Practicing Peace at HBS

Finding time for stillness, reflection, and wellness amidst the MBA

In the months leading up to the start of my first semester at Harvard Business School, I spoke with several current students, as well as a few alums. I asked them for advice on navigating HBS: balancing academics and professional development, exploring Cambridge and Boston, and making new friends as a grad student eager to avoid navigating once again the hierarchy, cliques, and complications of a high school-like social stratosphere.

Almost invariably, they described life at HBS as being divisible into three buckets: academics, social, and career. At any given time, you could prioritize up to two of the three. At the start of the first semester, they explained, HBS’s academic rigor would necessitate a tilt toward that bucket; as you found your personal balance and grew more comfortable with your new life, you could recalibrate.

Early on in my time at HBS, chatting with new friends at an apartment dinner gathering, we realized that a fourth category was simply unaccounted for in these three “comprehensive” buckets: wellness. If you could only choose two priorities at a time, what did that mean for categories that weren’t even part of the conversation?

So we added a fourth bucket, amending the list to include wellness, academics, social, and career. But when we attempted to assign a percentage to each category (i.e. “Right now, social is taking 35% of my time, career is 35%, etc.”) a paradox was revealed: either our summed percentages exceeded 100, or wellness was omitted entirely.

I moved to Massachusetts from Seattle, a fairly sleepy city that nourished the introvert within me. In Seattle, I kicked off my nightly routine with a yoga practice, followed without fail by time for reading and journaling.

So even though I was ecstatic to be at HBS, learning from and with people who inspired me, certain that this was the best choice for my professional and personal development, it felt odd to be entering a life that left little room for wellness.

But I think that this generalized interpretation of wellness at HBS is ungenerous; to varying degrees and in ways that accommodate the short-term MBA experience, HBS students do allocate effort and time towards wellness and self-care. In the months since the start of my HBS journey, I’ve come to realize and appreciate that wellness just looks a little different here. At many given moments, we could, non-hyperbolically, be choosing between four different calendar invitations. The hustle and bustle of the social and extracurricular scenes mean that finding time for individual wellness, for peace, necessitates more intentionality. But that doesn’t make it any less vital, and it is often still practiced. Perhaps wellness shouldn’t be considered a competitor to academics, social, and career; rather, it is an intentional complement.

With that in mind, I decided to pose a simple question to fellow members of the HBS community, my classmates and professors: What makes you feel the most at peace?

For me, it’s reading. Ideally, it’s reading on a luxurious Saturday morning, a hot bowl of oatmeal topped with berries and peanut butter in front of me. But I’ll take what I can get: even a few pages of a good book can bring profound calm, especially if I can learn a new word or appreciate beautiful imagery along the way.

I wanted to learn how other HBS community members find peace; how they prioritize wellness in their own lives. The responses I received can be split into four broad categories: spending time outside, spending time with others, spending time alone, and practicing mindfulness by focusing on the present.

For many of our peers, wellness looks like spending time outside, hiking in the Redwood forests, or even just “seeing the sun peeking through trees.” For others, it looks like stepping away from the HBS bubble, spending time with loved ones and pets, or expressing gratitude for those around them.

For still others, it means slowing down to have tea or bake and recharge, and for many, it means focusing on the present. Appreciating a specific sensory experience, like a smell or a sound. Listening to a song. Walking nowhere in particular.

So if you're looking for inspiration on finding peace and centering yourself as we enter another busy semester, take this as your reminder that finding peace doesn't always require extended, predictable chunks of time, and that simple, intentional moments can be just as powerful. At a school where time moves at lightspeed, and ambition and busyness are in high demand, wellness practices, no matter how momentary, are grounding, important forces to be reckoned with.

Keerthi Medicherla (MBA ’27) is originally from McLean, Virginia. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a double major in Computer Science and Global Studies in 2022. Prior to HBS, Keerthi worked as a software engineer at JPMorganChase in Seattle, Washington.