A brief aside: we’re at week 9 in the term which is when group assignments and case studies are either due or right around the corner so rather than talking about marketing, I thought I might switch topics and jump onto something a little more meta. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, since my undergrad actually, and while it’s not a ground breaking concept it’s something that sometimes gets lost, particularly when you hit the business end of term.
What I am alluding to is the education you get outside of the classroom. Like when a professor is happy to stick around after class and give you some of their time to discuss where things are headed in their field. Then there’s your classmates and the clubs you get involved with and the friends you make through the socializing you do outside of your study. This might seem really obvious but for me, it’s a critical component of the educational experience.
When I did my undergrad in engineering at Deakin, I didn’t really know what I was signing up for. I did it because I had pretty good grades in my maths and science based subjects and I enjoyed pulling things apart. I didn’t have a specific interest in cars, or electronics, or robotics but once I got into the course and was surrounded by people that were, it started to rub off. I became an engineer by osmosis: someone would build a trebuchet in class out of stuff in the room; someone would test the compressive strength of a brick. With other engineers we explored dogfighting with remote control planes, sumo robots, lazercut mechanical calculating systems and trying to get a set of robot legs to self balance. All of this stuff was done outside the classroom, outside of the formal learning environment but it was as influential on me as the stuff I was supposed to be learning.
A lot of my friends are in first-child territory and one of the topics that crops up regularly is nature vs. nurture. There’s a whole body of work out there expounding both sides but most people agree that it’s a combination of both that makes someone into who they are. Taking that a little further, I can understand how parents are the primary influencers throughout the infant stage but the moment that your kids start to socialize, there is suddenly whole new set of variables in the nurture equation. As we get older we have more opportunity to influence the environment that we’re spending our time in: we choose the sports we like, we hang around people who we share an interest, because we can connect with those people and it’s easy than maintaining a relationship with people who lack that commonality but like anything, as you focus in, you lose some of that ability to generalize.
And that’s what so great about B-school. Granted, there are a lot of engineers around but you’ll start hanging out with finance guys, quants who are avid stockmarket chartists or amateur economists who discuss things like what’s going to happen as the owners of negatively geared investment properties (predominately baby-boomers) stop working and don’t need to offset so much income anymore? Suddenly a whole bunch of pathways that you’ve shut off, reappear, you see what others do and enjoy and they enter the sphere of your awareness.
There’s clearly some other factors in this: how willing you are to interact with others, how many people there are for you to interact with and that is why class size and cohort/intake size makes for such an interesting discussion: too small and there’s not variety; too large and you have a hard time being heard. And that varies for everyone too, an extrovert might be comfortable interacting and contributing in a class with 80 people but an introverted international student, who’s first language isn’t English, may need a much smaller class size to make things work. If you’re considering an MBA, this is something that’s important, ask yourself honestly about the environment you’re going to need to have to be able to learn effectively. It doesn’t matter how great the name of the school is or who their alumni include, if you aren’t learning, participating and contributing then you’re not getting the education you deserve.
To sum up, I think one of the key factors when considering whether or not to do an MBA is the people who will be doing it along side you because they are the single biggest factor in the environment that you’re in. Surround yourself with people who have achieved and you’re are going to get a lot more out of it. I have been made feel welcome at MBS, and not just because people see a chance to meet someone as a networking opportunity but because the people I am studying with understand the intrinsic value of access a diverse group of people tied by a common thread. An MBA gives you an opportunity to widen out your professional field of vision again. It’s one of the few times that you can work back towards being more of a generalist (if you want) and that’s pretty amazing. Most business schools are going to be able to deliver on the classroom component (to a greater or lesser degree) but it’s your classmates who are going to complement and extend that experience for you and looking around at the people I’m going through this with, I feel like I made the right choice.
What Tim Learned at Business School 