Upon reading Peter Robinson’s classic book on MBA life, it has really inspired me to analyze my own MBA experience. I think his portrayal of the average MBA student’s experience is very accurate. I find it interesting that I read his book while I am right in the middle of my MBA program, which at times I think is the hardest time of all. It is easy to be excited and motivated at the beginning and at the end, but a lot of times being right in between both is where you will find the biggest struggles.
Having a MBA means different things to different people, and people enroll in MBA programs for different reasons. I think though, in the end, it’s mostly about money for most people. Sure, you will have some that want an MBA to springboard themselves into a career field that is more aligned with their personal passion, but for most people, the MBA is an attempt to guarantee yourself better jobs and an increased salary. I am not saying this is a bad thing by any means. For me personally, my decision to start the MBA program was directly related to my strong desire to provide my family with financial security. I had been working in the IT industry for a few years and thought that enrolling in school would allow me greater options and flexibility in the amount of other jobs I could garner interest with. So far that assumption has been true as I have received about five job offers from top companies I have started the program. Now that I am in a great position that pays me well, my goals for the MBA are mostly the same, but have an added dimension to them. My main motivation for finishing is that I believe having the MBA will serve as a security blanket if I ever lost my job, a way to set me apart from other candidates if an emergency situation presented itself. But now that I am in a big corporation, I hope that the MBA will also serve as a way to distant myself within my own company to allow me greater opportunities, or even just different opportunities that would normally be harder to migrate to without it.
A lot of times the marketing of a degree can sometimes outweigh the substance. Personally, I think this is true of most traditional college degree programs. As an undergraduate I studied long and hard for four years to achieve my Bachelor’s in Computer Science. But what I realized after graduation is that the school, or maybe more specifically the Computer Science degree route, did a poor job of preparing me for getting a job. Coming out of college I lacked the basic marketing skills to really know how to even market myself for job interviews. What transpired afterwards was a long learning process that made me learn these lessons the hard way. I also realized that I hardly use any of the material that I learned as an undergrad. I understand that a lot of the appeal in having a college degree is that it proves you can learn something, not necessarily that which you will have to do at your job. Still, I find the emphasis on having a degree a little silly when you breakdown the amount of that knowledge you actually apply in your day to day responsibilities.
With the MBA, I feel the same logic applies but maybe not to the same extent. I have been encouraged in most of my classes by the real world application of the material, which is what I think is lacking the most in traditional academia. However, I still think there is room for improvement. For instance, I feel that we spend a lot of time in our MBA classes crunching numbers and working the problems, and not enough time on analyzing the data that comes out of those problems. In my mind I believe that the emphasis should be on the analysis, and not on the calculation. With technology improving at such a rapid rate, I see the real need being the ability to analyze the data and not the ability to calculate the data. Personally I think that ability to affectively analyze the data is what will separate the top future leaders, and subsequently their companies, from their counterparts.
Much like Peter Robinson, I believe that my recollections of my MBA program will grow fonder as time goes by, especially after graduation. I think it’s always easier to appreciate something when you don’t have to go through it anymore. I do strongly believe that my MBA will provide the financial security for myself and my family that I expected it to back when I enrolled. That in itself will be a great feeling, especially since my family has had to suffer a bit from my involvement in graduate school. It is hard enough to have a job and a family, but when you add graduate school to the mix, it can get frustrating for everyone involved. In the end, only time will tell if the sacrifices my family and I have made to achieve this degree will be worth the benefits of having it.
