From the Editor’s Desk: A Ritual of Becoming

Shoulder struggles against shoulder, twitters, hushed words and loud words and quick words and wise words cascading over one another in through verdant Spangler doors, through the cafeteria, toward the delta where the river meets the dining hall sea. We perch for a few moments on the lookout for a table—any table. One eye meets another and the ensign goes up, a familiar hand waving its identity, in Spangler just as in Aldrich, answering a call for acceptance rather than one of assertion. Familiarity sails toward the conversation and the open land. Sometimes it gets lost, and turns back toward the double doors in search of friendlier shores.

Lunch is a ritual; one among school’s many. The end of the ritual draws in sight for both you and me. I am feeling it now, the slow end of an earnest way of life, as spring warms into something uncertain. Normally, I would reserve this sentiment for our May issue, but the unfurling of a feeling sometimes tells me more of its truth than does its hardening.

After class and in between meetings, I sometimes wander through campus. Twice in a while, I wonder where I am and what I’m for. I mosey through the little walkway at the side of Aldrich facing Klarman, past the Dean’s House, looking up at all the branches caressing the golden gleam of Baker’s little hat, with the occasional jaunt down to the Harbus’ office in the Gallatin basement if I’m feeling chilly. The walk turns brisk, passing through the pipes of the aircraft carrier that is the HBS tunnel system, then slows, breathing in the headlines plastered on the walls of that checkered-floor hall with the wrought-iron gate (and to the curator, know there is still appreciation for you yet). It might be remiss to call this a ritual in a wider sense. We all have different ways of translating our becoming into being. My experience, with all its crinkles, is not as uniform as that of the Spangler rush. But I see my wandering in the abstract as another general ritual of school—a ritual representative of its instrumental knowledge, of its textured place, of the grounding it has on a life.

The reason behind this note felt slippery for most of the above but just now found its form. You have one month left before the structured serendipity falls away. You have one month left before the summer internship, the family getaway, the full time job swallows your faculties. Appreciate turning and not being for what little time there is left, because the mind’s metamorphosis from here on out is rather painful. For your final becoming, life has in store children if you so choose; otherwise it is cruel. No longer the influence of parent and mentor or the profundity of book and school, for these made you in your earlier years. Drought is followed by the stoning. No, what awaits you is the passing of a mother, the failing of a life’s project of sweat and tears, pretty and ugly tragedy—walls closing in on the walkways, shops boarding up in the boulevards of change. Here and now the world has granted us the open field of ritual. Where else will you become?

Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy, politics, and physics at New York University. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Virginia.