The email below is from a reader who currently works in strategic planning, wants to get an MBA in the future, and aspires to work for McKinsey one day. Currently, he’s targeting an M.S. in Management and Systems as a way to develop some foundational skills to prepare him for a career in Management Consulting. He says that his targeted M.S. degree is similar to the M.S. in Management of Information Technology degree that I did at UVA and is interested in any insights that I have about it. This essay was a serious “blast from the past” for me since I’m seldom asked about my experiences in that grad program. I’m not sure if I was able to give him the type of information that he was seeking, but it should at least serve as a good starting point for him.
—–
GB wrote:
Hello Marquis,—–
Thank you for providing such a wealth of information on the internet.
I am pretty much at the start of my career, and I was recently fortunate enough to land a job in the Strategic Planning division of a Fortune 500 company and I see it as a great starting point for what I want to do.
I would love to work at McKinsey at some point in my future, but right now I’m really focused on learning as much as I can. Eventually, I’d like to have an MBA, but right now I’m considering the M.S. in Management and Systems with a concentration in Enterprise Risk Management, hoping it will give me a good knowledge base for consulting related work. It sounds somewhat similar to your Master in Management of Information Technology (but different still) and I was hoping you could provide some insight about the degree and how it helped you/was perceived.
Thank you in advance!
My response:
GB,
Thanks for checking out my site and for bringing your question to me. I apologize for taking so long to respond to you, but, with the volume of emails that I get, it often takes me a while to get back to people. I hope I’m sending this message in time for the contents to be useful to you in some way.
UVA’s M.S. in Management of IT program has changed a lot since I finished it in 2003, so my information may be very outdated. The goal of the program is to provide an end-to-end understanding of the issues faced by IT managers and executives and the curriculum covers everything from the nuts and bolts of IT architecture (i.e., data communication, business processes, object-oriented programming concepts) to the business thinking behind major IT initiatives (i.e., financials, build vs. buy decision making, industry analysis). Back in the day, there were 5 separate modules in the program, but they’ve since restructured the curriculum to teach everything in 4 modules. Each module is taught by a professor with deep knowledge about some aspect of technology and, to add a real-world perspective, guest speakers were often brought in to talk about their experiences. For additional details about the current structure of the M.S. in Management of IT program, check out http://www.commerce.virginia.edu/academic_programs/MSMIT/Academics/curriculum/Pages/index.aspx.
The teaching format is composed primarily of lectures, but also includes case studies and simulation exercises, which mirrors the format used in most top business schools. The program was designed for professionals who had experience in the IT space and, as a result, the average age of the students in my cohort was around 35. I was 24 years old (the youngest in my cohort) when I started the program and only had 3 years of work experience, so it was all pretty overwhelming to me. While my classmates could leverage their work experiences to contribute to class discussion, I focused on reading every book and article that I could to make sure that I didn’t end up silent during those discussions. I was fortuante to have had great classmates who understood where I was coming from and did everything they could to help me fill in the gaps in my knowledge. The program culminates in a capstone project that pulls together everything that was covered in the curriculum and involves the creation of a business plan for an IT-focused company of some kind.
To be honest, my primary purpose for doing the M.S. in Management of IT degree was to use it as a building block for applying to business school. I didn’t think that my undergraduate academic performance was “rockstar” enough to get me into a top business school, so I figured that a strong performance in a grad program would give me a leg up in the MBA application process. As such, I worked my butt off to come out of it with a strong GPA and hoped that what I learned would help me in my day job (just in case I didn’t get into business school). Before applying to the program, my employer told me that I’d be able to manage projects when I finished, but, after I graduated, they flipped it on me and told me that one couldn’t go from being an Engineer over to the business side at that company, which is why I applied to business school almost immediately after finishing up at UVA. At first, I felt like I’d been hit with the okie-doke, but I don’t really trip about how that turned out now because, when I received the thumbs up from Stanford GSB, it was all-to-the-good.
Unfortunately, I can’t really give you insights into how my M.S. in Management of IT degree was perceived by Consulting firms because I never really leveraged it to break into that sector. By the time I was applying to Consulting firms, I was a student at Stanford and they were all focused on the MBA that I was earning. I did field several questions about why I’d gone after the M.S. degree and my response was that I’d planned to leverage it to move further ahead in Tech but then decided to change course into business instead. Also, I never worked on a Tech strategy study at McKinsey, so the degree never came in to play during my time there. I’m sure that it would have been a big value-add if I had done work in that space while I was in Consulting though.
Surprisingly, the degree has started to pay dividends all of these years later now that I’m working in a Corporate Strategy environment. I often find myself in conversations with CIOs and CTOs within my company and, although it’s been 7+ years since I did anything hands-on, I’m able to fully engage in conversations about Technology issues with them without looking totally clueless. I’m able to talk intelligently about enterprise architecture, database structures, software layers, etc. and, despite the fact that I’m not spun up on the latest technologies, the conceptual knowledge is there, which gives me a lot of credibility with IT-focused folks. For me, the biggest value-add from having done the degree is that it gave me a view of Technology from an executive’s perspective, which has been very valuable when combined with the business fundamentals that I learned at the GSB.
I hope this response was helpful. I’m not sure if it was as specific as you were hoping for, but it is an honest representation on how I see my M.S. in Management of IT degree being useful. Take care and good luck with your M.S. in Management and Systems program.
Marquis
