When he was studying for his doctorate in economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jonathan Levin suffered a crisis of confidence about his academic career, sparked by his failure to make progress with a paper on the jobs market.
“I was working every minute but at the end of every day I’d pretty much throw out all my notes,” Prof Levin admitted in a candid recent posting on Quora, the question-and-answer website. “Research can be incredibly frustrating when you are getting nowhere.”
Two decades later, it is abundantly clear that Prof Levin is getting somewhere. The 43-year-old former economist is days into his new job as dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“I feel incredibly lucky,” he says, speaking to the Financial Times in his first interview since being appointed.
The former head of Stanford’s department of economics has been handed control of one of the richest and most oversubscribed business schools in the world at a time when the nomination committee’s key requirement was a safe pair of hands.
Last year, the school received 7,899 applications for just 407 places on its MBA programme, which was placed fifth in the Financial Times 2016 global MBA rankings, and top for entrepreneurship.