Sara Jane Ho, HBS Alumna: A Humble Eagerness to Learn

Ask MBA alumni what the most valuable lesson they learned while at business school was, and you might expect the answer to be something like technical expertise, leadership skills or an ability to think strategically.

However, for Harvard Business School alumna, Sara Jane Ho, the most profound thing she got from the Harvard MBA was a sense of humility. While Ho was at HBS, Professor Clay Christensen – who taught a course on building and sustaining a successful enterprise – was diagnosed with cancer.

Faced with this, he was moved to remind the class of the importance of humility, asking them to identify the most humble people they knew. For Ho, the results were enlightening: “[The Harvard MBA class] concluded that humble people have a high level of self-esteem. They know who they are, and they feel good about who they are. Humility is defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes, but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone either. To me, this is the spirit of etiquette!”

Possessing humility of this sort is particularly important, she continues, to Harvard Business School alumni. In terms of educational attainment, these graduates will be among the world’s academic and professional elite. However, this does not mean that they cannot learn from others who may not possess such rarified résumés.

“By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School, or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. If your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, then your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited.”

Of course, one place where one will be inundated with learning opportunities is at Harvard Business school, and like many others, Sara Jane Ho was first drawn to the Harvard MBA by the opportunity of learning from her peer group: “I have never been so impressed as I have by students at Harvard. Whether it was the students I met when I toured the school, or HBS alum that I had met throughout my life, I felt that they were motivated, energetic and inspiring. They are also quite visionary,” she adds, “perhaps a self-selecting group since HBS is known for grooming future CEOs.”

Being able to draw on the Harvard Business School international brand cachet also played a part in her decision, particularly as she intended to work in Asia after graduating, as well as the simple romance of studying at this most venerable seats of learning. “I fell in love with the red brick, wood floors, and twining ivy. Harvard’s campus is simply charming and Boston is the perfect university town.”

Though she found there was no shortage of claims on her time, between her academic and social lives, she found being free of the relatively constricting pressures of professional life extremely liberating. “My most treasured memory was how carefree and wholesome life was. I loved walking across the quad that had fresh grass and carefully tended trees, under Boston’s clear blue skies. Being able to sit outside and relax in the sun or walk to Cambridge Square for a coffee with friends, or step into a cute boutique. These are my most treasured memories of my time at HBS.”