Ask a professor

“I wouldn't pick a major because it pays well or seems safe; I'd pick the one where the day-to-day work still interests you when you're doing the boring parts. I chose psychology because I couldn't stop watching how people read each other, not because I had a plan.”

“I was an AB in psychology at Brown, but my real turn came later, in grad school, when I started sending people into Penn Station to ask strangers for favors and realized I was more interested in how people actually influence each other than in any one label. Pick the major that gives you questions you cannot stop thinking about, because the job you will do in ten years probably does not exist yet.”

“I studied economics because I wanted to understand how markets shape decisions; in my own research, personal interest and strong mentors turned out to be the dominant drivers of durable career paths. Pick the major that makes you lose track of time, then find a professor in that department who will push you.”

“Stop rereading and highlighting; it feels productive but mostly creates fluency illusions. I’ve seen students learn more from a quick self-quiz or by explaining an idea out loud to a peer than from hours of passive review.”

“For hard books I read the first fifty pages three times, skip what bores me, and reread the whole thing once without judging, then again with some map of where it's going. The real trick is forcing yourself to write out answers under a clock, the way Kotov taught me to study chess, rather than nodding along and thinking you already got it.”

“Stop treating study as memorization and start treating it as noticing. In our studies, the more new distinctions people found in the same material, the more they remembered and enjoyed it. So vary your angle, ask why it could be otherwise, and let curiosity do the work that willpower usually fails at.”

“I surveyed 470 founders for Why Startups Fail and found no correlation between an elite degree and startup success, and none for an MBA either. College can buy you access and credibility, but it can also fund a bad idea longer; the signal on a resume is weaker than most people think.”

“College paid off for me because it plugged me into the people and ideas that shaped my career, but the ROI is collapsing for many. If you're not getting network, judgment, or a credential that opens a specific door, the debt is harder to justify than ever.”

“I studied at Harvard for my Ph.D. because it opened doors to the research questions I cared about, not because the credential itself was the goal. College pays off when it gives you access to people, tools, or signals you cannot get cheaper elsewhere; otherwise the return is harder to justify.”

“I came to HBS after a decade at McKinsey, and the path is a tournament: maybe one in three PhD applicants get a shot, and only one in four assistant professors make tenure. I nearly didn't survive my first few years here, so the credential is less the degree than proving you can keep producing research and teaching that holds up.”

“I got my BA at UC Santa Barbara, my PhD in social psychology at UConn, and then I applied for faculty jobs straight out of grad school. In my field, you either get hired right after the PhD or do a postdoc first, and the only way to know which path fits your area is to ask people already in it.”

“I got here by doing a PhD at Columbia, then a postdoc at Rotman to shift from psychology into organizational behavior, then assistant professor jobs at Waterloo and Cornell. The path is less straight than the CV makes it look.”

“I get a lot of cold emails, and the ones I answer make it easy fast: a clear subject line, one sentence on who you are, one sentence on what you want, and a specific ask with a time commitment. Skip the resume and the flattery. If you share a connection or mention a specific paper or case I wrote, that helps. Keep it above the fold and proofread the name.”

“Keep it under five lines, say exactly what you need and by when, and skip the emergency tone. I ignored emails that begged for just thirty minutes whenever, but I answered the ones that proposed a specific time window.”

“I tell my students to make it shorter than they think: a clear subject line, one sentence of context, and a specific ask. Professors are drowning in email, so bullet points and a precise subject help both of you.”