The Last Place I Expected to Wrestle with God

Michelle Yu (MBA ‘26) on faith, ambition, and power in business school

When I was five years old, my mother found me shivering and naked in an empty bathtub, crying so hard that my small body seemed to fold in on itself. I had drained the water myself and sat there long enough for the cold porcelain to leave my skin blotchy and numb. My mother, with my two-year-old sister clinging to her leg and newborn sister squirming in her arms, knelt down and asked me what was wrong.

Through tears, I told her I was afraid to die.

My fear wasn’t of death in the abstract but of what I imagined might follow. I wanted to know where people went when they disappeared, frightened by the possibility of nowhere at all. My mother told me I would go to Heaven, where I’d see my grandmother and two brothers. When I asked her how she knew this, she said she just did. Before I could ask anything more, the baby began to wail, and the moment slipped away.

I had many episodes like this as a child, beset by moments of existential dread that visited without invitation. I grew up nominally Christian in the way that many of my peers did: with Christmas celebrations, casual references to God, and children’s Bibles tucked into random places around the house. Even then, I contended with the idea of a benevolent God. My parents had lost two sons before adopting me, both from a heart condition and both preceding their first birthday. What kind of God, I had wondered, would allow two innocent children to die? The question lingered, unanswered, as I learned early how to live with ambiguity.

Instead of religion, I gravitated toward something far more tangible: achievement. By the time I reached high school, my life revolved around external markers of success as I chased validation with a discipline that felt purposeful, even virtuous. For a while, the system held. I won the awards. I collected the leadership titles. I gained admission to the top schools. Each milestone promised a sense of arrival that never quite lasted but was enough to keep me moving forward.

Then the pandemic happened, and the scaffolding fell away. College classes, once legible in their demands, flattened into a single imperative — not to fail — after Columbia shifted to a Pass/Fail grading system in response to the shutdown. Academic life narrowed accordingly. There were no competitions to win, no rooms to impress, no benchmarks to chase. Stripped of those markers, I felt unmoored. Without the steady rhythm of achievement, I struggled to name the purpose my life was meant to serve.

So when my brother and mother decided to convert to Catholicism during my junior year, I joined them. Faith offered structure, language, and a sense of direction when everything else felt suspended. I enrolled in the year-long Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA) program at my local church, was baptized a month before graduation, and began attending Mass every weekend.

Still, I felt like a stranger to my own beliefs. I learned the rituals and read the Scripture, yet the dramatic clarity that others described remained elusive. I didn’t cry during services or feel overtaken by conviction. I watched people lift their hands during worship songs and wondered what it felt like to believe without hesitation. Whatever faith I had felt provisional, like something I was practicing rather than fully inhabiting.

When I arrived at HBS, even that fragile routine receded. Sunday mornings quickly filled up with case prep, recruiting events, and recovery from the week. Part of me assumed that religion didn’t belong at business school anyway. The two seemed fundamentally at odds. But as I sat in classes like LCA and debated cases on profit versus principle, I noticed how often my sectionmates drew on their faith to navigate moral complexity. Across Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and beyond, belief surfaced in how people spoke about obligations that extended beyond shareholders, tradeoffs resistant to optimization, and the discomfort between legality and conscience.

These conversations disrupted my sense of where faith belongs. Business school, at least how I had imagined it, teaches a truth of its own: that everything worth doing can be evaluated through rates of return and discounted over time. Religion seemed to traffic in a different dialect altogether, governed by moral codes, self-control, and the pursuit of eternal rewards over temporary pleasures. I had assumed these ways of thinking occupied separate worlds, each coherent only within its own boundaries.

And yet, it was precisely within an institution so close to power and influence that my questions about faith pressed most insistently.

HBS’s mission is to “educate leaders who make a difference in the world,” in part by granting proximity to capital and, eventually, authority. That proximity has an elucidative effect and forces a confrontation with questions that are easy to defer when influence feels abstract, like “what do I owe others when I have the ability to affect their lives?” and “how much wealth is enough?” and “at what point does ambition begin to justify harm?”

For me, these questions feel especially provocative because they emerged in a place where faith appeared least at home. I had long presumed that values are best cultivated in spaces that mirror them: that humility belongs in churches, restraint in private life, and ambition everywhere else. Being at HBS has disconcerted that belief. It has shown me that values are tested most rigorously when they encounter friction and rub against incentives pulling them in another direction.

I am still far from settled. I haven’t arrived at certainty or undergone the kind of spiritual clarity I once thought faith required. But what I do know is that moments of influence have a way of hollowing us out, leaving behind only what we bring with us. Long before titles, capital, or authority confer their weight, we are each asked to decide what will guide us when answers are incomplete. Whether we call that reckoning moral, spiritual, or simply human, it begs the same question of us: when those familiar signposts disappear, for what or whom do we reach — and why?

Michelle Yu (MBA '26) is originally from Cresskill, New Jersey. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Film and Media Studies and worked for CNBC, NBC News, and CNN prior to HBS, along with projects for HBO, Showtime, Oxygen, and Spectrum. Outside of work, she is a 2x marathon runner, American Songwriting Awards winner, and filmmaker whose work has screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and AMC's Empire Theaters in Times Square.