genuinely wondered whether I’d talked my way into a room I had no business being in.
And then the Study Group happened.
The magic of the MAM, it turns out, isn’t really the hardcore syllabus. It’s the humans you get assigned to. Mine came from everywhere and from everything, finance bros and sis, engineers, ex-developer, people who thought in code the way I thought in cash flows. On paper, we had nothing in common and, in practice, we became each other’s tutors. My classmates would patiently walk me through a loop at 10pm, and I’d return the favour by explaining why a company’s margins actually mattered. And slowly I learned the thing I’d been most afraid of: that the question I was too embarrassed to ask was usually the one half the room was also quietly wondering, and that the “obvious” business point I assumed everyone already knew, was often the one somebody could not see. Being the least technical person in the room never meant having the least to offer, it just meant offering something different. So, I started raising my hand. Badly, at first.
The breakthrough, though, came halfway up a pole.
Away Day. I have a real, knees-go-weak fear of heights. Naturally, the activity was a pole-climbing challenge, which is the kind where you scale a wobbling wooden post and stand on top of it while your entire cohort watches from the ground. I was hesitant to climb up and got about a third of the way up. And then I heard them: my classmates, shouting my name, telling me exactly where to put my foot, that they had me. I have no rational explanation for why a group of people I’d known for a few weeks yelling encouragement should improve my grip strength. But it did. I made it to the top. And standing up there, shaking, I realised it was the exact same thing I’d been resisting in the classroom, you get further by trusting your team than by white-knuckling it alone. Vulnerability isn’t the weakness I’d assumed it was. It’s the whole point.
That lesson followed me off the pole and into every room for the rest of the year. I used to find a reason not to approach the impressive-looking person at the speaker event: too senior, too busy, what would I even say. What I slowly understood is that most people, however senior, are quietly hoping someone will be brave enough to start the conversation. The founder who’d walked away from a lucrative banking career to build something of his own didn’t want to be admired from across the room; he wanted to talk. Almost every conversation I nearly talked myself out of became one of the ones I now remember best. Reaching out, across backgrounds, across seniority, across the whole intimidating spread of people LBS puts in front of you, stopped feeling like a risk and started feeling like the entire point of being here.
And then there was the travelling. On an ordinary weekend (or even weekdays) I’d find myself in a city I couldn’t have confidently placed on a map a year earlier. The centrepiece was our Global Experience in Cape Town, learning the history of District Six, and meeting the people building something hopeful out of a painful past, was the kind of week that quietly rearranges your priorities. But it was the whole year of it, really: stepping off planes into places I’d only ever imagined, and discovering, each time, that there are pieces of me belonged there too.
Away Day. I have a real, knees-go-weak fear of heights. Naturally, the activity was a pole-climbing challenge, which is the kind where you scale a wobbling wooden post and stand on top of it while your entire cohort watches from the ground. I was hesitant to climb up and got about a third of the way up. And then I heard them: my classmates, shouting my name, telling me exactly where to put my foot, that they had me. I have no rational explanation for why a group of people I’d known for a few weeks yelling encouragement should improve my grip strength. But it did. I made it to the top. And standing up there, shaking, I realised it was the exact same thing I’d been resisting in the classroom, you get further by trusting your team than by white-knuckling it alone. Vulnerability isn’t the weakness I’d assumed it was. It’s the whole point.
That lesson followed me off the pole and into every room for the rest of the year. I used to find a reason not to approach the impressive-looking person at the speaker event: too senior, too busy, what would I even say. What I slowly understood is that most people, however senior, are quietly hoping someone will be brave enough to start the conversation. The founder who’d walked away from a lucrative banking career to build something of his own didn’t want to be admired from across the room; he wanted to talk. Almost every conversation I nearly talked myself out of became one of the ones I now remember best. Reaching out, across backgrounds, across seniority, across the whole intimidating spread of people LBS puts in front of you, stopped feeling like a risk and started feeling like the entire point of being here.
And then there was the travelling. On an ordinary weekend (or even weekdays) I’d find myself in a city I couldn’t have confidently placed on a map a year earlier. The centrepiece was our Global Experience in Cape Town, learning the history of District Six, and meeting the people building something hopeful out of a painful past, was the kind of week that quietly rearranges your priorities. But it was the whole year of it, really: stepping off planes into places I’d only ever imagined, and discovering, each time, that there are pieces of me belonged there too.
My next step takes me home: a full-time role in asset management in Hong Kong. There’s a symmetry to it I didn’t see coming. I came to LBS to escape the familiar, and I’m returning to a familiar industry, except I’m not the same person walking back into it. I carry both the business instinct I started with and the data fluency I once found terrifying. I know exactly which classmate to message when I’m stuck at late night (even though there might be time zone issues). And I’m no longer afraid to be the one who raises a hand and says the thing nobody else has said.
This is a year I got comfortable being the worst in the room.
To my cohort, my study group, my friends and one very tall pole: thank you. I came to London to step out of my comfort zone. I’m leaving genuinely unsure I want it back.