[原创]MBA with no W/E

cannedpineapple

While I respect your opinion, I think you need to add a very strong qualifier here. While going straight to business school after college may not have been suitable for you, everyone is at different maturity levels and at different stages of their lives. Some students can be ready straight out of college; others (as I'm sure everyone can attest to) may be 30 years old and still not be mature enough to benefit from a business school programme.

Choosing to go to business school is a complex choice that depends on many factors- one's readiness for doing so, one's needs, and so on, and to generalise to a single point- 'don't go if you're applying straight from college'- is oversimplistic and by its very nature flawed.

For instance, what is the point of going to business school? For some, the alumni network is important. Some think the brand-name is crucial. For others, business school is 'school' first- a chance first and foremost to learn how to do business. For the last group, for instance, I suspect that even going to a school outside of the top 10 would be fine, since the top 10 does not have a monopoly on the best business educators in the world. Perhaps from your point of view going to business school is primarily about branding, but for others, this may not be the case. And for a student who has never had a formal education in business, where is the shame in going to a school outside of the top 10, to learn from equally world-leading business professors?

Unlike you, I felt ready to go to business school straight after college. And no, I did not have a "well-thought business idea" or a "family business" to go back to. Did not have stellar leadership experience either, and while my academics were okay, I doubt they were significantly better than everyone in my school (ie I'm not a genius). In fact, you may wish to reflect a little more closely on what you think makes a good business school candidate. For in fact if you already have such a well-thought business idea, I would argue that you would be better off starting that business than going to business school. But I digress.

My point again is this: "why MBA and why now" are intensely personal questions that have no 'right answers'. Rather than worrying about what admissions committees look for ("is this GPA enough? Am I old enough? Do I need more work experience?" Etc), reflect most of all on your own readiness and your own reasons for going. When you convince yourself with good and well-founded reasons, you'll often find that others are ready to listen to your case for business school too.

cannedpineapple

stellaecon, jenery>

One can only say what made the most sense to them. For almost everyone thinking of business school, that has tended to be, "let's wait a few years". For the majority, that is the right decision for them. However, there are some who also say, "let's wait a few years", simply because "everyone says we should wait a few years", as opposed to, "I have reflected about my own situation, know why for some people it may make sense to go straight after school, but for me it doesn't."

For example, both of you, and many of the other posters before, raise VERY GOOD points about recruiting. When I applied for internships in consulting, I did not get a single interview offer. My resume is really nothing to shout about. However, I did not come to business school just to look for a job, so while perhaps I got what I deserved, this wasn't a big deal to me at all. When I talk to alumni, I frequently ask them, what's the #1 thing you wish you had done differently while you were in business school- and 95% of them tell me, "I wish I didn't spend that much time looking for a job." In the class that graduated 2008, almost half have already quit the job that they had coming out of school. When these alumni think back about how they spent almost two years looking for a job that they only did for less than two years, they find themselves regretting a lot.

As a person going to school without work experience, I had very different goals. To me, business school wasn't just about finding a job, an internship, and so on. I am here to build a career. I am here to equip myself with the necessary intellectual, emotional and soft-skill resources to do well- the intellectual comes from the classes; emotional from learning how to listen to myself and understand what I really want, as well as to be brave enough to tell others that I have failed to look for an internship that they may have found impressive; and soft-skills from working with other impressive professionals, in my club involvement.

I've found that two types of people tend to think like me- those without much experience (although not all of them. Some think that they need to compensate, and work doubly or triply hard to get that internship), and those with a lot, >10 years of work experience. I've found that many more experienced people have the same goals as me- they're here not to look for a job, but to build a career. We agree that it doesn't matter as much whether recruiters want to look for us right now- what matters most is whether, in another ten or twenty years, we are in the position, and have the skills, to succeed in the career that we choose.

Because of this, I have had a wonderful, wonderful experience at business school, and am well on the way to meeting all my goals. When I reflect back on my experience, I fear that a few years of working experience would have changed me in a negative way, because I would be very focused on a choice of a job, rather than a career, and I would also use a different set of priorities to choose a job, too. Looking at my classmates, it's stunning how quickly (within one month) they entered Wharton, and immediately abandoned all their diverse dreams of working in non-profit, in sports, in media, in clean-tech, and so on. Instead, 95% of people recruit only for one of the four industries, whether or not they had wanted to do this before business school- Banking, Consulting, PE, VC.

I would say, out of my >800 classmates, I am probably one of less than a hundred, who is pursuing the exact short-term career goal that I had written I would pursue in my application. And that's been the most important thing to me. I strongly believe that if I can't even be honest to myself, I can never expect to be happy. If it comes with needing to tell others, "I'm not doing the jobs you want to do. It's okay if I'm a failure in your eyes", then that's what I have to do. Fact is, I can't please everyone- and given a choice, I'll choose to please myself.

stellaecon> Exactly as you say, "MBA只能读一次，所以有的时候读了还不如不读。" If I had come here with a few years of work experience, and acted exactly like many of my classmates (or even that friend of yours who had gone straight to Wharton and worried only about his job after school) then that to me would have been a complete waste of time and money. I am thankful for the opportunity I've been given to not worry about competing for a job, and instead being able to focus on the fantastic resources both at Wharton, but also at UPenn, and I believe this has been the perfect business school experience for myself. I have learnt so much about myself, about life, and about others in the process, and I wouldn't trade this for the world.

I hope this helps explain why I so passionately persuade others to think clearly for themselves. I think it is obvious why waiting a few years is good for many people- because maturity does tend to increase over time. However, there are inherent advantages to attending business school as a person out of college, who has a different set of priorities. Most people don't understand the case for attending straight out of school, because they've never tried it. I feel fortunate to have done so.

Jason

cannedpineapple

Agree. For most people, applying straight away doesn't make sense. It was simply my experience, when I applied, that nobody else had given (or, could give) me the other side of the story- why it may be good to apply without work experience.

This is the main reason I write my own experience: so that CDers, particularly the minority for whom applying straight out of school may be a good choice, can get a balanced perspective.

cannedpineapple

stellaecon> Agreed. For all of us, we study partly because we want to find a better job. But there is nothing magically different about you just because you got into and graduated from a business school. If business school is first and foremost about finding a better job, and therefore you spend as much time as you can recruiting, then have you really improved as a professional by the end of it? Debatable. This is what I mean by 'we have different goals'.

That piece of paper- MBA- does indeed give you more options. But some people take those job options as the chief and primary goal of business school, because you learn most at a workplace, while some people think that business school is still 'school', and you learn most at 'school'. I fall into the latter camp.

I am going to do sales, in a media company, selling advertisements, after business school. I wanted to work in the media pre-business school, and I want to do sales to learn the economics of the media business. This is extremely realistic for anyone- anyone on this chasedream forum can go and do this right now. You certainly don't need an MBA to do what I am going to do. This is what I wanted to do, so in my second year, I did not even bother looking for another job. I was presented with the option I wanted, and so I took it. It just so happened mine was an easy option, because most people don't want it. All the better for me

But like I said, the MBA has been more than finding a job, which is why perhaps my choice of job may sound strange. I have a specific plan in mind, and that plan lasts for the next 10 years, at least. So I'm not bothered. I got into the MBA programme with the aim to learn, and that's exactly what I've done. At the same time, I realise that part of that may be because of my own naivety, having not worked before, that I think that you can still learn certain things about business from a school environment- be it working with others, classes, and so on. Some people might think this makes me green behind the ears, that I will learn the 'truth' when I start working. They are no doubt right. There is much for me to learn. But at this point, what they see as my curse, my inexperience, I see as a blessing. I think that work experience, too, blinds people to the value of certain types of learning. Inexperience works both ways. I am inexperienced in knowing how to function in a work environment; they are inexperienced in knowing how to learn in a school.

I'm glad we agree that an MBA w/o WE can benefit some, though not all. The same can perhaps be said of any applicant to an MBA programme. Which, interestingly enough, coincides with a key question that all schools ask. Why do you want an MBA, why now, and why at our particular school?

Lastly, to answer your question directly- since I realise that my options are not what most people are looking for. My fellow classmates with no work experience are going to be doing the following things after graduation: PE, Real Estate, Banking, Consulting, General Management, Entrepreneurship. There aren't that many of us, which may explain why other industries (eg. non-profit) are less represented. We have found that the industries that traditionally have high turnover (consulting, banking) are much less open to hiring students with no work experience, since in effect they merely want to 'rent' your services for two years. On the other hand, we have had much better success finding employment in industries like PE, General Management, Entrepreneurship, where they look out for loyalty, for someone to stay a long time- these tend to be more willing to look past our obvious lack of skill-sets and look to our learning ability.

Having said that, some have still been successful in something like consulting. But not me. I think I truly got what I deserved, because I really wasn't spending as much time as these other guys were doing recruiting. But everybody knows that we only have 24 hours a day... and everyone has to make trade-offs. You can't have it all, and what matters most is that you're happy with what you do have, and what you've had to give up.

BTW, the need to make trade-offs in business school is perhaps something most who haven't pursued an MBA don't understand. When you apply, you look out for, I want to do 'x, y and z'. But the moment you go into business school, you realise the choice becomes, 'I am willing to give up a, b and c'. Everyone starts out thinking they can do 'a, b AND c'. But soon you realise- say in recruiting, you wish you only had to spend one hour a day doing it, but there are people around you spending five hours, ten hours- every free moment, even, networking and doing more. So you realise you gotta do more if you really want to get the job, and you do, and eventually all you're doing is that. I didn't do this, which is why I said, I probably get what I deserve.

Anyway, to link this to my experience, I have chosen to give up something which a lot of my classmates, with more experience, haven't chosen to do- perhaps because they value the learning you can glean at the workplace more than I do. This is where my inexperience comes into play. Nonetheless, as I've mentioned above, I think inexperience works both ways, and it's interesting to me that it is the youngest (most experienced with school) and oldest (most experienced with work) guys at business school who have tended to make similar choices as I have.

Jason