What’s up, folks. By now, you’ve probably seen all of the footage of downtown ATL after the tornado came through last night and I’m still in shock. I just happened to be on the way to dinner with a friend right after the storm hit and we noticed that an entire power grid went out down the street from my house. Then, we saw that the traffic on the highway was at a standstill and were still clue about what was going on. That was until we saw all kind of debris right in the middle of the highway…I’m talking about metal guardrails, glass, tree branches, and highway signs AND the power was out along the highway too, so people were looking all confused in their cars. Once we got off the highway and into the downtown/midtown area, it was like we were driving through a warzone. I’ve seen scenes like this on TV after a storm, but I never thought I’d see something like this in ATL of all places. It was only when I got home and turned on the news that I saw the full extent of what had happened in the Centennial Park area. My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone that might have been affected by the storm and I hope that the folks who had to evacuate the Omni Hotel were able to find places to stay…there’s a lot of stuff going on this weekend and the cats on CNN were saying that those people would have nowhere else in the city to get a hotel room 
Well, I might as well get to the entry that I’m responding to, huh? The email below is from a reader who has been working in the techology industry for 8 years now and is interested in pursuing an MBA. He’s looking for advice on which schools to consider to reach his goals and these kinds of questions are always difficult because one’s B-school selection is a personal one. Plus, I’m not as spun up on each of the schools like I was 5 years ago when I developed my own list of target schools. I’m not sure if I’m giving him the kind of guidance he’s looking for below, but I hope he found my words useful.
———————
AR wrote:
“Marquis,
I have been following up your blog for quite some time and have been quite impressed with your insights. I need your help in identifying an MBA program.
I am currently 31 years old and have 8 years of experience.
I have done my B Tech from Regional Engineering College, India. Through campus placement moved to a System integration company for IT telecom. During the first 5 years worked in delivery in various roles from developer (worked on Oracle, UNIX, Java, Web Technologies), designer, requirement capture to onsite coordinator. Later I moved to presales. Here I have been involved in bid management, market reasearch, solution architecting, resource pipelining, creating sales pitch etc. I am currently involved in solution architecting for provisioning, billing and customer relationship management. During my role in delivery I have worked exensively on provisioning and later after moving to pre sales, I picked up knowledge on other domains within telecom and software products for these domains. After quitting my first company moved to a small company(network integration) where worked with some of the major telecom equipment providers and collectively bidded for some major new businesses. My role was to propose IT layer over the network layer. Currently I am involved with a new operator in setting up IT for provisioing side which involves product evaluation, identifying business processes etc. This is a greenfield developement.
Looking forward I want to start my own consulting company (more into operation consulting, IT consulting and strategic consulting) in IT telecom. My current work experience has given me good knowledge in IT and operation consulting(though I agree I need to deepen my knowledge further). 5 years frm now I want to help services providers in designing their current netwrok and optimise cost/netwrok to provide new services.
Second line of thought is to start my own software product company.
Last year I had taken GMAT and scored 690 and applied to top 20 US B schools (for full time MBA) but was rejected. I am looking forward to join a program to gain knowledge on business and finance.
Now my concern is should I opt for a full time course or a 1 year program. Can you suggest some of the colleges which can help in achiving my goals? In waht other ways MBA help me in securing my goals? What should be my course of action?
Your reply will be very helpful.
Regards,
AR”
———————
My response:
AR,
Thanks for checking out my blog and hitting me up. I’ve got to start by telling you that you’ve asked me a pretty tough question by asking for recommendations of which schools to apply to. So much of the B-school process is surveying which schools are out there and determining which ones are a good fit for you. I’m not sure if I’m the right person to give you a perspective on this issue because you haven’t told me a whole lot about you other than what you’ve done career-wise. Other factors should come into play when choosing a set of schools, including your personality, development needs, desired academic and social culture, and geographic preferences, so I would hate for you to shortchange yourself by going off of my recommendations only. I’ll do my best to help you brainstorm about a few options, but I highly recommend that you spend some time thinking about what you really want out of a B-school and then do the in-depth research on the wide range of schools out there to pick out some targets.
- “Should I opt for a full-time course or a 1 year program?” –> It sounds like you’ve got a lot of Technology experience and understanding, but your email said nothing about you having any business background, so I’d guess that you’ll have a lot to learn about the fundamentals of business. As such, I’d go for a full two-year MBA program if I were in your shoes. One-year MBA programs are often accelerated and pack a lot of content into a relatively short amount of time. This works well for people who either have some prior business acumen or are very targeted in what they’re looking for. But, for people who are developing their business knowledgebase from scratch, it might be helpful to have a longer business school experience. Also, you don’t necessarily have to do a full-time MBA program. You could always do a part-time or executive MBA program and get the same experience of having a well-paced, spaced out academic journey through B-school.
- “Can you suggest some of the colleges which can help in achiving my goals?” –> I must be honest…this is a question that I always struggle with answering for people because I don’t want to make a suggestion and then have someone be miserable if they take my advice and end up at a school that doesn’t fit them. Let’s start by thinking about what you’re looking for from a business school…it seems that you’re in search of some depth on technology (from a business perspective), entrepreneurship, and finance. Off the top of my head, I’d guess that Stanford, Kellogg, Wharton, and Sloan would be great places for you to dive deep on all three of those areas. Keep in mind that these are not the only schools that would be good for targeting these topics…they’re just the ones that I remember being strong in them from my research back when I was applying. You really should spend some time on the school websites and reading through their catalogs to get an idea of each school’s area of focus. This really is a question that is hard for anyone to answer because so much of it is based on what you’re REALLY looking for.
- “In waht other ways MBA help me in securing my goals? ” –> I’ve written tons of entries about the topic of what one can get from an MBA, so I won’t delve into it here. Rather, I’d suggest reading through some of my old entries and seeing what you can find. A better way to approach it would be for you to answer this question for yourself by figuring out what it is that you specifically need to reach your goals. Once you’ve made that list, brainstorm about an MBA would give you to address all of the things on your list. A secondary benefit of this method is that it gives you a great set of things to address in your “Why MBA?” application essays.
- “What should be my course of action?” –> I think you’ve pretty well answered this question for yourself in your email…which would be to apply to business school
As I mentioned above, you should really put some time into thinking about what sort of academic and social environment you’re looking for in B-school. Once you’ve developed your set of desired attributes, you should get whatever resources you can (websites, admissions catalogs, US News & World Reports rankings, BusinessWeek profiles, etc) and do as much research on the different schools as possible. Then, you would have to think through which of those schools are suitable fits for your list of desired attributes for a school. I wouldn’t recommend applying to more than 5-6 schools because it will take significant time to do school visits and get all of the detailed info that you’ll need for your application. At the same time, you need to develop your “positioning” of why you want an MBA, what you’ll do with it, and why a school should accept you. I wrote an entry about this about a year or so ago, so you might want to search through my archives to see what advice I had to give about it. Finally, when the time comes to apply, you might want to spread your apps out between rounds 1 and 2 because it’s pretty daggone hard to do more than 3 applications in a single round (trust me, I did six schools in round 1 back in the day).
Take care and good luck on your business school applications. It sounds like you’ve got a great tech foundation, so I’m confident that you’ll be able to leverage your eventual business training to find great success.
-Marquis
Well, I might as well get to the entry that I’m responding to, huh? The email below is from a reader who has been working in the techology industry for 8 years now and is interested in pursuing an MBA. He’s looking for advice on which schools to consider to reach his goals and these kinds of questions are always difficult because one’s B-school selection is a personal one. Plus, I’m not as spun up on each of the schools like I was 5 years ago when I developed my own list of target schools. I’m not sure if I’m giving him the kind of guidance he’s looking for below, but I hope he found my words useful.
———————
AR wrote:
“Marquis,
I have been following up your blog for quite some time and have been quite impressed with your insights. I need your help in identifying an MBA program.
I am currently 31 years old and have 8 years of experience.
I have done my B Tech from Regional Engineering College, India. Through campus placement moved to a System integration company for IT telecom. During the first 5 years worked in delivery in various roles from developer (worked on Oracle, UNIX, Java, Web Technologies), designer, requirement capture to onsite coordinator. Later I moved to presales. Here I have been involved in bid management, market reasearch, solution architecting, resource pipelining, creating sales pitch etc. I am currently involved in solution architecting for provisioning, billing and customer relationship management. During my role in delivery I have worked exensively on provisioning and later after moving to pre sales, I picked up knowledge on other domains within telecom and software products for these domains. After quitting my first company moved to a small company(network integration) where worked with some of the major telecom equipment providers and collectively bidded for some major new businesses. My role was to propose IT layer over the network layer. Currently I am involved with a new operator in setting up IT for provisioing side which involves product evaluation, identifying business processes etc. This is a greenfield developement.
Looking forward I want to start my own consulting company (more into operation consulting, IT consulting and strategic consulting) in IT telecom. My current work experience has given me good knowledge in IT and operation consulting(though I agree I need to deepen my knowledge further). 5 years frm now I want to help services providers in designing their current netwrok and optimise cost/netwrok to provide new services.
Second line of thought is to start my own software product company.
Last year I had taken GMAT and scored 690 and applied to top 20 US B schools (for full time MBA) but was rejected. I am looking forward to join a program to gain knowledge on business and finance.
Now my concern is should I opt for a full time course or a 1 year program. Can you suggest some of the colleges which can help in achiving my goals? In waht other ways MBA help me in securing my goals? What should be my course of action?
Your reply will be very helpful.
Regards,
AR”
———————
My response:
AR,
Thanks for checking out my blog and hitting me up. I’ve got to start by telling you that you’ve asked me a pretty tough question by asking for recommendations of which schools to apply to. So much of the B-school process is surveying which schools are out there and determining which ones are a good fit for you. I’m not sure if I’m the right person to give you a perspective on this issue because you haven’t told me a whole lot about you other than what you’ve done career-wise. Other factors should come into play when choosing a set of schools, including your personality, development needs, desired academic and social culture, and geographic preferences, so I would hate for you to shortchange yourself by going off of my recommendations only. I’ll do my best to help you brainstorm about a few options, but I highly recommend that you spend some time thinking about what you really want out of a B-school and then do the in-depth research on the wide range of schools out there to pick out some targets.
- “Should I opt for a full-time course or a 1 year program?” –> It sounds like you’ve got a lot of Technology experience and understanding, but your email said nothing about you having any business background, so I’d guess that you’ll have a lot to learn about the fundamentals of business. As such, I’d go for a full two-year MBA program if I were in your shoes. One-year MBA programs are often accelerated and pack a lot of content into a relatively short amount of time. This works well for people who either have some prior business acumen or are very targeted in what they’re looking for. But, for people who are developing their business knowledgebase from scratch, it might be helpful to have a longer business school experience. Also, you don’t necessarily have to do a full-time MBA program. You could always do a part-time or executive MBA program and get the same experience of having a well-paced, spaced out academic journey through B-school.
- “Can you suggest some of the colleges which can help in achiving my goals?” –> I must be honest…this is a question that I always struggle with answering for people because I don’t want to make a suggestion and then have someone be miserable if they take my advice and end up at a school that doesn’t fit them. Let’s start by thinking about what you’re looking for from a business school…it seems that you’re in search of some depth on technology (from a business perspective), entrepreneurship, and finance. Off the top of my head, I’d guess that Stanford, Kellogg, Wharton, and Sloan would be great places for you to dive deep on all three of those areas. Keep in mind that these are not the only schools that would be good for targeting these topics…they’re just the ones that I remember being strong in them from my research back when I was applying. You really should spend some time on the school websites and reading through their catalogs to get an idea of each school’s area of focus. This really is a question that is hard for anyone to answer because so much of it is based on what you’re REALLY looking for.
- “In waht other ways MBA help me in securing my goals? ” –> I’ve written tons of entries about the topic of what one can get from an MBA, so I won’t delve into it here. Rather, I’d suggest reading through some of my old entries and seeing what you can find. A better way to approach it would be for you to answer this question for yourself by figuring out what it is that you specifically need to reach your goals. Once you’ve made that list, brainstorm about an MBA would give you to address all of the things on your list. A secondary benefit of this method is that it gives you a great set of things to address in your “Why MBA?” application essays.
- “What should be my course of action?” –> I think you’ve pretty well answered this question for yourself in your email…which would be to apply to business school
As I mentioned above, you should really put some time into thinking about what sort of academic and social environment you’re looking for in B-school. Once you’ve developed your set of desired attributes, you should get whatever resources you can (websites, admissions catalogs, US News & World Reports rankings, BusinessWeek profiles, etc) and do as much research on the different schools as possible. Then, you would have to think through which of those schools are suitable fits for your list of desired attributes for a school. I wouldn’t recommend applying to more than 5-6 schools because it will take significant time to do school visits and get all of the detailed info that you’ll need for your application. At the same time, you need to develop your “positioning” of why you want an MBA, what you’ll do with it, and why a school should accept you. I wrote an entry about this about a year or so ago, so you might want to search through my archives to see what advice I had to give about it. Finally, when the time comes to apply, you might want to spread your apps out between rounds 1 and 2 because it’s pretty daggone hard to do more than 3 applications in a single round (trust me, I did six schools in round 1 back in the day). Take care and good luck on your business school applications. It sounds like you’ve got a great tech foundation, so I’m confident that you’ll be able to leverage your eventual business training to find great success.
-Marquis
