Is Business School – MBA Right For You?

The number of students who come to the U.S. to study for a graduate business degree (MBA) is almost equivalent to those for engineering schools.

GMAT is required to get admission into an M.B.A. program in the U.S. Some universities started to accept GRE for MBA admissions.

However, let me ask you this: how did you reach the decision that an MBA degree is right for you?

Is MBA right for you?

Getting a degree in MBA from Ivy League schools is a dream for many, but not everyone can get into an Ivy League school in the U.S.

But you need to ask yourself the following questions first before you can really be sure if MBA is right for you:

1. Do you have work experience?
2. Are you applying for MBA studies due to high salary potential?
3. Can you pay the MBA education expenses?

I can keep on adding more questions, but I thought of finding answers to the above 3 questions will be good enough to guide you in the right direction.

Work Experience for MBA Admission

I have been working in the industry for a few years now. From my understanding, I definitely would recommend someone to have at least 2-3 years’ work experience before applying for MBA studies.

Concepts you learn during the course of an MBA program will be related to practical problems from industry.

If you don’t have any work experience, you will have to imagine and associate the problem to a hypothetical/virtual scenario.

To relate in terms of engineering, a student can spend 10 hours reading the theories behind C programming, how to write code, how to compile, and how to execute the program and how the expected outcomes will look like.

But when the student implements the code, he will face some issues before the results can be seen.

Libraries required to compile the program might be missing or the C compiler interface could be different.

But for the amount of money that has to be invested in an MBA program, you will not have time to experiment things, you have to associate lots of ideas to experience they have faced in real life in the corporate world.

Without any prior work experience, I feel a student cannot get the 100% value out of an expensive MBA education.

So if you are planning to study MBA in the U.S. but takes the GMAT, I would strongly recommend that you spend at least 2 years in industry before applying at schools.

MBA Degree in US = Very High Salary

I have the same questions which I asked to a few students and they said they believed having an MBA degree will give them very high salaries compared to having master’s degrees.

From what I have seen, a degree in business will help in career growth, but to get a high salary using an MBA, you have to be from the top MBA schools.

I will post about average salaries for MBA graduates from different schools. I have already posted this article, average salaries for master’s degrees.

Also, applying for an MBA and getting a student visa without work experience will be a tough sell.

Since taking MBA in business schools are more expensive, so students have to show more money in bank statements.

If during student visa interviews, if the VO feels that you don’t have enough experience, it will be tough to get student visa for MBA studies.