MBA Career Choices --- from non-business background
I could use a bit of advice from the wise folks on this forum about getting an MBA and post-MBA career choices.
I'm planning to apply to programs next year, and for a few months now I've been running with the idea of becoming a management consultant after getting an MBA. But upon traveling for work for the past few months and talking to few ex-consultants about consulting life style, I'm becoming less sure that this is a good path for me.
To give a little background about myself, why I was looking into MC, and why I'm diverting away from it: I went to a target school (finance hotbed) for physics for about a year. After a year I transferred to a non-target (Top 60) engineering focused school, got a degree in Eng. and been working at a F100 defense/aviation firm for about a 1.5 yrs now. About 6 months into my new job I realized engineering isn't a career I want to pursue long term and I'm more interested in the big picture strategy type of roles. Coming from non-business type background, it seems like the only way to get to those roles is either through an MBA or with strategy type experience and the possible post-MBA type career options are consulting or corporate development/strategy/M&A at F500s.
After searching online for quite a bit it sounded like consulting path will definitely get me there, but I'm not really a fan of being on the road ... specially after traveling for work for the past 3 months I've realized I really don't like spending my nights in hotel rooms and prefer coming back home after work. I don't mind working 60-65 hours a week, but I really want to make sure I'll have time for my future spouse, family, and get to enjoy my hard earned wealth.
Since I'm not interested in the MC type careers, is Corporate Development/ strategy a viable option with an MBA? I looked through some of those roles and looked like a lot of them want some sort of previous finance/accounting/corporate strategy background. Does my engineering work experience put me at an disadvantage or outright disqualify me for those roles even with an MBA? Should I try to enroll into some basic finance/accounting classes now and give a run at those roles?
What type of schools should I be looking at for those corporate development/ corporate strategy roles? Right now I have my eyes set on Booth, MIT, Yale, Cornell, NYU, CMU, Tuck, BU. I feel like with my stats I will pay significantly less at BU compared to all the other schools on the list. If that ends up happening the case, given that I'm interested in Corporate Development/ Strategy/ M&A type of roles and want to end up at either NYC or Boston area post-MBA should I go with BU? I'm also not sure which industry I want to pursue post-MBA. I just need to make a reasonable living (inflation-adjusted equivalent of 110-150k+ a few years into my post-MBA career) while getting to enjoy my life as well.
So, given my background and interest what are some other career paths that I can pursue that you wise monkeys know of or is MBA a viable option for me at all?
Traditionally those corp dev / strategy roles typically hire ex-consultants (and ex-IBD folks to some degree). Not because the experiences/skills/knowledge of a consultant is a prerequisite, but simply because these groups are typically headed by and full of ex-consultants, and they tend to hire in their own image (hiring ex-colleagues of theirs) because it's the easiest thing for them to do. Also, while there may be some turnover (not churn and burn like consulting, but folks moving in/out every few years), the corp dev/strat groups even at the largest companies are quite small, so at any given time they aren't hiring a lot of folks.
As such, you can get into these roles if you know someone who can get you in the door - but otherwise it's going to be very tough simply because there's little you can offer compared to the boatload of other ex-consultants looking to jump ship (whom they know firsthand or at least are 1-2 degrees separated: they know their engagement manager, or they worked with people in common).
And this goes regardless of what b-school you end up going.
By all means when you're in school, send your resumes to these firms (but your ex-consulting classmates will have a significant leg up on you), but just be prepared to suck it up in consulting for 1-3 years. Yes, the lifestyle sucks, but sometimes, you just have to suck it up especially if the workarounds/hacks/shortcuts simply aren't there for an outsider.
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