Pages from an HBS Scribe's Diary

The Stamps Reading Room, far from the chaos of class; photo by Alex Qi

Dear Diary,

Oh how good it is to sit down with a piping hot cuppa in silence after a long day of listening to people who have no clue what they are on about.

How was my day? Oh thank you for asking! Well, it is the week after START; so as you can imagine, all the new pups have swarmed Aldrich. Dripping with juvenile enthusiasm, all 900 of them, I tell you. Eyes glittering with hope and pride, chests swollen with the belief that they are leaders here to change the world—whilst they plead with VMock to move their resume’s impact scores to green.

The first few weeks are always the hardest to endure for someone who has been around since they first painted these walls Crimson. Once you’ve seen classes come and go for a few years, an S-tier scribe like yours truly starts to notice patterns—patterns which require pure human intelligence, obtained after eating Granola and other lesser scribes for breakfast.

What kinds of patterns? Class participation is a dead giveaway. You’ve got the hawk-eyed consultants (god there’s always too many of them)—eager to swoop in at any given point and suggest that we maximize profits by outsourcing overheads. To Baljeet from Bain, Bangalore—as attractive as your income statements may look, you should NOT outsource your chefs at Benihana.

Then there’s Nina from the non-profit in Naples who cannot comprehend how Erik Peterson could be fired without being nurtured and nourished by his leaders—does the US not have labor laws? Welcome to the real world!

There’s always a Laurent from L’Oreal’s lotion factory in Lyon, whose engineer brain cannot comprehend how debiting assets can increase them. His introverted self is too scared to say it aloud, but deep down, he truly believes that accounting is nothing but fictional math invented by people who couldn’t understand STEM in high school. No wonder he and Dylan from Deloitte Dallas can’t be spotted together at a Spangler lunchtable.

And it's not just the students. You also notice the professor who's been using the same dad joke for the Cialis vs Viagra case study for years because it still gets a nice, hard guffaw out of the class each year. (In case you’re interested—How did Cialis consistently win market share year over year? They really knew how to extend their competitive advantage. Cringe.)

I will say though that these last few years, a new breed is rapidly multiplying on the red Herman Miller chairs—the AI bros and sisters. 30-year olds are running around entrusting their lives to Meta’s marvelous Muse. Techies have historically been fairly lonely creatures. Now they are lonely and unoccupied thanks to their fleet of agents replying to humans on their behalf. Given a chance, they will happily wax eloquent on LinkedIn about vibe coding a Claude connector that connects to a Kohler MCP server and wipes their bottoms for them every morning. I overheard one the other day saying “Bruh, why does Harvard pay for so many scribes? Like, why can’t we just switch to Wispr bruh?” I truly wish them the best for this October’s mid-term class participation feedback.

Sometimes I truly wonder, is this it for me in life? I mean, don’t get me wrong diary—I love being a scribe. Listening to perfectly crafted and rehearsed sentences, then butchering them with my own interpretation as I rapidly jot them down on my laptop—what’s not to like? But I do feel sometimes that I need a change of environment. Perhaps a courtroom where I chronicle the dissemination of historic judgements? Or wait—a high-stakes corporate boardroom where I get advance intimation of a looming NASDAQ bloodbath! How else am I supposed to advance my skills, right? I mean, Plato got to record Socrates’ ingenious musings. The elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesha wrote the Mahabharata at breakneck speed with his own tusk, and here I am transcribing why Penelope, who did PE in Pennsylvania, thinks that a hospital is an unattractive institution because it only makes 8x EBITDA multiples.

I’ll mull over my next career move tomorrow while someone regurgitates plain case statistics hidden behind the facade of a sentence beginning with ‘As we can see from Exhibit 5…’

Thanks for listening to my rant today, dear diary. Until next time!

Satyam Saxena (MBA ’28) grew up in New Delhi, India. He studied Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi where he discovered how little of it he actually understood. Prior to HBS, Satyam spent 5 years at Unilever building robots for research, selling tea in rural India, and using AI to understand why the average Joe likes his shampoo. In his spare time, he hopes to use his cameras more often, and remember that he used to run a graphic design page.