MBA Student Profile: Vitaly Osokin, Fuqua School of Business

Vitaly Osokin speaks with TopMBA.com about life as an MBA student at Duke. He begins by saying he was pretty satisfied with his career before he decided to apply for a US business school in 2007.

“I started thinking about going to business school long before I made up my mind to apply,” says Vitaly Osokin, a Russian MBA student at the Fuqua School of Business. “My first boss was an MBA graduate who used to tell me a lot about his business school experience and how important an MBA degree was for his career – he ended up being a McKinsey partner before he left the firm.”

As Osokin’s career progressed, he met and worked with an increasing number of business school graduates. Fascinated by the enormous career opportunities an MBA offers, he eventually got used to the idea that business school would be a self-evident step in his career. “At the time, I didn’t fully understand why I would need the degree,” he says. “I didn’t have any specific goals that an MBA would help to achieve. I considered it more like a quality mark on a person’s career.”

By the time Osokin decided to apply to business school in 2007, he was pretty satisfied with his career. In just a few years, he’d progressed from the position of financial analyst to the head of the strategic projects division at one of the world’s largest aluminium companies. “It became apparent to me that the higher the position I assumed, the more broad knowledge and skills I required. Since I saw myself in an executive suit in several years I started considering the MBA as a means of achieving the level of knowledge and skills required for an executive position. Furthermore, I always liked studying and learning something new.”

Osokin says applying to business school was an excellent way to kill two birds with one stone. “I would be able to contribute to my career success and enjoy a student environment,” he says. But the last – although not the least – deciding factor was his desire to change his life for a while. “I got a little bit tired of the office environment, of the necessity to work long hours and climb the career ladder. I realised that by 27, I didn’t see much outside my office. So, I wanted to put the brakes on my office life and do something different, keeping in mind that eventually I’ll have to return to work. Business school seemed to be a perfect match with what I wanted at this point of my life.”

It was February 2007 when Osokin decided that it was time to start working on his application for the 2008 intake and the very first thing he did was to check his level of English. “For some reason, I thought it would be pretty good,” he says. “But as I quickly discovered, I was so wrong. My first practice TOEFL gave me around 50 points out of the possible 120 - not surprisingly though, since I only learnt English in high-school and never used it at work. I could read a little bit and was able to write simple emails but the biggest problem was that I couldn’t speak.”

After the realisation of the TOEFL test result hit home, Osokin joined one of the numerous English classes offered in Moscow with a goal to ‘tremendously improve my English language in a short period of time.’

“To my regret, it turned out to be impossible with that level of effort – only three days a week. Furthermore, my instructor told me to forget about applying that year since it was hard to improve my English to the extent I wanted in just several months. By March 2007, I realised that I would probably have to postpone my application until the following year.”

However, Osokin was determined, or stubborn – or both! He didn’t want to wait that long so decided to take some radical steps. In May 2007, he left his company and went to New York to study English there. “The only way to achieve my goal was to completely immerse myself into an English speaking environment,” he says. “I studied English at Kaplan, spending at least 12 hours every day including weekends. My efforts finally paid off: in a three month period I successful prepared myself for TOEFL and scored 107 after the first attempt.”

While preparing for the TOEFL at Kaplan in New York, Osokin started looking into the GMAT as well. He signed up for the two-month GMAT classes that Kaplan offered and did a couple of tests. “Not surprisingly though, the verbal part took some time to master,” he says, although he didn’t have any problems with the math section due to his engineering background.

In September 2007, Osokin returned to Moscow and started working on his GMAT and essays. Since he didn’t work at that time, he had some time advantage. “I continued working with Kaplan’s materials and then moved to other sources of practice tests.”

However, Osokin didn’t have any strategy and that, he says, was his biggest mistake. “I tried to do as many different tests as possible without focusing on my weak areas. That, I believe, partly contributed to my unsatisfactory final GMAT results. In total, I spent approximately three months on GMAT (not including the time I spent at Kaplan), working at least five to six hours every day.”

Choosing the right business school was an extremely important issue for Osokin. So much so that while he was in New York he visited almost all of the top, and many other, business schools on the East Coast. “Almost all schools say in their brochures that they have a collaborative environment, friendly atmosphere and so on. But that just means that the only way to get to know which school is right for you is to go and visit its campus, talk to students, talk to professors and walk around for a while.”

After matching the perception of his school after each visit with his criteria, Osokin narrowed down his list of desired schools to just a few. He also added a few that he didn’t visit but had a pretty good understanding of their cultures after meeting and talking to current students and alumni. “By the time I decided to apply, I knew all the basic information about top US business schools and their ranking positions, but I didn’t want to rely solely upon rankings and established associations. The main criteria for me were friendly people, a collaborative environment, and a family-oriented atmosphere. I am a very laid-back person and don’t like a competitive “cut-throat” environment, so I wanted to make sure that I would spend an enjoyable two years of my life at business school.”

Osokin’s dedication, perseverance and willingness to put himself outside his comfort zone has paid off. He’s now a full-time MBA student at Duke University and has just spent a summer with Chevron in Houston. He’s not sure what his dream job will be just yet, but upon graduation in 2010, he hopes to continue in the energy resource industry working in the business development arena.