I have completed my graduation this year and working in a multinational firm as an associate executive. All the seniors in my office are MBA. One of my seniors has suggested me to take admission in the MBA course. However, I don’t want to leave my job as it is the only source of my income. Could anyone suggest me what should I do? Should I leave this job and take admission in a MBA college? Is there is any way by means of which one can complete the MBA course while doing the full time job? Please help me. I will be waiting for the reply.
There is no reason to leave your employment to earn an MBA. There are plenty of colleges and universities offering distance education degrees including MBAs.
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Ami, When you use the term "associate", are you indicating that you are a first or second year associate in a consulting or accounting type firm? Many people on this career track leave the workforce for a few years to earn their MBA. The idea is to give up a couple of your low earning years in order to accelerate your career - graduates from top tier MBA programs can expect to earn $90K (or more, depending on the area of the country you find yourself in) per year as an entry-level consultant or i-banker. Executive MBA programs, on the other hand, tend to cater to the mid-career professional who is moving from a functional role into a management position, someone with a bit more work experience than it sounds like you have. When your manager suggests earning an MBA, I am willing to bet he is envisioning a full-time program. My advice is for you to listen to his advice and start preparing yourself to be the best full-time MBA applicant you can be. If you graduated last May, as I suspect, you're realistically at least two years away from applying to b-school (probably three). You have plenty of time to focus on two critical things: 1. Building the kind of experience that will make you attractive to an admissions officer. 2. Understanding why you are pursuing a graduate education in business. I'm going to tackle the second point first. Right now, if I read your post correctly, you are considering an MBA because several people where you work have one and they told you that you should get one too. While that is a perfectly good reason to begin thinking about getting your MBA, it will lead to a very uncomfortable silence should you use it in an admissions interview. By the time you're interviewing, however, you're going to have a better reason. Start by talking with the senior managers in your company. Ask them about where they studied, why they chose the school they did, and what their career plans were both pre and post MBA. Many people find that the b-school experience changes their outlook on their chosen life path. Start networking, especially with people who are two or three years older than you and currently going through the process of applying to b-school. Learn from their mistakes, and from their successes. If your company offers a mentoring program, take advantage of it - eventually you will want to use your mentor to write your recommendations, and getting to know the boss is always a good thing anyway. Even as you're working on firming up your reasons for earning the MBA, start thinking about what you're going to look like to an admissions committee. An MBA application consists of four parts: 1. The application questionnaire. 2. One or more application essays. 3. One or more letters of recommendation (usually three). 4. Your GMAT scores. Again, I'm going to tackle the last part first. The GMAT gets a lot of grief on this message board, but in reality, you should have learned everything you needed to do well on it way back in high school. All of the mathematics is pre-calculus, the verbal section should be easy for a native english speaker, and most schools ignore the essay section altogether. Doing well on the GMAT boils down to preparation, being familiar with the types of questions you will be asked, and having a strategy to attack the test. My GMAT preparations consisted of purchasing 4 GMAT study guides, reading one to learn about the types of questions and the strategy for the test, and then doing all the practice tests in the books and their accompanying CDs, plus the PowerPrep software (with two complete simulated GMATs based on real test questions) you can download for free from MBA.com. A useful hint that was given to me is to use the first test from the PowerPrep software to guage where you're starting, and after your preparations, use the second test to get insight into your improvement. The application questionnaire seems like a pretty generic part of the process (except for the University of Chicago, where the application is designed by second year students), but there are ways that you can make these personal inventories work to your advantage, and by thinking about it early, you can position yourself to be the applicant who jumps directly into the "Admitted" pile. First, think about what your resume or work history will say to the Adcom. You need to show a stable employment history with increasing responsibility and salary. Since you're four months out of undergrad at this point, this means that you should not change employers between now and your application, unless the move is clearly an increase in both responsibility and salary. Do not change employers more than once between now and when you apply. Do be visible within your current employer. Seek out new responsibilities and skills, especially if these roles are customer-facing. A great piece of advice is to always seek line jobs (where you interact with customers), not staff jobs or support roles. Next, show that you have interests outside of work. Join an organization. Volunteer your time. Lead a committee. A good rule of thumb for "extracurricular activities" is that ones where you interact with other people are superior to individual pursuits, application wise. Someone who leads the effort to plan and execute a 10K race for charity looks better as an applicant than a runner who runs lots of charity 10K races. In the same vein, travel. You have two weeks of vacation. Use it. Leave the country. Go somewhere where you don't speak the language. Build experiences. You will be surprised how many applications ask you about international travel and your international experiences. If your company offers a way for you to work a stint overseas, go for it. If you have serious academic deficiencies, start addressing them. If your GPA was sub 3.0, then start building an alternative transcript. Take some undergraduate business courses, especially quantitative ones like finance, stats, and accounting, and get A's in them. You have plenty of time to address any potential problems. If you have a 3.5 undergrad GPA or better, you're probably good to go. Your application essays are a huge part of the application, and where you should spend the most of your time. If you're a sub-par writer, then you need to address this. Read some books on business communications, practice writing, and share your writing with others, listening to their feedback. A helpful hint with your essays is to do your applications in reverse order from the schools you want to attend. Writing the essays for the schools you want to attend the least will prepare you to do a better job writing the essays for the school you want to attend the most. NEVER reuse material from one application essay to the next, always start fresh for each one. You don't want your Wharton application essay explaining how excited you are about attending Darden. Finally, letters of recommendation. Make sure your recommenders are going to make it look like you cause the sun to rise in the morning with your smile, because everyone else's recommenders are going to do the same thing. If someone has reservations about recommending you, don't ask them to do it. Some schools ask recommenders not to show you the recommendation. If this is the case, respect it, but if it isn't, don't be shy about reviewing the recommendation with your recommender. To be clear (especially on a DL forum), I am usually very much in favor of DL MBA's. I'm pursuing one myself. I've posted a lot on both DL and full-time MBAs. However, in your situation, given the little I know about it, I think that you should continue working for a few years before applying to full time programs. It might be heresy at degreeinfo, but I really think that in your case, earning a DL MBA now would be less effective over the long term than waiting a few years and doing a full-time program at a top 25 school. Whatever you decide, best of luck! --Fortunato
My fiance is going for his MBA through an online college and working full time. I wouldnt suggest quitting your job, you can get your MBA while working... Is your senior threatened by you? lol. I dont think that is wise advice.
I understand that this is a DL forum and as I noted before, I earned my degree via DL. Honestly, however, there are situations where leaving the workforce temporarily to pursue your education is the optimal path. I think that Ami's case is one of them. At 22 or 23, she has an extremely long time horizion over which her MBA will pay for itself. What she doesn't have is the experience to put graduate business education in the proper context, which is an absolute neccessity for those entering Executive/part-time/DL/online MBA programs. As I noted in a previous post, I think that non-traditional MBAs are aimed at a student who is a little further down his or her career path - someone who has compiled a good understanding of how the business world works, but is ready to add the analysis "toolkit" that an MBA gives you as they prepare to step up to the next phase in their career. A full-time MBA student, on the other hand, might not necessarily have vast amounts of business experience. But they will cover a lot more cases and other material in the course of putting together the same "toolkit" as the EMBA student. This additional work in the classroom adds the context that makes up for the traditional student's lack of experience. If you put your average 22 year old in an EMBA program, you are going to end up with a sorely underprepared MBA graduate. Over the course of my program at Fuqua, we will probably end up doing around 50-60 cases across 16 courses. By contrast, a full-time MBA student will "crack" between 400 and 500 cases over two years and 24 to 28 courses. I want to be clear - I am not saying that full time MBA programs are superior to DL MBAs. I don't believe that they are. However, I do believe that DL and executive MBAs tend to serve experienced students much better than they do younger ones. Since Ami appears to be a younger student, I believe it is in her best interests to target a full-time program. --Fortunato
Fantastic advice below Fortunato. Let's hope ami takes the time to acknowledge the effort you made. I am currently just beginning year 2 of my EMBA at Henley Management College in Oxfordshire, UK. Would be pleased to share study tips and experiences either here or by PM. All the best, Dave C.
