The truth behind an MBA

Oh my gosh, LIFE. The last week has been insane, with moving back to Boston and starting classes and a bachelorette party and a wedding and a thousand other things and ACK, crazy. Maybe one day I'll get to all that stuff. Until then, let's move on.

People often ask me whether I made a good decision in going to business school. They want to know if I'm enjoying being back in academia and if I think I made a worthwhile investment. Since this question was posed to me again quite recently, and since there may be people out there considering going for an MBA, I thought I would give you my perspective. Also, it's about time to have that disgusting bug from my last post be moved down from the top of my blog.

I am decidedly pro-MBA. Before I get into the reasons why, I should say that i do not, under any circumstances, support the idea of going back to graduate school at all unless you know that's what you want to do. School will suck if you don't want to be there. If you go to business school because you can't think of anything else to do with your life, you will probably sit idly during class daydreaming of what you'll do when class is over, and none of what I say next will apply to you.

Now. An MBA is a pretty versatile degree. You can go into finance, marketing, HR, IT. For profit, non-profit, no-idea-what-you'll-do-with-the-degree-but-hopefully-there-will-one-day-be-profit (I fall into this camp). You can start your own business. You will never find an MBA a waste of money, the way you might find an MD a waste of money should you decide once you're done that you don't want anything to do with medicine. An MBA, in addition to a lot of classroom-heavy stuff, teaches you about the real world. It helps you understand the world around you, and, arguably of more importance, to question it and want to reshape it.

Instead of just thinking, "Hey, this is cool," you will say, "This is cool, but how do they make money?" (I asked this of both Twitter and Hulu when I first heard about them).

When you and your friend go for ice cream and see that the ice cream parlor (do they still call them parlors?) has decided to open a few hours earlier and serve hot breakfast, you will discuss, at length, whether or not you think this is a wise idea and you wonder, as business students always do, whether the move has proved profitable.

If you notice that a particular venue seems to have a severe bottleneck every time there's a concert which causes hours of sitting idly in traffic as you wait just to park your damn vehicle (I'm looking at you, PNC Bank Arts Center), instead of just complaining about it, you'll say, "Clearly there's a problem with this process. I wonder how much it would cost them to bring someone in to analyze and reengineer the parking situation." You will sound like a nerd, but you won't care. Because you really, really want this to happen. And not only that, you sort of want to use the tools you learned in Operations class to spearhead the effort.

An MBA can enlighten you as to how you were mismanaged by your last boss, or how lucky you were to have a manager who was also a mentor. You will speak to your classmates and be in awe of the amazing things they did pre-b-school, and you will feel wholly inadequate, yet fortunate to be able to learn from their experiences.

B-school will make you antsy to pick up the paper in the morning (even if it's just a virtual copy) because you have a better understanding of what's going on in the world. You will become absolutely elated when you find a deal that gives you a free 1 year subscription to BusinessWeek magazine.

All in all, you will find an MBA to be a valuable 2 years of your life, both in the experience as well as the monetary investment you put into it. Hopefully it turns out to be one that gets you your dream job. And if that dream job pays enough to get rid of those student loans quickly, then you can consider yourself a success.