Twenty nine thousand people applied to the founding cohort of MasterClass Executive’s program with Chicago Booth. Seven hundred and five were accepted. I am one of them.
I have been sitting with that ratio for two weeks now, since orientation started, and I still don’t know what to do with it. Part of me wants to treat it like a fact and move on. Part of me keeps turning it over, looking for what it says about me that I couldn’t see on my own.
Here is what I keep coming back to. Getting in wasn’t the result of one thing I did recently. It was the accumulation of a lot of things I did without knowing they were building toward anything. The years of legal work, the partner negotiations, the sales conversations, the writing I kept doing even when nobody was reading it. None of it felt like preparation at the time. It just felt like work.
Somebody on the other side of that application looked at all of it together and saw something I hadn’t fully seen myself. That is the part that has stayed with me. It is uncomfortable to admit you needed someone else to point at your own life and say this adds up to something. But it is also, I think, the most honest way to describe what happened.
I don’t want this post to read as a victory lap. I want it to say something more specific: sometimes the people around you, or the systems evaluating you, notice a pattern in your work before you do. You don’t have to wait until you can see it yourself to trust that it’s there. Sometimes belief has to come first.
Two weeks in, the conversations already feel different from what I expected. Less performative, more real. I’ll write more as it unfolds. For now I wanted to mark the moment honestly: I applied, I didn’t know what my odds were, and I got in.
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