Through hellfire to an MBA: When Peter Robinson left his job as a speechwriter, President Reagan warned him of Stanford's leanings to the left, but never prepared him for the super-heated cauldron of one of

'It is one o'clock in the morning, I have at least two more hours of studying to do and I am gulping coffee that was cold at midnight.

My friend warned me that most of my classmates would be engineers, consultants and financial analysts - people who knew how to work with numbers. 'Then there will be a few students with flaky backgrounds like yours,' he said. 'Poets. You know, people who've never done anything real for a living.'

Today this poet sat through all three classes feeling utterly lost, went to the library and studied 'utility maximisation' models for two hours, then gave up and went to the campus bookstore. I picked up The Divine Comedy, flipped to the canto in which Dante finds himself at the gates of the inferno, looking up at the inscription: 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'

That's me all right, I thought. A poet in hell.'

THE PRESIDENT'S face looked ruddy, soft, and friendly. He looked at me and winked. 'Well, Peter,' he said, 'I want to thank you for all you've done.'

The photographer snapped a few standard handshake shots, and for a moment I thought that would be all. Then President Reagan, his actor's eye ever alert, turned to the photographer and said: 'This is a pretty sunset. What about a few walking shots?' So the President and I strolled along the colonnade, chatting, while the photographer scuttled in front of us, the motor drive on his camera whirring. When we reached the door to the Residence, the President paused.

'Now, just where is it that you're going?'

'Stanford Business School, Mr President.'

'Stanford? Well, you be careful. The faculty out there is a little . . .' His eyes pooled up with mirth and he put his head to one side and gave it that famous little Reagan shake.

I knew what he was recalling, of course. Stanford had once been suggested as the site for the Reagan Library, a complex to house the President's papers after he left the White House. But the Stanford faculty and students had protested. There had been marches, placards, and ugly speeches - a brief re-effulgence of the Sixties. The proposal for putting the Reagan Library at Stanford had been dropped.

The President held his pause for an actor's beat - a perfect, rounded moment. 'The faculty out there is a little . . . left-leaning.' He chuckled. 'But you get in touch with my friend Milton Friedman. Milton will keep you on the straight and narrow.'

IT WAS the first morning of math camp. Professor George Cooper, a trim, cheerful man in corduroys and a baggy sweater, stood at the front of the classroom, beaming. 'Welcome to the math pre-enrolment course,' he said. 'My purpose over the next two weeks will be to encourage crisp, quantitative thinking. I also want to reduce the revulsion at numbers that some of you may feel when you see notation that looks like - what example shall I use? - let's say this.' He turned to the board and wrote:

lim f(x)

x -> c

'Very simply,' Cooper said, still beaming, 'this means 'the limit of the function of x as x approaches c'.'

I felt revulsion.

During the lunchtime break, the poets mingled in the courtyard in groups of three and four. Conversation tended to fall into a simple formula. 'Where are you from? What did you do before coming to Stanford?' I decided to look for company, which I here defined as someone as miserable as myself.

I tried talking to a pert woman from Boston, but it turned out that she had spent the summer getting ready for this math course by taking a math course. 'My husband went to business school himself before getting his teaching job at Harvard,' she said. ' 'Anne,' he told me, 'you've got to be able to solve linear equations in your head.' So I made sure that I could.'

I struck up a conversation with a classmate who looked barely out of his teens. 'This?' he said. 'Just a refresher. I took a lot of math as an undergraduate at Yale.'

'Many of you still see mathematics as foreign and difficult,' Cooper said, beginning the afternoon session. 'So I'd like to depart from the syllabus for a few minutes to give you a practical demonstration of the way mathematics can help you to think.' He put his chin in his hand and peered at us. 'If you took a single piece of paper,' he said, 'folded it in half, folded it in half again, and kept on folding it in half a total of 32 times, how thick would the sheet be?' He called on a woman in the front row.

'Maybe two inches?' she said.

'Wrong]' Cooper said, looking gleeful. He called on a man in the back of the room.

'A foot thick?' the man said.

'Wrong]' Cooper called on others. 'Two feet thick?' 'Three feet?'

Cooper shook his head. 'The correct answer, ladies and gentlemen, is that the sheet of paper will achieve a thickness of just over 271 miles. Observed.'

Turning to the chalkboard, he took us through the mathematics. A ream of paper of 500 sheets was about two inches thick. Each sheet was therefore about 2 500 or .004 of an inch thick. After one fold, a sheet of paper took on the thickness of two sheets, after two folds, of four sheets, and after three folds, of eight sheets. Two, four, and eight could also be expressed as two to the power of one, two to the power of two, and two to the power of three.

'After 32 folds,' Cooper said, 'the sheet has the thickness of two to the power of 32, or 4,294,967,296 sheets. That number times .004 inch equals 17,179,869 inches. Seventeen million one hundred seventy-nine thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine inches equals 1,431,655 feet, or approximately 271 miles.

'Ladies and gentlemen, there is no way intuition gets you there. But math gets you there in just a brief series of calculations.'

Even I had to admit that Cooper had made his point: math could provide a compact, powerful tool of analysis. For a moment I was even struck with a kind of wonderment, a poet glimpsing the poetry of math. Then Cooper turned back to the syllabus, started a discussion of simultaneous linear equations, and lost me, as it were, simultaneously.

Drudgery broken by brief, surpassing moments of understanding proved the pattern during math camp. We'd slog through linear equations drawn in the X and Y co- ordinates of Cartesian graphs, vectors involving the mathematics of magnitude and direction, and probability theory, 'defined', as Cooper emphasised, 'strictly in terms of sets' and therefore illustrated by way of the overlapping circles of Venn diagrams. Then Cooper would offer a particular example or insight, and for at least a moment I would see something of the usefulness and beauty of mathematics.

'One of the lessons we attempt to teach here at the business school,' he said cheerfully, 'is that rigorous, mathematical reasoning can lead to big profits.'

THE Director of Admissions had provided us with a brief set of statistics, telling us during his remarks that the 333 members of the class had graduated from 127 undergraduate institutions and come from 21 countries. The oldest member of the class was, at 42, nearly twice as old as the youngest, while the average age was 271 2 . One sixth of the students were 30 or older; another third would be 30 by the time we graduated. Women numbered 83, just under a quarter of the class.

But the statistics failed to provide any sense of the students' attainments. In the first quarter of an hour in the courtyard, I met a Navy pilot who had landed fighter planes on carriers, three medical doctors, a former pro football fullback, and a Coast Guard helicopter pilot who while on duty in South Florida had routinely flown several drug interdiction missions each month. For two or three minutes I joined a group that included a professional rock musician, an Exxon engineer, and a young man, just returned from graduate studies in Leningrad, who described his hobby as 'capitalist encirclement'. Later I introduced myself to a 25-year-old recently returned from a sailing trip across the Pacific. He had paid for the trip with money he had made by selling his design for a lighter, more comfortable, more attractive wheelchair to a manufacturer of medical equipment. Among the women in our class I met a classical pianist, a neurosurgeon, and the finance director of a presidential campaign.

It was clear at once that my classmates had self-confidence, intelli- gence, talent. Although I had worked with gifted people at the White House I had never seen a group like this, in which every member proved so articulate and conveyed such vitality. These young men and women even looked perfect.

Were they children of affluence? Or had they acquired their confidence in rising up from obscurity and poverty? I would learn later that the class contained elements of each. One of my classmates was the son of a billionaire, another the son of one of the most prominent executives in Hollywood. At the other end of the scale, one student had grown up in a Los Angeles barrio, another in a tough Puerto Rican section of Brooklyn. But mingling in the courtyard on the first day, it was impossible to say. In England, where I had done my graduate work, class distinctions would have lain on the surface, in accents, dress, even posture. But here accents said nothing. Clothes? Rich, poor, middle class, everyone wore California hip.

I HAVE NOW been to the first session of each of my five core courses. I do not understand computers. I do not understand micro. I do not understand accounting. I do understand organisational behavior since it deals with words rather than numbers. But I don't like it. So what am I doing at business school?

I marked the textbooks in magic markers and high-lighters of all colours. I took notes, formed them into outlines, transferred key formulas from the texts onto three-by-five cards, then taped the cards to the wall over my table. Each week I had hundreds of pages of material to get through, but lacked any ability to discriminate, to tell what was of central importance. I was wholly overwhelmed.

Yet the most difficult aspect of the work lay not in its sheer volume but in adjusting from politics to business. Politics was big ideas and talk. Business was implementation, organisation, specifics, numbers. Pose a question in politics and a capable Washington hand could fashion two or more answers that would sound plausible, garner some level of public support, and therefore prove correct. For instance: should the President propose a cut in the capital gains tax?

Answer One: the President cannot propose such a tax cut because it would fail to get through Congress.

Answer Two: the President must support such a tax cut. Even though the measure would fail in Congress, the President would still have demonstrated determination to spur investment and create jobs.

Note that from the Washington point of view, Answer Two is just as correct, if you will, as Answer One.

Now pose a question in accounting. To choose from one of Walt's assignment sheets: 'If in 1987 the Stride-Rite corporation had used the Last-In, First-Out, or LIFO, method of accounting for inventory instead of the First-In, First-Out, or FIFO method, how much more, or less, would it have had to pay in taxes?' There was only one answer, exact, precise, specific to the penny.

Who cares, I'd think when I read a question like that. I am here to absorb the grand concepts. Then I'd reflect that my instructors cared. So with a miserable inward groan, I'd pull my calculator from its case to begin grappling with the numbers.

And the hours would tick past.

THE TIME is six minutes past 10. I have worked all day, rising at 7, attending class from 8 until 11.45, eating a quick lunch, returning to class from 1.20 until 3.05, doing some quick shopping, going for a quick run, microwaving a quick dinner, then entering my office to study.

I probably have another five hours of work to go - but I'm not sure I'll be able to complete it because I feel too old.

I don't mean I feel my full 31 years. I mean I feel 80 or 90. My joints are stiff, I have trouble remembering what I did the day before yesterday, I doze off intermittently, and I find that I keep checking myself over the way really old people are always looking for things to tell the doctor.

THE SECOND ACT of the job drama was the winter term CV crunch. By the third week of the term, each of us was required to submit a copy of his CV to the business school's Career Management Centre.

Ten days before they were due, the centre began running lunchtime seminars on writing CVs. I refused to attend, scoffing at the notion. 'How complicated can writing a CV be?' I thought. 'You list where you worked and where you went to school. If there's space left over at the bottom of the page, you put down your favorite sports.' I neglected the whole matter until four days before the deadline.

When I finally went downstairs to the computer lab, it was jammed. The atmosphere was frantic. Students were working at terminals while others stood in tense groups, waiting their turns to use the laser printers, or paced back and forth, circulating drafts of their CVs to each other to proofread. The lab floor looked like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

'If I were you, I'd put my name in 14-point bold typeface, not 12-point italic. You want your name to look big and confident, not small and fussy.'

'Should I centre my address and phone number under my name? Or put my address flush with the left margin and my phone number flush with the right? Hey, it matters.'

'Don't just say you 'worked on several refinancings' while you were at Goldman. Say something with more energy. Something like 'participated in a number of major financial restructurings'.'

'Are you still using the printer? Please. There are 333 of us who need to meet this deadline.'

I ended up spending three hours a day in the computer lab for all four days, getting every item on my CV just so, printing it out, passing it around for comments, then going back to the computer again and again to make tiny adjustments.

'How are we supposed to get any studying done?' I complained to a classmate. He continued to tap at his terminal. 'You thought you were here to study? Wrong-o. You're here to get a job.'

Had I done the right thing in going for an MBA? Sure.

Stanford heightened my appreciation of the brains and talent and sheer creativity required in business. It permitted me to mingle for two years with bright, business-minded classmates and to give serious thought to business careers. Stanford even let me try being a banker, and get paid for it, and try working in a gigantic communications empire, and get paid for that, too. Most of my classmates learned where they fit in business. I learned that I fit best outside, writing about business rather than participating in it directly.

The reader will have to check in with me again in 20 or so years to learn how my classmates and I stand, but it's my belief that after a bumpy start, all of us are going to do just fine. Business school did not, as I've said, deliver us into paradise. But it did equip us all to lead pretty interesting lives here below.

Extracted from Snapshots From Hell: The Making of an MBA by Peter Robinson, published by Nicholas Brealey at pounds 9.99 on 6 October.

(Photograph omitted)