When I enrolled in the Pharma MBA at Goethe Business School in Frankfurt, I thought I was there for the additional knowledge. Maybe a title. A credential to silence the quiet voice that said: You chose not to do a PhD, and certain doors will stay closed because of it.
The Discovery I Didn’t Enroll For
What I did not expect was that this program would hand me back something I hadn’t realized I’d been quietly putting away, looking a lot like being professional: myself.
Not the softened, diplomatic, playing-it-safe version of myself. The real one. The no-risk-no-fun one. The one who walks into a finance course and remembers, almost physically, that she loves numbers. That logic feels like home. The one who reads the room and then decides to speak anyway. The one who sits in a platform economics lecture and feels something ignite – competition, innovation, market dynamics, the systems that drive entire economies – and proudly wins both in-class quizzes because she was too genuinely on fire with the material to be anything other than fully in it. The one who doesn’t drink but stays until the end of the party because the conversation is too interesting to leave.
The Edge I Had Already Built
That person had been building something for years. The MBA revealed just how powerful an asset it was. Pharmacist. Researcher. Branch manager. KAM. Marathon runner. Keynote speaker. Debate club regular. Nutrition coach. Network co-founder. Four languages. Pan-European projects. And a consistent habit of not just showing up, but building, leading and constantly raising the bar. Systems thinking is not something you study. It’s something you build, slowly, over years of working at the intersection of science, commerce, regulation, people and urgency. I have managed pharmacogenetic implementation in a hospital from patient identification all the way to personalized dosing recommendations, which is a systems problem. I have navigated EU-level clinical research infrastructure, that is a governance and stakeholder problem. I have run a pharmacy during a pandemic while building and scaling a profitable testing center, which is an operations and leadership problem. When the MBA cases arrived, I wasn’t deciphering, I was recognizing. What the program gave me that experience alone never could was simpler than I expected: the logical framework that turned economics from a foreign language into a system I could own. And with that, I stopped watching from the bench. I entered the game.
The Friction That Sharpens You
And then, on top of all of that, was the friction. The friction between what every aspect of life was constantly demanding and what I myself wanted to do. The friction of doing everything all at once.
The weekends in Frankfurt. The sometimes-exhausting group work. The last-minute exam sessions squeezed between a full-time role, my gym schedule, a relationship, private projects, and the general refusal to stop living fully while also studying. The moments of genuine doubt about whether the nerdy, too-loud, concepts-over-cliques version of me was the right fit for the room.
She was.
Friction does not dull you. It sharpens your edge, if you let it. If you stay in the room instead of making yourself smaller to fit it. If you stick to your principles and say no, even when yes feels easier. Sharp edges may seem dangerous to those who prefer smoothness, but they give you something smooth edges never can: the ability to cut yourself loose from everything that does not fit you, and to shape what comes next.
So, if you’re asking yourself whether a program like this is for you or if you should venture into another unknown, I’m not going to give you an answer. I’m going to ask you a question:
What version of yourself have you been quietly leaving behind in the name of being practical?
Go find out. Say yes to the thing that seems worth it. Not because it will be comfortable. Because it won’t be.
That’s exactly the point.