The MBA Journey 1 - Where I started

It started out as a fantasy, something I thought about. Eight months down the line and it’s reality.

Getting an MBA might look like just another degree but my interaction with the admission process alone taught me otherwise. My choice of an MBA was more out of a desire to chart a new course. A little exposure to the corporate world taught me a lot more than I expected, I knew I needed more than what I was doing. It was a perfect way to escape, re-evaluate and re-strategize. My theory is, every decision we take is inextricably linked with what we turn out to be in the future. If that’s the case, then I guess, once you can narrow down on what you would like to do in life, the best thing is to at least start working along that route even if you don’t see the end of the tunnel from the beginning (only a very few people actually see anything meaningful about the end from the beginning).

Once I made up my mind, I did some research and I found out that an MBA Programme is probably one of the most expensive educational degrees around if not the most expensive. As such, it makes sense to attend any of the top B-Schools or a school that you know meets your needs. Apart from the quality of education at these schools, the top recruiters in the world go to these schools to recruit (over 88% of the graduates from the top 15 schools get employment from school). That’s apart from the exposure, the kind of minds you would work it and the continuous internationalization of these schools.

Most schools are increasingly moving towards Leadership and Entrepreneurship, two things the world needs badly today. They are moving away from the traditional notion of building “managers”. Clearly, the days of “managing” are over. In the past, the world always looked to the academia for solutions to human problems – mostly social and technological. From the look of things, nobody has any “real” answers to the problems we are facing now. It’s obvious the answers wouldn’t come from Wall Street or government houses.With the current crisis in the world more people would go back to school (I pray economies of scale would force the B-Schools to drop their fees). For emerging markets like Nigeria, there’s also an increasing need for the skilled business leaders with more companies going international. The trend should at the least linger till the end of this crisis. , As such, this is the best time to go to a B-School. . . . . . . . .