What School Is All About
Michael Dubin, founder of Dollar Shave Club (recently sold to Unilever for US$1 billion) and an independent school alum (Haverford), elegantly describes the experience that more students (especially boys, given the state of their condition) need to have in secondary and post-secondary education for a profile in Emory Magazine, the alumni publication of Emory University where Dubin is an alumnus ('01) and the 2018 commencement speaker.
Nancy [Dubin's mother] also has described Dubin as a pretty typical teenage guy when it came to school, saying, “If things interested him, he was a fabulous student. If it was a subject that didn’t interest him at all, I think he was probably a terrible student.”
Still, that warehouse full of razor blades wasn’t the only time Dubin was able to spot a chance opportunity and follow its lead. During his junior year at Haverford, a friend who was applying to colleges left an admission brochure from Emory on his hall table by accident. As Dubin tells it, he picked it up, read it, and thought, “Huh. That seems like a pretty cool place to go.”
But Dubin has made no secret of the fact that his Emory experience wasn’t a slam dunk. He struggled academically, never quite finding the inspiration that would point him in the right direction.
“I will admit to not being the most successful student my freshman and sophomore year,” he told Elliott. “I think I came to college not really sure what the purpose was. My signature academic failure was actually flunking the same class twice in back-to-back years. It seems pretty amazing that someone could flunk the same class twice, especially after having seen all the exam material the year before. But I think that wasn’t for lack of intelligence or motivation, it was just that I hadn’t found my passion [or] my path and I didn’t ask for help.”
Junior year, Dubin gave himself a reality check and started to get a little more traction. His grades improved and he began exploring the idea of a career in business. Through some friends in Goizueta Business School, he met Andrea Hershatter, now senior associate dean and director of the BBA program.
“I said, ‘I would love to take a couple of classes, and I would love to get a marketing internship. I’m not a business school student. Can you help me?’,” Dubin recalls. “She had no reason to say yes, [but] for whatever reason she said yes, because she’s a great person. I’m so grateful that she did that, because if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten some critical exposure to ideas early on that sprung me onward into doing other things in media and marketing.”
Among other opportunities, Dubin took an early version of a course taught by Joey Reiman, who founded the game-changing marketing firm Brighthouse, and interned at CNN.
“As a student, Michael was an enthusiastic and invaluable contributor to a small team of BBA students who were examining the connection between innovation and corporate success,” Hershatter says. “He makes it look easy, but there is nothing accidental about Michael’s success. He is not only incredibly bright, insightful, and creative, but also extremely strategic and hard working.”
Although he wound up gravitating toward business, Dubin has a keen awareness of how every experience along the way helped shape him and guide his path forward—including his foundation in a liberal arts education. The writing and critical thinking skills that he gained as a history major have helped him tell the Dollar Shave Club story.
There you have what should be our goal for every student: helping them find their passion and path. Or at least helping them be ready to find it when an opportunity opens up.It may be the psychologist in me that hears echos of ADD and a disaffection with school common to many male students; but, in the end, schooling "worked" phenomenally well for Michael Durbin, including failure, taking courses outside a prescribed major, and doing an internship in a leading company. The story is a great reminder that the paths to success are not all along traditional lines.