What’s good, y’all. The email below is from a reader who will be starting his MBA journey in the fall and is looking for advice on how to best use this summer. Unfortunately, he sent his email to me about a month and a half ago and I haven’t been able to get to it until now. I hope my response got to him early enough to help him…and I hope I’m posting it early enough to help anyone out there with the same sort of question.
As always, I what I’ve written is just the way I thought through the question and I’m not saying that it is THE only way to make good use of one’s summer prior to business school. Keep that in mind when reading it…
By the way, one of my boys sent me this video clip and I just had to share it. I almost fell out of my seat laughing from it: http://www.barelypolitical.com/episode/MV_20080528
——–
NV wrote:
“Hi Marquis,
At the risk of sounding cliché, I have truly enjoyed reading about your experiences at Stanford and beyond. Your honesty about the past four years was endearing and made me read all the posts.
I’ll give you a bit about my background. I pursued my bachelors in civil engineering from University of Mumbai. I then came to Temple University and acquired an MS in construction management. While studying at Temple I was also working for a transportation engineering consulting firm (completely connect with being broke). I have been working there for the last four years, and have been involved with bridge design in a small satellite office. I have now been accepted to Smith School (Uni. Of MD) for MBA ’10.
I am very interested in strategy consulting and looking to enter the field post MBA. I felt extremely disappointed when I was not accepted to a top 10 school but on reading your blog, I now realize the onus lies on me to make sure I acquire the kind of job I’m looking for. I am not your typical techie looking to transition into consulting (your specialty) so I hope you will enjoy the change.
I am looking for advice on
· How can I best use my summer pre MBA
I also had a suggestion for the site. You could possibly put a link on the right for the files you have uploaded and recommended reading for MBA students.
I appreciate that your taking time out of your schedule to help me. I look forward to hearing back from ‘The Kid’ J.
Thank you,
NV.”
——–
My response:
NV,
Thanks for checking out my blog and for thinking of me as a resource. Also, I’d like to apologize for taking so long to respond to your message. I’ve been swamped with responding to messages for the past few weeks and I’m running a pretty sizeable backlog. I hope my response is helpful, but I worry that I’m sending it to you a little too late.
Now, regarding your question…I have SO MANY ideas about how you can put your pre-MBA summer to use because I wish I had used my own more effectively. First and foremost, I’d advise you to make sure you enjoy this summer because it is one of the last totally free periods you’ll have before you retire. Second, you should think about how you would like to use your time during the summer. Thinking back, I would have thought about three possibilities here: relax as much as possible, perform pre-study on topics soon-to-be-faced in business school, or make moves to ease the transition into your post-MBA career.
1. Relax as much as possible –> This is the option that most soon-to-be business school students choose. Here, one can do any number of relaxing activites, from vacations to sitting around to visiting your family. The pre-MBA summer should involve some measure of relaxation, but it’ll be up to you to decide how much of your summer you want to chill and how much you’d like to make productive.
2. Perform pre-study on topics soon-to-be-faced in business school –> Most business schools require incoming students to complete pre-work to provide an intro to the topics in the core MBA curriculum, but this pre-work may not be enough to get some ready. A great use of time during the pre-MBA summer is to do some in-depth studying past this assigned pre-work to maximize preparedness for school. This could mean reading through some textbook chapters, completing a couple of summer courses at a community college, or reviewing some CD-ROM prep materials. Whichever method is chosen should provide a leg-up when starting your MBA classes.
3. Make moves to ease the transition into your post-MBA career –> This is a broad catch-all category that covers possibly helpful actions in transitioning to a given career. A common example is to reach out to companies in your desired industry and request a short pre-MBA summer internship. I’ve heard that some investment banks and corporations offer these type of internships, but I’ve never heard of this in consulting. For consulting, a good option could be to shadow and/or volunteer with business owners or managers to learn how they run their businesses. Also, this could be a good time to reach out to recruiters at a variety of firms in a range of industries in hopes of scheduling informational interviews to find out more about the firms, industry, and lifestyle of the job. Several of the investment banks and consulting firms offer one- or two-day “camps” to provide an introduction to their industry and or firms. Plus, other independently provided “camps” of this type (ex: MBA Jumpstart) involving banking and consulting firms can provide a wealth of information about firms and/or industries.
Third, you should figure out the details of what you’ll actually do during your summer after choosing how you’d like to use that time, in general. I’ve given you quite a bit to think about above, so I’ll the details of this one to you.
Unfortunately, I’m sending this response to you at the start of the summer, so there’s not a lot of time for you to figure this out if you haven’t done so already. So, if I had to make this choice right now, I’d go with #2. As I’ve written about before, diving into an MBA program with no business background can be incredibly difficult, especially if you’ve never seen any of the concepts before. As mentioned above, most MBA programs assign pre-reading for students, but I’d guess that few students actually follow through with it. In this case, I’d have a good 2-3 months to dive into this content and prepare myself to tackle your accounting, finance, econ, strategy, and other core MBA classes. This way, I could focus on internalizing and contributing in class (as opposed to playing catch-up like I actually did). Also, this pre-work would improve the chances of earning higher grades, which will be helpful when summer internship search starts during the second semester. Remember, THIS IS WHAT I WOULD DO…I’m not saying that this is what you should do. Now, you should step back and think about what you really want to get out of the next few months and make this choice for yourself.
Take care and I wish you the best of luck with your summer and the first year of your MBA program.
-Marquis
P.S. Thanks for the suggestion for improving the site. At some point, I should take the time to think about stuff like this, but i’m sure you can imagine how difficult finding the free time to do so can be.
As always, I what I’ve written is just the way I thought through the question and I’m not saying that it is THE only way to make good use of one’s summer prior to business school. Keep that in mind when reading it…
By the way, one of my boys sent me this video clip and I just had to share it. I almost fell out of my seat laughing from it: http://www.barelypolitical.com/episode/MV_20080528
——–
NV wrote:
“Hi Marquis,
At the risk of sounding cliché, I have truly enjoyed reading about your experiences at Stanford and beyond. Your honesty about the past four years was endearing and made me read all the posts.
I’ll give you a bit about my background. I pursued my bachelors in civil engineering from University of Mumbai. I then came to Temple University and acquired an MS in construction management. While studying at Temple I was also working for a transportation engineering consulting firm (completely connect with being broke). I have been working there for the last four years, and have been involved with bridge design in a small satellite office. I have now been accepted to Smith School (Uni. Of MD) for MBA ’10.
I am very interested in strategy consulting and looking to enter the field post MBA. I felt extremely disappointed when I was not accepted to a top 10 school but on reading your blog, I now realize the onus lies on me to make sure I acquire the kind of job I’m looking for. I am not your typical techie looking to transition into consulting (your specialty) so I hope you will enjoy the change.
I am looking for advice on
· How can I best use my summer pre MBA
I also had a suggestion for the site. You could possibly put a link on the right for the files you have uploaded and recommended reading for MBA students.
I appreciate that your taking time out of your schedule to help me. I look forward to hearing back from ‘The Kid’ J.
Thank you,
NV.”
——–
My response:
NV,
Thanks for checking out my blog and for thinking of me as a resource. Also, I’d like to apologize for taking so long to respond to your message. I’ve been swamped with responding to messages for the past few weeks and I’m running a pretty sizeable backlog. I hope my response is helpful, but I worry that I’m sending it to you a little too late.
Now, regarding your question…I have SO MANY ideas about how you can put your pre-MBA summer to use because I wish I had used my own more effectively. First and foremost, I’d advise you to make sure you enjoy this summer because it is one of the last totally free periods you’ll have before you retire. Second, you should think about how you would like to use your time during the summer. Thinking back, I would have thought about three possibilities here: relax as much as possible, perform pre-study on topics soon-to-be-faced in business school, or make moves to ease the transition into your post-MBA career.
1. Relax as much as possible –> This is the option that most soon-to-be business school students choose. Here, one can do any number of relaxing activites, from vacations to sitting around to visiting your family. The pre-MBA summer should involve some measure of relaxation, but it’ll be up to you to decide how much of your summer you want to chill and how much you’d like to make productive.
2. Perform pre-study on topics soon-to-be-faced in business school –> Most business schools require incoming students to complete pre-work to provide an intro to the topics in the core MBA curriculum, but this pre-work may not be enough to get some ready. A great use of time during the pre-MBA summer is to do some in-depth studying past this assigned pre-work to maximize preparedness for school. This could mean reading through some textbook chapters, completing a couple of summer courses at a community college, or reviewing some CD-ROM prep materials. Whichever method is chosen should provide a leg-up when starting your MBA classes.
3. Make moves to ease the transition into your post-MBA career –> This is a broad catch-all category that covers possibly helpful actions in transitioning to a given career. A common example is to reach out to companies in your desired industry and request a short pre-MBA summer internship. I’ve heard that some investment banks and corporations offer these type of internships, but I’ve never heard of this in consulting. For consulting, a good option could be to shadow and/or volunteer with business owners or managers to learn how they run their businesses. Also, this could be a good time to reach out to recruiters at a variety of firms in a range of industries in hopes of scheduling informational interviews to find out more about the firms, industry, and lifestyle of the job. Several of the investment banks and consulting firms offer one- or two-day “camps” to provide an introduction to their industry and or firms. Plus, other independently provided “camps” of this type (ex: MBA Jumpstart) involving banking and consulting firms can provide a wealth of information about firms and/or industries.
Third, you should figure out the details of what you’ll actually do during your summer after choosing how you’d like to use that time, in general. I’ve given you quite a bit to think about above, so I’ll the details of this one to you.
Unfortunately, I’m sending this response to you at the start of the summer, so there’s not a lot of time for you to figure this out if you haven’t done so already. So, if I had to make this choice right now, I’d go with #2. As I’ve written about before, diving into an MBA program with no business background can be incredibly difficult, especially if you’ve never seen any of the concepts before. As mentioned above, most MBA programs assign pre-reading for students, but I’d guess that few students actually follow through with it. In this case, I’d have a good 2-3 months to dive into this content and prepare myself to tackle your accounting, finance, econ, strategy, and other core MBA classes. This way, I could focus on internalizing and contributing in class (as opposed to playing catch-up like I actually did). Also, this pre-work would improve the chances of earning higher grades, which will be helpful when summer internship search starts during the second semester. Remember, THIS IS WHAT I WOULD DO…I’m not saying that this is what you should do. Now, you should step back and think about what you really want to get out of the next few months and make this choice for yourself.
Take care and I wish you the best of luck with your summer and the first year of your MBA program.
-Marquis
P.S. Thanks for the suggestion for improving the site. At some point, I should take the time to think about stuff like this, but i’m sure you can imagine how difficult finding the free time to do so can be.
