I was curious if anyone has ever seen someone get their part-time MBA while working in IB at or around the associate level. Is it possible for someone to pursue this path? Especially curious for someone who wants to be a career banker and is already in the industry.
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Quick answer: I would not recommend this
To give a bit more info, I did my professional/part time MBA while working before going to IB and plenty of my classmates quit their regular jobs during the program as they had issues dealing with the normal 40-60 hour work weeks on top of the MBA.
It really depends on your bank, and I did have one classmate who did it while working in IB, but overall you should estimate 20-25 hours a week of time commitment, a bit more if you want good grades. I would not currently as an associate be able to commit that amount of time. Not just from a time commitment, but the unpredictable hours of IB makes it really hard to schedule group calls or participate in classes. Even as an associate we are averaging about 80-90 hours per week and I will say the difference in suffering between 85 hours and 110 hours is substantial! And that assumes that you will not have a 110 hour work week without class commitment for the duration of the program. Just studying for the FINRA exams while working was a PITA and nothing like the time commitment for an MBA.
Thanks for your reply. Couple questions:
-If you did your PT MBA while working at the firm you're working for right now, would the senior people at your firm be supportive of it?
-How did you make the transition into IB? Did the PT MBA help?
It's possible but it sucks. I've done it and it is a rough go, not from a workload perspective but it takes a toll on you from a mental capacity standpoint. Working in IB you are typically used to having lots of work to do so adding work from school on top of that really isn't much of a change but the difficult part is that you never have a chance to switch your brain off. For me 90% of the time I would only have time to do homework and meet for group projects on the weekends which if work does not leak into the weekend (typically does) would be time to myself to shut my brain off and unwind, but that would be downtime is filled with stuff for class. It took me 3 years and I finished with a 3.66 gpa, it's great to have been able to get my MBA without the economic loss of income but you need to be ready to give up your mental sanity for a few years, definitely not recommended for people who have difficulty managing stress. Depends on your bank as well, my bank/team was really understanding when it came to me being offline for a few hours the nights I had class but traveling for meetings can always be a monkey wrench that you really can't do anything about given you are typically tethered to the MDs schedule.
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