MBA beyond myths, rankings, salary increases and career boosts

Foreword:I couple of months ago, I wrote an article about my experience at The Lisbon MBA. There was so much engagement over the article that I decided to translate it (since the original was written in Portuguese) and make it available to a larger audience. 

It's easy to find a lot of different articles that discuss the virtues of doing an MBA, the boost that an MBA can bring to your career, the famous Financial Times MBA ranking, the TOP MBA programs or the amazing salary increases after completing the MBA... To be honest... I find most of these articles very poor in describing what is really an MBA experience.

I finished a couple of days ago one of the biggest, more exciting and more life changing experience of my life. I completed my MBA degree at The Lisbon MBA!

Thus, I thought an excellent way to reflect upon the experience would be to share it from beginning to end, hoping to inspire others and help to clarify some doubts about what is really doing an MBA.

What drove me to chose an MBA?

I'm a software engineer, and as you can probably imagine, most of my life was spent surrounded by technology. Although I was always thrilled with technology and developing software, I also enjoy very much to nurture and develop my relationship with people, which led me to pursue management related roles such as team leader or project management.

Not knowing virtually nothing about management, I did what I was taught to do in my engineering school, "learn by trial and error".

The truth is that the more away I was from my base training, the more I felt the need to learn and to be exposed to new knowledge and contexts.

I felt that the learning I had every day in my professional context, while important and relevant, was far from the one that would really enrich me as a person and professional.

This feeling sharpened up month after month, year after year, until the moment I decided to do something for myself!

I consider myself to be a rational person. Therefore, I look for numerous options between master degrees, post graduate degrees, certifications, PhDs, MBAs.... I weighed the pros and cons of each option and ended up focusing my attention on MBA programs, mainly for the following reasons:

• An MBA program seemed to me extraordinarily comprehensive and broader, ranging from more "hard" (Finance, Accounting, Economics, etc ...) to more "soft" subjects (Marketing, Leadership, Sustainability, etc ... ). I was pretty sure that I would learn things completely out of my comfort zone.
• An MBA is always a quality certification in the curriculum. So I expect that this recognition could open doors in the future and would enable me to develop my career further.
• Through the MBA I hoped to establish a network of contacts relevant to my professional context.

For these reasons, an MBA not only seemed like a good way of complement my previous academic background but also appeared to be quite in line with my career and experience at that time.

What were my main fears and doubts?

Despite the strong reasons mentioned above and my strong desire to take a step further, I was also faced with various fears and doubts.

Perhaps my main concern was the fact that the part-time program of The Lisbon MBA toke two years, a period in which I had to give away a very significant slice of my time to the program (including late evenings and weekends ). Indeed, family and friends would suffer, and all my daily routines would have to change radically.

Another relevant fear was the extremely high investment required. Would it be worth it? Was I willing to compromise other parts of my life to have money available? How long would it take to get the return on investment? And if you did not get that "millionaire job" at the end? Where would I get the money?

Finally, I also had doubts if I was prepared to face such a challenge. Probably the program would be full of talented people with much more knowledge, experience, and skills; it would be very demanding just to keep up the pace with them.

The decision.

After much reflection, I concluded that I was 30, and I was eager to learn!

I felt that if I would not risk at that time, I was condemning me to live boring and uninteresting life, from work to home and from home to work... certainly the right moment would never come, so, waiting for it would be stupid ...

Applications would close in one month and in one of the most impulsive decisions of my life, I booked the GMAT and TOEFL exams and sent my application to The Lisbon MBA. After a crazy month of preparations for the exams and in the twinkling of an eye, It was September, and I was with my backpack on returning to University!

What did I find at The Lisbon MBA?

Reflecting on these two years of the Lisbon MBA, I can say that the reasons that led me to choose to do an MBA and what I take out of it are very distant.

A holistic view of the world we.

I can say that what I toke from 8 quarters of classes goes far beyond learning about interesting and varied topics. I found amazing teachers, engaging teaching methods, diversity and focus on results.

These features allowed me to develop a consistent and holistic view of the world. I do not think that I have become particularly expert in a field. Nonetheless, this comprehensive view allows me to rationalize about problems with a much broader perspective, understanding the subtle interconnections of problems where often lies the solutions to them.

Developing this vision has also changed my behavior towards life and other people. It will not be fair to say that I learned extraordinarily complex things, in fact, the funniest thing is to realize that most of the things that learned are in their essence relatively straightforward. Nevertheless, we often ignore the most simple things in our day-to-day life, always looking for complex scenarios and explanation.

Perhaps the best metaphor I can find to describe my feelings after these two years is the famous red/blue pill Matrix scene where Neo chooses to know the real Matrix taking the red pill. Doing an MBA is choosing the red pill! As in the movie, most of the things in the "Matrix" are not necessarily good, so if you think an MBA you must choose wisely because after knowing the "Matrix" there's no return ...

What lays beyond your comfort zone?

Of course, there are numerous articles on the virtues of getting outside your comfort zone. However, I can assure you that is an extraordinary journey that makes us know ourselves way beyond what we think we are aware.

Imagine yourself sharing your personal and professional life with something that takes you a significant amount of hours per week and that requires an emotional and intellectual involvement as great or greater than that what you normally give to other activities of your life ...

Scared? Don't be! Is in this sweet spot that the magic happens!

Given these circumstances we are forced to change our routines and by doing it amazing things start to happen.

I began to be much more rational in the use of my time forcing myself to choose wisely the tasks I get involved. In this process I found that most of the tasks in which I invested significant slices of my time, did not need my involvement, in a nutshell, I was wasting time!

Try to spend a day without answering emails and then analyze the amount of issues that were resolved without requiring your intervention. Reflect if you are not involving yourself in problems that take you time and that do not required your time.

I began to realize the importance of establishing boundaries between my professional and personal life, as well as, the impact that our well-being has on our performance. I started doing yoga and sports regularly; I started my day early to meditate and read, and I began to give great importance to my eating habits. I began to feel more balanced and focused leading to numerous positive impacts both in the MBA and in my life.

Today I can not imagine returning to the routine I had before, looking back I had a mediocre and uninteresting life.

Finally, beyond the time management issue, being in a class with 45 people with completely different backgrounds raises constant challenges. Getting to work with entirely different people, with different career paths and being forced to work on topics way beyond our comfort zone, requires us to be extremely creative, resilient, humble.

Friends and amazing people!

Engineers, pharmacists, architects, medical doctors, veterinarians, lawyers are just some of the backgrounds of the people who had the privilege of knowing in this fantastic adventure! It is impossible, face with this context, not to develop strong bonds with most of these people. Not only for the work done together but for all the things they consciously or unconsciously taught me.

The humble and genuine way people in my class lived this experience, made possible to bring to the top the best in each of us. Today I know I found friends for life! People to whom I turn when I have a problem, people who taught me to respect radically opposing views of my people who have shown me many different ways of looking at problems.

A profound change of me as a person

Today, I am a very different person when compared to the person I was two years ago; I can truly say that this experience shaped me as a person. During the MBA I discovered myself, I realized that my limits were, after all, nothing more than mental barriers, I learned to value my time and developed a vision of the world that challenged and wiped out many of my dogmas.

I met fantastic people who questioned and who challenged me, who had the courage to tell me that I was wrong! But that were there to work side by side with me. I met teachers genuinely concerned on developing their students. I discovered areas of knowledge to which I am now deeply passionate about.

It would be impossible to describe in words what this journey was, but it was certainly much more than the reasons that led me to enroll in the MBA.

Now, before the end of the journey, I just have the sadness of not being able to continue this path of personal evolution and enlightenment that brought up the best in me! And the joy of have had the courage to take the risk of enrolling myself in The Lisbon MBA.

Recommendations for those who want to pursue an MBA.

• Do not wait for the right moment! It does not exist and delay the decision is just the most comfortable position to be stuck in the "Matrix".
• Ultimately it will be an emotional decision! The truth is that for every reason you find to do an MBA, you will find many others for not to do it. At the end of the day, the decision will always be an emotional decision. A decision that should come from your sincere desire to change your life and discover your true potential.
• The money cannot be THE problem! There is no better investment than the one made in our personal development. I am sure that if I have the possibility of reaching the age of 80, I will still enjoy and take advantage a lot of what I learned. Therefore, from a financial perspective, this investment can be amortized over a lifetime! Besides, there are loans, grants and 3F (friends, fools, and family) that may help you.
• Do not expect a magic recipe to become rich! If such recipe existed and if it was an MBA, then surely all people would invest in an MBA ... The career progression and professional development will happen as a side effect of how the experience shapes you.
• Not everything will be perfect! Not all the subjects will be interesting, not all teachers will be fantastic, not all colleagues will be friendly, there will be times where you cannot invest the time that you want and need in the MBA... However, from my experience, I can say that looking back the balance of the experience is clearly positive.
• What you will take from the MBA will be proportional to the time you invest in it! The more you give to the program the more you learn and the more you will be able to take out from the experience. Thus, I only recommend this experience to people who are genuinely willing to go the extra-mile and that see the MBA as a way to improve them as persons.
• It's not the only possibility! You have a lot of alternatives to an MBA, your path for personal development can be entirely different from mine. So don't stick with recipes and look into what kind of experiences drive you and choose wisely.

Do you want to hear a different perspective?

The following article was written by a friend and colleague, André Viera (What I learned with my MBA... and what I forgot!).