In my blog I am planning to write about my experience of going through the MBA program as a part-time student, full-time employee, full-time husband and father. I hope that some of my experience will be helpful to others who are considering taking on this endevor of going part-time or even full-time MBA for that matter.
My personal way to MBA was very long. Suffice it to say, I am in my early forties. Not your typical MBA candidate. I really wish someone could tell me many of the things I know now may be 5-9 years ago. That’s why in my posts I will try to be personal, honest, informative, and hopefully regular. What I am trying to accomplish is just to give my personal perspective, so the readers could have additional information to help them in making some of the many decisions connected with the pursuit of MBA.
There is a lot of information about MBA programs, schools, courses etc on formal, official, semi-official sites of all kinds pertinent to ‘everything MBA’. There are also a lot of private blogs and websites from current and former student. All those sites combined provide a mother lode of information for prospective students. I hope that my blog will add some valuable insights to this wealth of information.
I am a part-time MBA student in Washington, DC area. I am in my first term right now, so hopefully I still have a lot to share about in my next three or so years of going through the business school.
I realize that many of the readers could be prospective students and they are specifically interested in the application/preparation aspect of the MBA experience (I know I was, and intensly so). I will share some of the things that I think could be helpful for the aspiring students. They will be posted in ‘MBA Introspection’ section of my blog.
Otherwise I will try to keep up to date on my current journey through the program, so you might know what to expect once you overcome all the hurdles of application and get admitted to the school of your choice. May be for some readers my insights will serve as deterrent, but I think that for most of the MBA aspirants it will serve as encouragement and motivation.
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Tuesday class in Entrepreneurship was a blast. Professor has been teaching it since mid-seventies, so he can afford to be unorthodox. There were quite a few ideas he introduced in the class that would probably not fly if he was a younger member of the faculty. But this is a charm of having a seasoned educator, as long as he keeps his interest in teaching students, even if in his own non-conformist way.
Since professor’s undegraduate and masters degrees were in psychology, significant part of his lecture was around that subject. He introduced three major drivers of business people (humans in general?):
- Need for achievement
- Need for power (to influence other people)
- Need for affiliation (to be around people)
On these three basic needs he made distinctions between the executives and entrepreneurs. Obviously the entrepreneurs are big on the need for achievement, whereas executives are more interested in the remaining two. He also made a remark that university faculty are big on need for power, according to some research 
Another topic he was talking about was the traits of the entrepreneurs.You can self-evaluate how you stack up on these, if you are interested in entrepreneurship. Here they are from my class notes:
- Commitment, determination, perseverance
- Persistent problem solving
- Seeking feedback
- Risk-taking (moderate risk in their own eyes, but sometimes exorbitant in the eyes of the people around)
- Tolerance for failure
- High energy level
- Autonomy (being their own boss)
- Optimism
He also talked about the Locus of Control, i.e. what a person believes is the cause of outcomes in his life, and therefore whether s/he is driven by external or internal motivation. Apparently this is also an important distinction of entrepreneurs, who are internally driven and believe that everything depends on them and they can influence the world around them. He gave us test on Locus of Control based on the original Rotter’s Scale. I ended up just on the border of the internal and external locuses. So it probably means I still have a chance to become my own boss after the MBA
I was not able to find exact same questionaire on the internet, but there are quite a few of other derivatives available. If interested, just google Locus of Control test and you will find a bunch.
Speaking of the word google used as a verb. Professor told us that he is probably the only one in academia who uses the word entrepreneur as a verb. For which he is being frowned upon by some of his collegues He demonstrated usage of the word by ”You can entrepreneur everything” example.
That’s it for the first class in Entrepreneurship. If I say another word from the lecture, GWSB will ask me for their cut of tution fee which I would have to collect from you
On Monday I had my first class of the second module: Data Analysis and Decisions. This is a continuation of the course I took in the Fall Term – Judgement, Uncertainty and Decision Making. I have different professor this time, just hope he will be able to explain the material at least as clearly as the previous one.
Professor reviewed some of the stuff we learned in the first course, specifically my “old friend” – normal distribution and its “accomplices” mean and standard deviation. The course is not going to be a cake walk, since it is presumably a build up on the previous one, which was rather challenging for me. Though professor tried to make it sound that it is not going to be too hard. We’ll see about that. It’s based on the same textbook that we used in the Judgement & Uncertainty in fall. So it will be a “sweet reunion” .
This class is being video recorded for distance learning students, so professor said he is not going to do any joking. That’s sad. I learned so much in many of my previous MBA courses through the anecdotes and jokes. I guess I won’t have much to share on the blog from the class .
