Why MBA? Top 5 Reasons To Get An MBA
Why MBA? for the money that’s why. What a stupid question right? But if we dig a little deeper and try to understand why this question is important it may not sound as stupid. You will get more out of your MBA experience if you have a clear response to the why MBA question.
It’s a question that can drive you crazy, whether you’re answering it in MBA essays and interviews or simply introspecting at some time in your career. Here’s the trouble with relying just on money. Even if you acquire a high-paying job right after graduation, it will take a long time for you to recoup your initial investment.
After graduating from a top MBA program, pay off your student loans and begin saving. Some prominent MBA schools have payback periods of five to 10 years or more, and what if you don’t get your dream job after graduation? For those reasons, you’ll be better off obtaining an MBA if you have a couple of additional equally significant reasons.
Here are some popular responses to the question “why MBA?”
Personal Branding
Consider your reaction if someone says, “I went to Harvard Business School.” Your admiration for them grows instantly, and you have no idea whether they went there to study or to deliver a pizza. That is branding’s power. Top-ranked B schools have well-known brands that can aid in the development of your brand.
These B schools have existed for quite some time, They have an impressive list of alumni in the top positions across industries. The alumni’s qualifications often figure prominently in the new stories that feature them. Some MBA grads launch startups that become billion-dollar unicorns over time.
Some make multi-million dollar donations to their alma mater and bring the brand back into the headlines. When you attend a program like that you benefit from the halo and the positive karma. It helps you build your brand only because of the association with a top school.
Job Opportunities
An MBA can be a useful degree to break a few glass ceilings and move up the corporate ladder. This is one of the reasons why a large number of hospitals choose an MBA degree over other postgraduate courses.
The variety of topics covered in an MBA syllabus can help you build a wide range of skills that are useful in multiple ranges of industries. Someone who’s been in a technical role for several years and now wishes to take up a management position in the same field can do so through an MBA.
An MBA graduate from a good university can have an upper hand with recruiters giving them a reference for excellent job openings throughout their career and yes a higher salary is one of the positive outcomes as you climb the corporate hierarchy.
Career Change
A generation back it was pretty common for graduates to start and end their careers in one company. You won’t see too many people doing that today. Interest and patience levels have changed and so have the dynamics of the business world.
Layoffs have become more common which is why many start looking at a career change when they foresee their career graph stagnating. This is another area where an internationally recognized degree from a globally renowned Business School can help. If you see the placement statistics of the good business schools you’ll see a large proportion of career changers including students who have changed their industry, role, geography, or all three.
Management Skills
Apart from the theory that gets covered in lectures, there’s a lot more going on in the MBA classes and outside that helps students learn more nuanced skills. Teamwork, leadership, communication, dispute resolution, and negotiation are examples of skills. This happens through the various projects and events assignments you will be juggling. There are plenty of opportunities outside the academic zone that can help you discover your entrepreneurial spirit.
Look into the numerous student-run organizations on campus. There are consultancy firms, finance firms, dance studios, sports teams, cultural groups, and much more. You’ll be spoiled for choice, which is a great approach to improve your prioritization, decision-making, and time management abilities.
Networking
an international MBA program has a lot of diversity with students coming from various cultural backgrounds and nationalities. The percentage of international students can vary from 30% in American MBA programs to over 90% in European programs.
This huge and diverse mix of students can help you with valuable contacts in multiple countries without actually traveling to each of them. During social events on campus, you get opportunities to develop contacts with alumni and students pursuing other courses. You’ll get to attend guest lectures by successful entrepreneurs and CEOs and hear them share their success stories.
You may also get a chance to interact one-on-one with industry leaders. The kind of reach that an MBA offers in terms of networking scope is unmatched by any other academic degree. These five reasons are not the only ones. It’s just to get you started. There are many more that you can think of.
Why MBA Now?
Before you do a cartwheel assuming your job is done there’s one more important question to answer. Why MBA now? Here are two major reasons that many people find compelling. The first one is career needs. There are several variations to this, Your role may have become more demanding and the skills you picked up in your undergrad degree have run their course which means you need to reskill to avoid falling back in the race or it could be linked to your career change plans.
The second reason is related to age and experience. B schools cannot discriminate based on age and experience so they don’t have a hard cutoff for either but if you see the statistics most students fall in a narrow age and experience bracket. That gives rise to two situations.
The first one is when you are applying for an MBA when you are close to the median age and experience for the program. In this case, you don’t need to explicitly cite the reason admission officers can see it on your resume, but when you don’t fall in the typical age and experience range you will need to explain why you are applying too early or too late in your career.
Create your why MBA and now answer based on these two aspects. Here’s the catch. Just knowing about the general reasons will not make it the best answer to the why MBA question because every applicant will talk about some or all of these points so how can you make your answer better and more impactful than others? The answer is not just rattling off a laundry list but personalizing it based on your profile and career plans.
Admission officers are not trying to get the right answer. They are trying to understand your motivations, and your ability to think and present the answer like a mature professional so make it interesting. Bring in your life story, bring in your personal aspirations and then connect all the dots. Only then you’ll have an answer which is truly yours.
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