In my blog I have been writing 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 endeavor 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 students. 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 have finished my first year of MBA studies in summer 2010, and I still have a lot to share about in my remaining two 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 intensely 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.
I noticed that some visitors to my blog have been searching the site for my email. If you are too shy to leave a message in the comments, shoot me an email to webmaster at parttimembadegree.com
Today I had the first class in my elective course – Consultative Processes. From the syllabus and the first class it became obvious that the class is going to be very writing-intensive and group work oriented. We will have to submit three individually prepared cases from Harvard Business Publications. And there will be two group projects, each consisting of a write-up and an in-class presentation: Consulting Proposal and Consulting Report. On top of that a lot of reading assignments too.
From the Professor’s comments in the class it appears that, just as I expected based on the syllabus, it is going to be relatively general, high level introductory course to Consulting. However, the cases and especially the two group projects are going to give me enough exercise and taste, for me to decide if I want to take more advanced classes geared to Consulting later on in my MBA program.
In class we did some exercises, namely the students were giving their answers to three questions about Consultant’s professional attributes. Here is the result of our collective brain-storming. I think it gives some interesting insights for those who are not very familiar with what Consultants work is like. The bullets are in no hierarchial order, but rather in the order they were suggested by the students. Every suggested bullet was supported by specific example, but I have no time for those details here, and you would have to interpret some of the more vague points on your own. So here are the lists.
What Consultants DO:
- Diagnose the problem and figure out how to address it
- Provide expertise/capacity to the client
- Identify opportunities
- External revies of the client’s processes
- Benchmarking
- Changem management
- Soft skills
- Conflict management
- Avoid conflict of interests
What Consultants Should NOT DO:
- Undertake projects outside their expertise
- Cover up illegal activities of the client
- Bad customer service
- Sell up unnecessary services
- Make decisions for the client
- Breach confidentiality
Skills (and attributes) of Consultant:
- Communication
- Listening
- Absorb a lot of new information quickly
- Analytical skills
- Project management
- People skills
- Ethics
- Negotiation
- Humility (I guess this is not very popular notion among consultants, but apparently clients are expecting this)
- Dealing with ambiguity
- Continuous learning
- Creativity
- Receptive to client’s feedback
- Research skills
- Interviewing skills
The list is not exhaustive, but a good start nevertheless. I hope it would be helpful for those who are interested to learn more about consulting, but do not have very clear understanding about what Consulting is yet.
The required text for this class is The McKinsey Mind by Ethan Rasiel and Paul Friga.
. The book itself was not very expensive, because it is not a formal textbook. Which was nice, especially in comparison to the one I had to buy for Financial Markets. But unfortunately this price advantage was all but eliminated by the cost of other materials that need to be purchased for the class: the pack of Harvard Business cases and the course pack. Well, it’s not something new. (MBA) Education is pricey. I have kind of got used to it 
Today I had my first class in the Fall term – Financial Markets. It was rather interesting and at times even entertaining.
Professor had eventually placed syllabus with required textbook earlier today and I was able to order it from Amazon. The book we are using in class is Financial Management: Theory & Practice 
13 edition, by Brigham and Ehrhardt. As is customary for me, I was trying to get an international edition of the book from Ebay, but it was not available there, at least for now. So it cost me $146, includding shipping, from Amazon marketplace. Professor mentioned in class that we don’t have to buy the latest edition, and can get the previous one instead, as it would be much cheaper. I wish she had mentioned this in the syllabus before I ordered it 
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As for the textbook, Professor also said that it was essentially the same book that she had used at her graduate studies some 30 years ago. She also made a remark that the only difference is that the problems at the end of chapters are getting simpler and shorter with each edition. I am not even sure how to interpret this. Either the expectations from the students are getting more and more lax, or the authors realize with the time that they had overthought the problems in the first place and eventually get to terms with reality by making them more relevant and coincise. Whatever it is, I guess I could live with that 
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In the class professor gave us a general overview of the subject of Financial Management and its principal differences from the Accounting. Financial Management is all about cash and it is directed toward the future. So such thing as assets depreciation, which is in the realm of (Financial) Accounting, is basically irrelevant for Finance guys, as there is no real cash flow from this superficial accounting transaction.
As for entertaining part, Professor told us about the attitude of people working in finance towards people doing accounting. She refered to a joke about how the Swiss count cows: they count the number of legs in the herd and then divide by four. They ultimately get the correct result, but in a cumbersome and inefficient way.
So in the true spirit of Financial Management principles, I am looking forward towards the course, with expectation of payoffs, and in hope that it will be less cumbersome than what I experienced in Financial Accounting last year
