Biggest Myths About The Top Business Schools
No one wants to be called a “nerd.” The caricature is a pop culture staple: Bullied and celibate, nerds are the outliers whose high IQs and technical wizardly are only matched by their stunted social skills and laughable bench presses. Decked out in bow ties, thick-rimmed glasses, and pocket protectors, the prototypical nerd has his nose pressed into a textbook (or a laptop), consumed with the abstract and oblivious to its applications.
But what do you know — these nerds grow up to be Mark Zuckerberg and Tina Fey. You know, the ones who amass fortunes and shape the way we all live and think.
MIT has a reputation for being “nerdy.” That probably makes sense. Flush with research dollars, MIT is a bastion for engineering and physical science, a pioneering force in robotics, genetics, and artificial intelligence. Naturally, people tag the Sloan School of Management as the MBA program for tech-driven, all-consumed prodigies. You’ll find Sloan students are happy to adopt the “nerdy” moniker – provided people know what “nerdy” really means.
“If ‘nerdy’ means that we are intellectually curious and passionate about what we do — then, absolutely,” says Faye Cheng, a Siebel Scholar, Bain recruit, and 2018 Best & Brightest MBA. “We like to have fun but that’s not how we spend all of our time. For most of us, the MBA is way more than a two-year vacation.”
MYTHS HIDE THE TRUE VALUE OF THE MBA EXPERIENCE
Like most programs, Sloan benefits from the myths surrounding it. Sloan is the tech school, no different than Kellogg being associated with marketing, Wharton with finance, or Stanford with entrepreneurship. In many ways, such myths serve as a compliment: a recognition of excellence in a particular field. At the same time, they often obscure a reality: most business schools are strong across the board. Slapping them with a certain stereotype simply diverts attention from more fascinating aspects of a program.
Take Sloan. Operating from a Mens et Manus (“Mind and Hand”) philosophy, Sloan leans heavily on experiential learning as a means to imagine, experiment and act. While it traditionally ranks among the top programs in “hard” areas like information systems, operations, and logistics, Sloan has also carved out world class programming in areas like finance, management, and entrepreneurship. Even more, it has emerged as a leader in team-based learning that prepares MBA for far more than the lonely and nerdy tasks of crunching data and drawing up models.
“Sloan has a reputation for being very tech-focused and quantitative,” Cheng admits. “While there is definitely expertise in this area, there is also a great range of training in “soft” skills. For example, Communications and Organizational Processes are part of the core curriculum that all MBAs have to take. We even have a class where students put on a Shakespeare play! MIT has a lot of diversity around methods and perspectives, and Sloan’s curriculum really reflects that.”
Or consider Stanford University's Graduate School of Business where the most prevailing myth is that every MBA goes into tech or entrepreneurship. “It’s true that there are many interested in technology (wait, who isn’t?), and that many of my classmates aspire to start their own companies," explains Sarah Anne Hinkfuss, a 2018 MBA graduate of the program, "but even more pronounced for me has been the genuine excitement I’ve felt and seen from the community for every imaginable career path.”
As part of the Best & Brightest MBAs program, Poets&Quants asked MBAs to share the myths or stereotypes about their business school – and address whether they are true or not. From cutthroat cultures to dull campus life, here are some of the biggest myths you’ll hear about your favorite MBA programs.
To see the biggest myths for each of the top business schools, check out Poets&Quants.com:
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6 年Good read for anyone serious about doing an MBA
Software Development Contractor
6 年One thing business schools are particularly good at is hype. 'Learn how to start a business'. Wonderful. Note that many businesses are started by pushcart vendors, people stuffing worms in cut-off soda bottles, or welfare cheats with muffin pans. A lot of the things that make money are grungy and boring. Building supplies, homeowners insurance, and electrical contractors, for instance. People in these businesses send their kids to university, where they go on to be investment bankers. What these kids do with their investment banking skills is purge the economy of small town mom-and-pop businesses. At various times in the past someone might run a lumber mill and cut down trees needed to build houses in the immediate vicinity. One cut down the trees they needed, leaving the rest alone. Once the MBA shows up with their global marketing mind set the business buys one hundred square miles of forest and mows it down from end to end. One finds a lot of people with 'financial' skills living on beach houses situated on barrier islands. These are wonderful places to amuse kids in the summer and entertain guests, but they make a mess of the coastal ecosystem. The MBA's solution to this is to donate money to a charity that concerns itself with 'cleaning up' the ecological mess. Perhaps the easiest way to clean up the mess is not make it in the first place. There is a stench of absurdity in much of this. Perhaps these schools need to send their classes on field outings into some of the more distressed areas of the country, to see what all this wizardry does to real people.