Is it worth it to go for an MBA in this day and age? What I thought when I went for an MBA in the U.S.

We only live once. Experiment with everything ourselves.

Does it really make sense to go to Top University? Does it really make sense to be a sushi master? Is it really worth it to go for an MBA in the States? You will never know until you try.

Then, let's try first. I am Taisho, and I love to experiment that I have not ever experimented. You only live once. I want to tell people that anything is possible, depending on how you think and what you do. And of course, to myself. With this in mind, I spend my days challenging and experimenting with my team members.

In this article, I will try to summarize what I felt about MBAs at this time, as I am going to graduate in August after a year of study for an MBA in the US. How did I plan and act on my policies in my job search in the U.S.? As a result, I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to stay in the U.S. and take on the challenge of being in charge of new business development for a frozen food company. If you are interested in job hunting in the U.S., please refer to the article below.

First, for those who don't have much time, I would like to conclude by saying that I think the point of value, if we focus on the US MBA, is that it gives you a visa that allows you to work for 3 years. Other than that, I think the value is hard to see. Frankly speaking, I am of the school of thought that if you are going to learn business, it would be better to do business and learn from customers. In the moratorium period of my life, the cost of tuition and living expenses to earn an MBA in the U.S. is now over 160 Japanese yen to the dollar (as of June 2024), and I have the impression that it is becoming much more difficult.

In a foreign country, we have to listen to and speak English every day to get things done. This alone is a big challenge. As I write this article one year and three months after arriving in the U.S., I live my life as if every day is a training session. It is a fun time of training.

Can an MBA teach business?

I thought that the fastest and quickest way to learn a business was to learn from customers. This is something I had originally anticipated, and I still believe that, especially when it comes to the process of starting a business, it is faster to do it while actually serving customers. So, although this is not original, I think that if you want to learn a trade, you should learn it by working with customers on a daily basis, and if you don't understand something, read a book or talk directly with the customer.

However, as I mentioned the value of focusing on a US MBA is that it provides a visa that allows you to work for three years, if the "customer" is a customer who is not from the country where you were born and raised (in my case, Japan), then the story is a bit different.

I believe this leads to the importance of going abroad and actually working while you are as young as possible, but who are your customers? Think about it. If your customer is an American, then there is value in getting the right to work in the U.S. and getting a visa! The United States has a diversity and collects a bunch of people from all over the world. If you check market needs in the States, the meaning is that you check worldwide needs. The environment is very different from Japan where I was born.

Visa opportunities available after MBA graduation

CPT (a summer internship period of about two months before graduation), OPT (a period of one year after graduation during which you can work), and STEM OPT (a period of two additional years during which you can work if you have taken classes that fall under the STEM category). By taking advantage of these, you will have the right to work in the U.S. legally as an immigrant. In the case of an MBA in the U.S., I think it is valuable that this right comes with graduation.

How well can you actually learn English in a short period of time?

If you use only your native language with people from the same country who come to the U.S., of course, your English will not improve. This is one of the areas where I decided to use only English, especially during the first three months after arriving in the United States. However, the help of friends from the same country is also very helpful.

So, my conclusion is that it is good to have a balance. If there is even one speaker whose native language is English, you will use English. Therefore, I intentionally created such an environment to increase opportunities for conversation in English as much as possible.

I was also the president of the sushi club in my MBA club activities, so I wondered if I could actually do something similar to project management in English. In part, I was given a chance to practice before working in an English environment. As president of the Sushi Club, this is the article I wrote when I was interviewed at the school. After graduation, I will be working in the US starting in September 2024.

I was able to make sushi and eat it with others, so this activity helped me and also made it easier to take the opportunity to communicate in English.

If you are interested in learning how to make sushi and if you are interested, you can sign up here.

I was also able to make and eat sushi before graduation in the form of a graduation sushi party on campus, after informing them of the circumstances that prevented me from attending the graduation ceremony. I was very happy that my school teachers and the visa team who helped me with my visa application also came to the party.

And the graduation sushi party is now up on the school's official Instagram of the event. Many of the people who helped me in San Francisco came to the party, and I am grateful to have made so many connections with so many people in the year and three months or so I spent in San Francisco.

How much did I invest in an MBA in the States?

I actually looked back at the costs of writing this article, and I have invested about $117,930 (assuming the conversion to 160 yen to the dollar, which is 18,868,800 yen).

Was this investment meaningful? will be shown by the results of your future. I cannot tell you now whether the investment was meaningful or not. I cannot speak to the It depends on the future results.

Does it make sense to go abroad for an MBA? Or not? I think there is often a debate about this. But I think this. Is it meaningful to start a business or not? I don't think there is an answer to that question.

I want to make that choice the right one anyway. To be able to make it the right choice, I will have fun and face the challenges that come up there. I want to have that kind of courage. Whether the choice I made is the right one or not? I don't know, but I try to have fun and work through it. You only live once. Rather than agonizing over what I should have done that, or what I should have done that, I would rather try it, fail, and just improve from there. If I had that experience of failure, I might have more opportunities to empathize with more people. With this in mind, I try to challenge things.

How did I cope with the loneliness and isolation that tends to hit me after I came to the US?

Write down the things that make you feel anxious or lonely anyway, and then take action on the things you can control. Once you have written them down, divide them into things that you can control and things that you cannot control. Then, write down what you will do for the things you can control, and do it anyway without excuse. In order not to create reasons not to do things, I would write them down in my Google calendar in advance to hold back time, while creating a team of people with whom I would declare that I would do them, so that I could do them.

I would like to give you a specific example. As far as the exchange rate is concerned, it is out of our control. Therefore, we assume that we do not worry or take any action in this area. However, we can control and improve our own actions to the point where we can work in English. Then, we will clarify what level of English we are going to bring them to.

By gathering this kind of information, putting it into action, and doing it solemnly, I think I was able to break the vicious cycle of being unnecessarily anxious, stopping action out of anxiety, and holding it in my head as a blur.

Since I came to the U.S., I have much more time to be alone. I think that about 30% of one's life is an appropriate time for a human being to be alone and free. When you are in Tokyo, you can't help but notice that all the restaurants are open until late at night, there are convenience stores, and anyway, the city of Tokyo is like Disneyland, as you will see when you leave the city. It is a dreamland. Personally, there were times when I felt extremely lonely. The environment changes a lot, and there is a time difference from Japan. In addition, since the conversation is in English, I feel itchy and unable to communicate as well as I can in Japanese, etc. every day.

Since I came to the U.S., stores close early at night, and convenience stores are not everywhere so close by. Since I had the opportunity to travel by plane, I had to wake up at 4:00 a.m. many times to get to San Francisco International Airport so that I could move during the day to my destination. So, first of all, I went to bed early and got up early. By writing down my aforementioned thoughts and concerns in any case, I was able to ask myself: How am I going to conduct my new business in the U.S. in the future? What will be my career path? What kind of team will I assemble? What do I want to do in the first place? What values do I truly cherish? What kind of people do I want to spend my life with?

I used them as subjects for conversation in my English studies, and when I was alone, I had time to talk with people from different countries in English who had come to San Francisco and to organize myself based on their perspectives and ideas. I guess it depends on my nature, but I have an extroverted temperament, and I am the type of person who gets energy from conversations with others. So I know that if I don't have too many conversations with people, my energy tends to gradually drain away. It's like a combination of that temperament, creating opportunities to learn English, and speaking English in a way that is tied to something that I am actually interested in and facing anyway.

How meaningful was this? It is difficult to see in the short term, but I think I was able to have a different multifaceted view of life than when I was living in Japan and taking information only in Japanese.

Why is it better to go abroad sooner rather than later? America is a country where health and body maintenance costs more than in Japan. And the experience can be used for the rest of your life.

We all know how expensive medical care is in the United States. It is true that when you visit a hospital, you need to check whether the hospital is covered by your insurance. It is also true that when you visit a hospital, you need to check whether the hospital is covered by your insurance, and you may not be able to fully communicate your symptoms or understand the doctor's explanations in English. Therefore, I think it is better for those who want to challenge themselves in the U.S. to do so while they are still healthy when they need to go to the hospital less often, and when they need to maintain their bodies less frequently.

Also, the longer you study in the U.S. and the longer you live afterward, the more you will be able to use the insights from your experience to make choices in your subsequent life. There are a certain number of entrepreneurs (not all of them, I think...) who have developed businesses that are not confined to Japan, such as Softbank founder Masayoshi Son (UC Berkeley), Rakuten founder Hiroshi Mikitani (Harvard), and others. I feel that a certain number of entrepreneurs (not all, but some may think that hiring an interpreter is a good idea) have MBA experience in the U.S. and are applying it to their startups and company management. In fact, the representative of Ajinomoto North America, whom I had the opportunity to meet, had also gone to UCLA for his MBA.

Health is created from daily habits. The cost of maintaining good health is lower in Japan, even when it comes to the food we eat. This is also true in terms of hospital visits. If you ate the American diet in its entirety without choosing what you eat each time, you would gain weight and become ill. While having a drink once in a while, regular exercise habits, improving the quality of sleep, and improving what you eat are all important. Since coming to the U.S., I have felt the importance of "health" even more keenly than in Japan, where it is easy to get healthy food, it is safe, and I can run along the riverbanks even at night, which is what I feel is really important.

It makes me think of Japan as being like Disneyland, a dreamland, where healthy and delicious meals are readily available anytime, anywhere. I would like to take on the challenge of making such meals accessible in the U.S. as well, if not a dreamland, as I am involved in the launch of frozen foods and new businesses in North America.

After coming to the U.S. for my MBA and living in the U.S., I have come to see the wonderful things about Japan and the potential for further growth that exists to make Japan an even more wonderful country.

In quality control/production control, there seems to be no one on the right side of Japanese companies. This is an industry that can take advantage of such technology in the trend of the Internet and AI and one that will grow large. I am focusing on the North American frozen food market.

This Japanese ability to solemnly build up detailed improvements in the field was honestly one of the things I felt when organizing the sushi party. To mention a small detail, when making rolls, if you use a bamboo mat as it is to make sushi, it is difficult to clean the rolls when washing them. However, if you wrap a piece of saran wrap around the bamboo mat, you don't have to wash it every time and it's easy to do. (To be honest, I am not sure how much attention to detail I have in this area. (To be honest, I am not sure if I have this level of attention to detail, but I am aware that I am rough among Japanese people, but not so rough when I go outside of that group).

The frozen food market is the same size as the computer industry and is growing at twice the annual rate of the computer market. It is also an area where production control and quality control technologies live, and where technologies such as the Internet and AI, which I love, have not yet been applied to a large extent. In this area, I believe that we can be the best in the world at a specific number. I believe that we can be the best in the world in this area in terms of specific numbers. Japan is a wonderful country where it is very easy to live, and even poor people can go to Top University (even if their parents' income tends to be high).

My days of working in the U.S. and developing new businesses will begin in earnest. I would like to thank those who are giving me the chance, to concentrate on what I can control, and challenge myself to make it through this time with one team and produce results in fact-based numbers.