I did a PhD in clinical experimental therapeutics and an MBA at the same time. Terrible idea. Would not recommend it to anyone.
The PhD was not a good experience. I'm not going to romanticize it. Five years of grinding through a program that didn't work for me. I didn't come out the other side with a clean set of transferable skills and a love of the scientific method. I came out tired and wondering what I wanted to do next.
What the MBA actually gave me
Most of what they teach in business school, the frameworks, case studies, strategy models, I could take or leave. But there was one class that genuinely changed how I think.
A venture feasibility course. One professor. He taught me how to evaluate whether an idea was worth pursuing before sinking time into it. How to think about whether something is viable. Not abstract. Practical. "Is this real or are you fooling yourself."
That class shifted something. Before it, I thought of myself as a researcher. Someone who studies things. After it, I started thinking like someone who could build things. The entrepreneurial mindset didn't come from the PhD. It came from that one class and the gut instinct I developed through the MBA experience.
The gap
Wanting to build things and being able to build things are different. I had ideas. I understood problems. I could think through whether something was viable. But I couldn't code. I'd tried learning. Tutorials, toy projects. Nothing stuck.
For years I was stuck in that gap. Enough business instinct to know what to build. Not enough technical skill to build it.
AI closed the gap
Then vibe coding happened, and the gap closed.
I can describe what I want and ship something real. I'm building a trading platform and a competitive intelligence tool. I'm running an automated e-commerce experiment. A year ago these were ideas in a notebook.
The PhD didn't teach me to build. The MBA, or at least one professor in it, gave me the instinct for what's worth building. And vibe coding finally made the building part possible. The path from researcher to builder is messier than any clean narrative. But I got here.