Reflections on Year 1 of MBA
After reading CompBanker and TheGrind’s excellent posts on their b-school experiences, I feel an obligation to chime in. There probably isn’t too much that I can say here that is something you guys haven’t heard before, but nonetheless I am hoping it will be helpful for applicants and prospectives alike.
Brief Background
I’m one of the older people at my school, in my early 30’s. I was a former trader who also worked on a couple of startups and consulting ventures and went back to school in hopes of transitioning to Asset Management. Particularly, I am very interested in asset allocation, portfolio construction, and multi-asset strategies. I just wrapped up my first year at a top finance heavy program: Wharton/Columbia/Booth/Sloan. (Sorry, don’t want to get too specific). I am currently interning in the asset management/alternative space.
Recruiting/Jobs
This topic has been beaten to death, but I will reiterate some of what I have seen. Recruiting in general has been fairly robust, and people with realistic expectations who put in the effort have no problem getting internship or full-time jobs. Consulting is absolutely on fire, and a lot of my classmates are into tech and startups, thus following the MBA trend towards this space. In finance, very few want banking unless it’s a last resort or they have never worked in finance before. Pretty much most of my finance classmates are gunning for private equity or on the public side, long-short equity or special situations/event driven hedge funds. The competition for these jobs is VERY keen, and the amount of work they put into stock pitches and interviews is astounding. Even then, given how few seats there are at these funds, most of them will not get their top choices. In general though, most people are pretty happy with their offers. If you are not interested in an OCR-dependent path such as consulting, banking, general management, for example, you will have to do a lot of legwork on your own. Career services isn’t that helpful beyond generalities since the people who work there aren’t too knowledgeable about the intricate details of various industries and firms. On the plus side, alums have been very helpful and surprisingly responsive to my inquiries. Multiple alums who I cold e-mailed agreed to meet for coffee and share advice and thoughts.
Social Life
I think the primary reasons why it’s fun is because we are not working and are around others who are eager to party and do stuff. There is no shortage of activities, travelling, parties, dinners, etc. And if you so choose you can pack your calendar. However, it gets tiresome after a while, and after going out relentlessly I toned things down and had no problem staying in. The people are overall pretty cool and chill, but many of the relationships you form are sort of shallow and based on mutual professional interests. In this sense they are not as deep as the friendships I formed earlier in my life. Dating wise, there is plenty of hooking up, but most of the attractive girls are taken. If they are single, you have to move fast or else they will be taken by a classmate by the first or second week of classes. Due to slim pickings, I’ve resorted to meeting girls outside of class, whether it’s through mixers with other grad programs at the university, random cold approaches, or online dating. Among girls at the other less prestigious programs, the MBA prestige definitely helps, but outside of school, it’s not an advantage.
Caliber of Students
There are plenty of really talented people who did cool stuff and worked at great companies. In terms of breadth of accomplishments and backgrounds, I have been pretty impressed. I have learned a lot from them during class discussions, and as someone with a limited set of experiences it has been humbling. If you are only wowed by pure brainpower, though, b-school won’t impress you much. This is not to say that they are not smart, but rather, I have met very few (maybe a handful ) whom I would consider brilliant or intellectually superior to me. This stands in sharp contrast to college where I met genuine geniuses and those whose brains were just operating on a different level from mine. A couple of additional notes here are worth mentioning. The rich international students really bring down the caliber of the student body, and it is clear that they only got in because of their family wealth. Many of them blow off school work, skip classes days at a time, and simply don’t give a fuck. This really bothered me initially, but I have come to deal with the BS nature of MBA admissions. Also, this is politically incorrect, but there is a gap between men and women in terms of caliber of resumes and analytical horsepower. This has been evident numerous times during classes with a quantitative bent; it’s something that I have talked about with my male classmates, but given the PC climate none of us would dare utter this in public.
Academics
This has easily been the most disappointing aspect of my experience. The core curriculum is a dreadful joke. Ostensibly its purpose is to make sure that all the students are on the same page and leave school with a basic business toolkit. Although this mission is laudable, the execution is awful. Most of the teachers are bad, the classes are either too theoretical or totally lacking in analytical rigor. For example, my microecon class did not even use derivatives, which I found laughable. And macro was more an overview of something you would read in Financial Times than a serious look into the global economy. Strategy and Marketing were so bad that I felt that my IQ took a hit just by being in the classroom. The finance electives, however, have been a lot better, and I look forward to taking more of them in the coming year. My school offers a plethora of courses that interest me: derivatives, Asset Management, debt markets, credit markets, factor investing, behavioral finance, quantitative finance, and more. So as a finance geek, the electives are an intellectual buffet of sorts.
Feel free to comment or ask me questions, but given my schedule it may take a while to respond.
Great feedback!
Miss the Thursday night mixers on Uris patio.
Academically, your observations are reasons for my hesitation to do a FT MBA among other reasons.
Enjoy your summer and kill 2nd year!!!
To be fair though, academics is probably the least important aspect of business school. Also one can exempt out of core classes if you pass the exemption exams. I don't think you should let this aspect dissuade you from doing a FT MBA.
Thanks for the well wishes.
Glad you made it into the M7, Brady
Sorry, but this is pretty pointless without specifying which school you go to. Everything you wrote above is a mix of generalities and high level observations that can be ascertained from reading other random posts about business school experiences.
What made @"CompBanker"'s and @"TheGrind"'s insight so valuable was their ability to dive into the detail of their individual campuses, daily lives, actual social experiences, and then answer our individual questions based on that specific school. Thank you for taking the time to write this up, but I guess my point is that, if you're going to make one of these topics, do it right and make it a staple on WSO.
Sorry that I did not delve deeply into my personal life and give every juicy tidbit of my life. Should I also tell you what time I shit and how many girls I've fucked and what their favorite sexual positions are?
In all seriousness, there is a reason why I am not going into overly specific details. Sadly, there are losers on WSO who stalk me and have sent messages probing what I've been up to. It's sad and creepy, and there's no way I'm going to tell everyone my current school and risk losing anonymity.
If you have actual reasonable questions, ask and ye shall receive.
It is Brady and the school is Wharton.
@mbavsmfin: No comment on how do you like the city your school is located in? Say it happens to be between NYC and DC.
I like the city. Plenty of stuff to do in terms of restaurants and nightlife. Not too many complaints there.
Very interesting. Tell us what school you go to!
I thought it was pretty common knowledge that mbavsmfin goes to Wharton...
So basically if you fork over 200k, have previous solid work experience... You are purchasing another network and two rounds of recruiting. Basically all target schools are the same with slight variations among placements.
Go with the best aid package and fit. I just summed up 10 of these posts.
Not quite. At a very basic level you are right in that you are paying for the name brand, network, and recruiting opportunities. But not all target schools are equal if you are defining target broadly.
So let's say you want MBB consulting, a very generic popular post-MBA destination. Even within the top 15 there are huge variations in number of offers. At my school, roughly 30-40 get each of MBB; at a "lower" top 15 such as UT Austin, Cornell, Yale, only a few get each of those. That's a big difference even when you adjust for class size. This difference becomes even more stark when you talk about finance.
Makes sense to do some placement targeting.
I've been traveling every 3-4 months and go out to happy hours all the time. Don't need an MBA to do that. It's called being social.
I stopped reading after you mentioned using prestige to pick up butterfaces.
Exactly how many tears did you shed when you failed to get into HBS, Brady?
When did you lose the Wharton logo as your avatar under your new username, mbavsmfin?
Do you wear a Wharton sweatshirt around town and has that help you get laid?
Will you ever be happy?
Does anyone like @"bankerella", @"Going Concern", @"BlackHat", @"CompBanker", @"Marcus_Halberstram", or anyone else care to comment?
Lol, I miss the original Brady posts. This current OP is so watered down and generic it's almost disheartening. What happened to the costume parties and personal transformations?
Mad swagger, we hardly knew ye.
Comment on? What are you wankers going on and on about?
I can see Brady going to Marquee, sitting in the corner with a Bschool tshirt on and just seething at the non-target guys getting laid. Women absolutely could careless about any of that shit.
I think business school is great for many reasons. Getting laid and traveling are not on that list.
You totally misinterpreted what I wrote, but this seems par for the course for you.
First, nowhere in my post did I say that b-school alone is sufficient to getting you laid. I said that the MBA prestige HELPS with girls from those other programs: no more, no less. And then I followed up by saying explicitly that in the "real" world it doesn't matter too much.
Second, of course you can travel without being in b-school. What kind of dumb fucking argument is that? Traveling is just one component of b-school social life, but being able to travel without having to worry about work and doing so with a large group of people is an added bonus.
If you want to critique my posts, feel free to do so, but next time try to actually read the post before delving into ad hominem attacks.
TNA and a lot of other people don't quite get this. The issue is NOT that you cannot party and travel outside of b-school. The issue is that if you are a working professional (if you're a trust fund kid, pro athlete, billionaire tech founder, etc., this does not apply to you), you still have to deal with limited vacation days per year, corporate policies regarding vacations, time constraints. This is especially true if you're working in finance where you may be making good money, but you will be busting your butt off, with little vacation days to enjoy. Moreover, when you are out in the workforce, it's a lot tougher to get a good group of friends together to travel since they all have their own work schedules. This is even more of an issue as you get older, and friends start getting married/have kids. As CompBanker said in his "Why an MBA" thread, for many of us, the problem is about time rather than money.
B-school is a unique environment because aside from college it's one of the few environments I can think of where you have almost total control over your time, and you are surrounded by hundreds of people roughly in your age group (age doesn't matter in b-school; we all hang out with each other) in the same setting who are eager to have fun, travel, and socialize. Again, I'm not saying that b-school is the only time when you can enjoy life or that it's somehow a panacea to one's social woes. I'm just emphasizing the unique aspect of b-school and why it's a pretty good experience.
Can you comment on the following: 1. How competitive are the students? Through my interaction with students from your school, it felt like they do care about grades lot more than wherever I went to. 2. I also felt liked the students felt somewhat entitled. E.g. they all wanted to be in M&A in my BB or even after getting that, wanted to re-recruit, or just had somewhat hard to please attitude. 3. Seems like they blow through a decent amount of money during MBA. Visited a friend there recently, and seemed like lot of people live in pretty expensive penthouse of the highrises or something. Most of the trips and stuff also seem like they are on the fancy end of stuff. 4. Seemed like the close community feel just wasn't there.
We have grade non-disclosure; grades don't matter, and very few people are competitive when it comes to grades. Recruiting though is a different beast, and things can get tense between students competing for a job at a coveted firm. Overall though, I would not use the word "competitive" to describe my classmates.
The sense of entitlement is definitely real at top b-schools. The ones with the strongest pre-MBA resumes tend to be the most picky on what they want to do after school and tend to be more arrogant, but I guess that just comes with the territory. However, the most entitled students by far are the rich internationals who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Personally, I could somewhat forgive arrogance if the guy is smart and accomplished and earned his place. I have no tolerance for people who act that way because they were born into the right family.
Trips are pricy. There are both international trips that are sponsored by the school's international institute (israel, hong kong, seoul, were all on the table this year; of course students still have to pay for everything themselves) as well as trips planned by the students. I've had to cut down on some of these trips due to budget constraints, but as CB said in his thread, if you don't come in with tons of cash, you have to make sacrifices on what you can and cannot do. For me, I value trips way more than drinking at bars, so I don't go out as much during the week as a lot of my classmates do.
Disagree STRONGLY. If anything, I was blown away by the sense of community and cohesiveness of the student body. It is a big school though, so it won't have the intimate feel of say Tuck, where everyone knows each other, and it's not a fratty feel-good school like Kellogg. Nonetheless, the sense of community is still strong; classmates go out of their way to help each other. I can't tell you how many times my learning team members saved my ass with homework assignments and put in more work than I did on projects. Others went out of their way to get me in touch with their friends who worked at firms I was interested in. Finally, the alumni have been extremely responsive, something that really surprised me.
Lol I travel with groups of people also, it's called friends.
Compbanker had a legit post. This is just a lame ass tag along.
Glad you made it into a M7 school, Brady.
To piggyback, I was one of those naive souls who believed the budget that the school sets for a year, plus a slight cushion. HA! If you do just 1 learning expedition/trek, you will go over it at least 25% w/ living expenses. I consider myself pretty frugal, and I stopped going out drinking and eating out with classmates within the first month. I still watched my budget go off rails. Lots of other stuff would come up: expensive auto repairs, language lessons, ski weekends, recruiting trips, and even the occasional date. Throw in a trek or two (winter and spring break) and that's all she wrote. You also get tired of cooking the same crap over and over so you'll occasionally eat out or go mad. I considered it a blessing the months I was able to keep my expenses
The school's proposed budget is beyond conservative. I'm one of the most frugal guys at school and have went beyond the budget by a good margin.
I wanna see mbavsmuffin and TAN go at it, virtual style.
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
At least your goals match up with the strengths of the program and you didn't just go without plan and to jerk off on a wharton diploma the rest of your life.
Or just work for a company that offers 3 up to 5 weeks vacation when you gain tenure, 10 sick days and 11 holidays. Problem solved.
This Piper Jaffrayish OP concocted the entire MBA rant just to persuade the board into thinking he's not a virgin.
Grab yourself a sixer of Coke heavy, put your headset back on, and return to your network gaming.
Hahahahaha...I almost spit out my drink.
Ummm, you still have shit to do in grad school. I mean if all you want to do is take a two year vacation then do so.
I did a year off and I know plenty of people at Wharton since I'm in Philly. None of the people I know are endlessly vacationing. You go on some trips, have happy hours, go out to dinner. Last time I checked many people do that without b school.
You work, you take long weekend, you take a week off, yo hit up happy hour. It's called being normal.
Ok, you are pretty dense and just don't get it, so I won't waste too much of my time delving into this. Nowhere did I say that you can't do those things if you're not in b-school. The issue is time, and fact of the matter is, MBA students have way more disposable free time than people with serious jobs. Yes, we have classes, learning team projects, recruiting, etc. But to be honest, aside from recruiting, we actually end up having a lot of time on our hands, and there are a lot of days available for travel, certainly more than the vacation days that working professionals get.
I'm guessing most finance people get 20-25 vacation days per year (this figure is being generous and applies to more senior people as opposed to young analysts and associates). And many of them probably still need to answer work e-mails while on vacation and have to worry about the work they have to do when they get back. In b-school there is no boss who dictates how you allocate your time and what you do. Aside from the required classes, I can't think of anything mandatory that you have to do. If you don't want to join any clubs or go through on-campus recruiting, that's totally up to you. If you want to spend your weekend in Miami rather than getting ready for interviews, that's up to you.
It's easy to under estimate the amount of free time during FT MBA. My school was in session for like about 26 weeks out of 52 in a year. Add the scheduling tactics CB talked about, you could be going to class for only 2 days a week and you won't even have to wake up too early or stay late those two days. Kind of blows to think I have to go from two years of that to FT IB in couple of weeks.
Does your/do most associate program(s) commence on August 1st?
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/a-2nd-years-reflections-on-hbs
Brady, my only question is what percent of the male student body at Wharton would you say even lifts? To be more specific, I'm referring to deadlifts and squats here.
Amongst my male classmates, I would place myself in the top 10% in terms of fitness. But I work out about 4 times a week, both cardio and weights and barely drink beer. If I had to guess, about 25% of the guys at school work out regularly.
I'm cracking up that you answered this... you are definitely part of that whole Yale thing
I was at the bar and some drunk, obnoxious asian chick came in acting a fool. A couple dudes were in tow. All Wharton people. One of the dudes ran his suck to the wrong guy and got laid out. I literally never saw a human being collapse like that.
Brady, was that you.
I love how Brady thought an MBA would lead to him pulling in tail faster than he could handle it and now that he's a first year at Wharton he's cruising match.com and south street dive bars.
People always blame something else when in fact they need to look in the mirror.
A bit surprised to hear that the Americans are impressed with the international students' wealth. People in NYC / SF are generally much more wealthy than people in South America / Europe / Middle East. Can you give some examples of your international classmates? Can you share some stories of travels and outings with your international friends?
Why is this surprising? International students don't qualify for U.S. federal aid, so they can't take out loans like everyone else. Most are paying out of pocket.
One guy in my section comes from a former Soviet republic, where his dad has a virtual monopoly on a fairly large industry. He lives in one of the nicest condos I have ever been to, buys bottles of cristal and champagne when we go out to clubs, skips most of his classes, and generally does whatever the fuck he wants. There are more like him although this guy is a bit extreme in terms of his laziness.
Travels: typical spots such as Rio, Vegas, Miami, as well as Hong Kong, Seoul, etc. Most of the stuff we've done is typical sightseeing, dining out, partying, along with some cool stuff such as hang gliding over Rio, riding motorcycles through the favelas, scuba diving, etc.
@MBAvsMFIN:
Did many of the Europeans in your class do London Banking Days over Thanksgiving?
Are the student-initiated trips to Miami and Vegas open to the entire class?
How many of your classmates wanted to get an IBD internship in NYC, but didn't get one?
How much did your classmates who did internships in NYC manage to save over the summer?
I presume many of your European classmates already held advanced degrees prior to matriculation – were they 'overqualified' / 'knocking it out of the park' academically?
Was London a popular destination for internships?
At your school, did your classmates try to get jobs in Houston to avoid the exuberant taxes in NYC and SF?
Are there many Israelis and Lebanese people in your class?
Please describe the wealth gap at your school and comment on its impact on the social scene at the school.
Please share more details and anecdotes re dating, the wealthy internationals in your class, etc.
Jeez why don't you ask a few more questions.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not with your ridiculous laundry list of questions. Although I want to be as helpful as I can, most of your questions are retarded and irrelevant. I will answer just a few out of courtesy.
Yes, decent number went to London Banking Days.
The student-initiated trips are open to the entire class, although not everyone will find out about it because the non-school trips are done ad hoc and spread through word of mouth, e-mail, facebook, etc.
London wasn't too popular. Most went for NYC or SF.
I don't know anyone who is trying to land in Houston. Yes, low taxes, but the city sucks, and unless you're dead set on O&G no reason to go there.
I'm not trolling. I'm just very curious. I genuinely appreciate the answers you give. I ask the questions here since I know that I can't ask them when I'll participate in coffee chats, interviews, etc. with AdCom.
Nice to see you are enjoying Wharton Brady.
Question: Who do you refer to when you say internationals? I agree the south americans and middle easterns bring the level down (on average), but at the same time the Europeans and Asians are (on average again) at a noticeably higher level than the Americans ( I couldn't believe many of the Americans didn't even know how to do a simple derivative...)
Most of the rich internationals I talked about are from Latin America and Europe.
What do you mean by "noticeably higher?" Do you mean in terms of raw brainpower? Professional success? Although there are certainly impressive internationals, the Americans are much more impressive pound for pound on those measures. That's just my opinion, and I'm sure many will disagree.
I've been surprised at how quantitatively weak some of my classmates are. One girl in my learning team could not do basic probability or stat, and we had to hold her hand. At one point she broke down crying during one of our study sessions because she was worried about flunking out of b-school. The core microecon class at our school had to get rid of derivatives because too many students were struggling with the concept. And the core macro class is such a joke that I can learn more just by reading the Economist or the Financial Times. Overall, with the exception of Accounting (which I did not have exposure to before), the core has been a waste of time. The finance electives though are much better because it allows you to go much deeper into specific topics. Even in those classes, however, the intellectual horsepower is nowhere close to a top STEM undergrad, MFin/MFE, or Phd.
The MBA is a generalist degree; it's not a specialized degree with the goal of producing experts, but more for people who would prefer to do high-level thinking as managers. No one actually learns anything too technical from the core curriculum; if anything the most insightful classes are the ones that give you great takeaways about your leadership and communication styles.
When AdCom are putting together classes they admit a bunch of people who were either liberal arts majors, or essentially have little quant background but did well enough on the GMAT to demonstrate proficiency at perhaps learning certain quantitative concepts. In any career, those skills become less important for those looking to hit the management track-it's why b-school values people who demonstrate leadership or are outstanding communicators-people like that tend to rise quickly so long as they have a minimum understanding of technical stuff. The core is designed to give everyone familiarity so that they "speak the language" and understand most concepts, but it's not going to make you a math geek. I've met people who are brilliant in some ways: fluency in multiple languages, photographic memories, amazing analysis of most topics etc but may not have had significant math exposure, so just need more time to catch up. It doesn't necessarily mean that they lack intellectual horsepower. You can't reasonably compare folks who have had a lifetime of exposure to those who have had little. What's more impressive to me is when people come in w/ zero quant background and walk out of classes like Stats and Acctounting w/ damn near full comprehension, because the core does cover quite a bit-although it doesn't dive nearly as deep as the actual STEM classes. But that's what electives are for.
Oh boy. This could turn into a very long discussion, so I'm gonna limit my post to a few points.
I agree that an MBA is a generalist degree and that the purpose of the core is to give everyone a broad exposure to various business topics. Nonetheless, at least at my school, a lot of the core courses were taught poorly and many of my classmates walked away without having learned much. Again, this could be particular to my school.
I'm not convinced that one can learn to be a better leader or manager through b-school.
There are indeed multiple ways to assess someone's intellectual horsepower, and I did not mean to say that those from non-STEM backgrounds are somehow not as smart. But when there is a non-trivial number of students who struggle to grasp fairly basic statistics and probability and can't do a basic derivative in microecon, it does raise some concerns. I am actually of the belief that analytical/quant skills are becoming more important in the broader business world, not less.
Geesus Brady, now you're making the poor girl in your learning team cry? Did she at least respect your daily wear of the Wharton fleece?
LOL, she probably got so intimidated that she was in the presence of a demi-god. Maybe not the best approach to make the World of Warcraft to Pound Town transition.
Princeton lax tank for when he's at Equinox working on his grip strength and annihilating the neck machine.
Brady doesn't go to Wharton, not sure why everyone is so convinced he's at Wharton...
The greatest trick the Demigod ever pulled was convincing the world that he did exist.
Dicta vel est dolor nulla quia dolores. Ut fuga dicta veritatis sint praesentium iure sed. Accusantium doloremque nisi quae possimus.
Mollitia nulla dolore et deleniti et deserunt est. Mollitia quod qui omnis doloribus neque eaque. Sed nobis magni assumenda atque nesciunt.
Est aut eos quis assumenda. Ad error possimus recusandae natus at a. Et quasi qui molestiae porro est aliquam id. Architecto ipsum error labore a. Et modi at maxime consequatur temporibus libero.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...
Quo voluptatem alias autem ducimus laborum. Nemo repellat consequuntur ratione blanditiis voluptas labore minima dolorum. Blanditiis ipsa ratione numquam dolor quam quia dolorem. Eveniet qui est commodi magnam soluta reiciendis. Enim et tenetur exercitationem dolorem dolorum.
Ut deserunt enim aspernatur officia. Reprehenderit doloremque saepe dolorem.
Quam omnis ut blanditiis est nam. Ea repudiandae sint modi ad debitis omnis eveniet minus. Iure et dolores necessitatibus asperiores nam sed. Veritatis voluptas eveniet explicabo aut minus est.
Iusto quo consequatur voluptatum dolorem. Est rerum iusto possimus culpa ab sed. Aspernatur iusto similique esse enim et.
Eos quia excepturi commodi et. Et tempore nihil quam quia. Cupiditate tenetur neque aliquam necessitatibus totam. Saepe dolorum occaecati aspernatur quod dolore fugit. Recusandae consequatur error et modi ratione. Ut enim quia et eius dolorem tempora nihil.