The last post: The benefit of an MBA I couldn't get on my own

This is my last post of a series on if an MBA was worth it, even though there is still plenty more I could say.

The MBA's benefit I couldn't get on my own

Let’s acknowledge that when some people talk about their graduate or doctoral degree, they sound like complete tools. “That guy” might introduce himself the following way: “Hi, I’m Fakey McToolbag, and I completed my MBA at [Insert top-ten B-School].”

This is not a ‘toot-my-own-horn’ essay. It’s a true & objective list of what I got out of the Foster MBA program that I could not have received through my own self-directed learning from books or online tutorials. 

Let’s also be real and acknowledge a formal upper-tier MBA program gets you access to some things that self-directed study just can’t… such as (brace yourself for buzz-words) access to networks of people, certain hands-on experience, job-placement systems, friendships, and a unique way to learn about yourself.

I have 4 main topics, and if you read any of them, I hope you read the last section.

Network of People. I used to think “it’s not what you know but who you know” was a lame buzz-phrase. Then I joined a small group of 140 people who (I felt) were all way more accomplished than me, sharper than me, tested higher than me, and had more forms of technical skills than me.

Being a part of that group mattered because I would have to do things that were new and difficult for me, and these new colleagues could sit down and show me how to manipulate that computer code in a software program to create a survey, or how to manage that horrendous workload, or show how to use some function I didn’t know existed in Excel that sped my work up 10 times faster. Again, that is a very abbreviated, narrow list.

Networks of people outside the networks I would naturally make taught me more on how other nationalities, political or religious creeds think or do business as I worked with them on really hard, time-consuming projects. (Bubble-check: What percentage of your friends are of significantly different political or religious views?)

Examples: 
With a Coast Guard officer, former Navy submarine captain, Indian software engineer, Chinese aviation engineer, and Indonesian Banker, we told a 2-Billion dollar commercial bank where to build their next branch.

·         In a small group of a Chemist, Navy Veteran, Taiwanese Banker, Japanese Medical Salesman, and Indian IT Consultant, we decided how to price a John Deere Tractor.

·         With two guys from the East Coast and a guy from Mumbai we hired and trained 13 students for a year to have them recommend a market sector & industry to invest in.

·         With a South African engineer with multiple physics & mathematics degrees, a native mandarin-speaking accounting manager educated in British Columbia, and hilarious Boeing engineer we made a science fiction movie storyboard illustrating macro-economic principles and international currency problems.

My changed network matters because the less homogenous it is, they more unique lessons they teach me. In 1:1 or small, private settings, I got to learn what people’s completely different worlds were like.

·         I sat and talked with an Indian classmate about his experience and opinion on the cast system.

·         A classmate (both a mother and Muslim) and I got to hear a classmate from China tell his observations of the abortion policies and practices in China.

·         I talked with another native Chinese classmate about his experience being a believing Christian in a country that oppresses religious freedom, and discussed our varying Christian beliefs.

·         […and some white guys from the east coast had to explain to me what a Derby Party was. Who on the west coast goes to a horse-racing event celebration dressed like Easter Sunday?]

Rather than listen to TV Speakers, I got to shake their hands and have a 2-way conversation with pretty high-caliber individuals.

  Examples: I got to shake hands with Steve Forbes & ask what topics he felt my generation of students didn’t consider in presidential elections that he felt we should.

·         The Founders of Tableau Software shared their vision to a group of 200 students on how to find the place in the tech world where you can make the disrupting, revolutionary product.

·         The CFO of Alaska Airlines took my same finance classes a few years ago, and got to explain where he did and didn’t use the theory from class.

·         The Treasurer (the guys who handle all the extra cash the company has) of Apple and Treasurer of Microsoft got to explain the challenges facing new MBA’s and our economic & political environment.

Each set of bullet points are small snapshot of a much larger set of experiences with people that I wouldn’t interact with if I just tried to do my own self-study.

There’s a System: I learned there is a super secret system that MBA schools, their alumni, and really big companies have made. It’s code-name is “On-Campus Recruiting” or “Career Services.” The companies that hire MBA’s know the types of students the school will produce, so they directly connect to each other and bypass the traditional job hiring process. Here’s what the MBA school system plugged me into.

·         MBA only career fairs with interviewing & job offers on the spot. There are 2 main “National Career Fairs” hosted by the National Society of Hispanic MBA’s and National Black MBA Association. I went to one in a huge expo center in Philadelphia, talked with dozens of employers, interviewed with a few including USAA, and lo and behold I have a job at USAA. I’m a believer.

·         “Office Hours” where employers send “pre-interviewers” to the MBA school so students like me could sign up to talk with the recruiter to a little get-to-know-the-interviewer-&-company. Using this resource correlated very highly with getting a job interview.

·         Career Services & Alumni from your school. If I was interested in working for a specific company in Seattle or Austin TX or Denver CO, I would email my career services partner and she would reply in a day with 2 or 3 MBA school alumni who had agreed to either meet up with me or call them to ask them all about their job & the way people end up working there.

·         “MBA Rotational Jobs” that cut out at least 1 or 2 rungs on the corporate ladder. Just about every large company has a rotational program. Some call it a Career Development Program, or Leadership Development Program. If a company has a standard hierarchy of Individual Contributor (like me when I was at Fidelity) > Senior Member > Manager > Director > Program Director > VP > Executive > President. These programs boost a person like me 2 to 3 levels up from where I was previously working. Know more than a dozen of my classmates including me get an MBA Rotational job, and have jobs at (or approaching) a director-level job.

This system is a real thing and a huge benefit. Companies trust that my classmates and I are director-caliber people or will be in a year or two. It feels like a total slingshot up now being in a role where I actually get to lead, create, and decide things.  There’s a lot of other pieces to the MBA School / MBA Employer system, but that’s enough to get my point across. …And being in a role where I can lead, create and decide things leads me to my next point.

Practical Experience: My experience in school was one where I got to lead, create and decide things at a level that I would not otherwise been able to.  Here’s 2 examples out of “at least two-hands worth” of internship, projects and consulting opportunities.

·         I and 3 other students completed the founding of an investment fund with a 6-digit dollar amount. We wrote the governing documents, hired the student analysts, wrote the curriculum and lead them on how to do research, then presented our findings & investment strategy to our donors.

·         Teaching Experience within a top-10 undergraduate program. I taught undergraduate accounting classes as a teaching assistant to over 300 young adults over the course of 4 quarters. I worked with professors to prepare lessons and materials, quizzes, and exams, and got deal with kids who think they could someone get special credit for trying really hard. False. This was important to me because I always have (and continue to) entertain the idea of finding a place to teach finance or accounting at a small university and build a managed investment portfolio. It let me try the teaching in and see “how the sausage is made.” Overall, I really liked it. I felt like I genuinely helped people in a difficult time of life where they were searching for guidance, and made something difficult not as bad. The experience taught me something I needed to learn about myself.

This leads me to the last point I would like to make, despite having a list of a few others I could have included:

A Full-Time MBA program at a Top-25 business school

I know Christine better, and she knows me better, and I know myself better: And we understand & love each other better, and I feel better about myself. Here are some reasons why:

·         I know what I’m capable of, as well as where my limits are.

·         I know what Christine is capable of, and what difficult things can strengthen or weaken our relationship. I feel empowered with more ways for us to be close.

·         We learned how we do living in new places from moving apartments across state lines 4 times in the last 3 years (SLC to Seattle, Seattle to Austin, Austin to Seattle, Seattle to San Antonio). It taught us how to expand our perspectives on how people live. It taught us how quick people are to judge how others live without understanding the context of what their living circumstances are like. It taught us how to adapt, and love wherever we are.

I could talk about the professors & their caliber, the study tours and access to some many other things, but this is already too long.

So, was an MBA worth it for me? Unequivocally, yes. But that is just one person’s experience. 

Was an MBA worth it financially? The Costs vs Benefit

What about all those costs you have to make up?

As I write this, tomorrow is the deadline for my very last payment in the MBA program - my graduation cap & gown. It makes me think about the total cost of doing this.

Going back to school was financially the riskiest thing Christine and I have done together so far; the costs are relatively certain but the reward can be influenced by a lot of things outside of our control… It's a classic Cost vs Benefit, or Risk vs Reward story. I want to define what the costs and benefits were for Christine and I, and tell how those costs and benefits played out.

I’m not going to talk about salaries because telling people how much money you make is tacky (and highly correlated with being a tool-bag). I am going to talk about the time it will take to make up all our different costs. I’ll have another post specifically about the benefits of the MBA.

There are 2 kinds of costs: ‘Real’ cost and ‘Opportunity’ costs. The real costs come out of the bank account such as tuition, fees, student club dues, moving and travel, books, software, HBS Case Studies (etc). Christine and I’s costs were a pretty unique situation. Here's why: Tuition for out-of-state residents is a healthy 5-digit number per quarter. I thought this was unavoidable because I didn’t have any type of scholarship, but once I started school I learned about scholarships that could be earned during school, research assistance-ships (tuition money for helping a professor do research) and teaching assistance-ships (tuition money for helping a professor teach, grade papers and deflect dumb questions…yes, there is such thing).

I was very fortunate to earn a spot as an accounting teaching assistant after doing very well in my accounting class, setting meetings with professors to learn more about teaching assistance-ship opportunities, and continually following-up.
You’re probably thinking to yourself “Self, Brennen is probably a nerd because accounting is for nerds, and I am not a nerd.” This is probably true, but it just happens to be that the accounting department at Foster needs a ton more TA’s compared to other departments, so there’s much less of a chance to be a TA for anything other than accounting. Being a TA was a huge deal because it provided Christine and I with a full tuition waiver plus a small stipend during each quarter as TA. I’ll end school having TA’d for 4 quarters, which is equivalent to having a 2/3rds scholarship plus some cash each month. This puts us in an amazingly fortunate position in terms of costs, because we will only end-up paying for two quarters of tuition out of the six. In short, our costs were dramatically lowered because I jumped on the TA opportunity, but had to sacrifice a lot of time and forego other opportunities. 

The second type of costs are opportunity costs - the value of everything you have to give up - such as not working full-time for a 1 year and 7 months & all the work-benefits that go along with it. I chose to quit my job, we chose to live nearly 1,000 miles from the closest direct family member, Christine chose to work remotely for the same company rather than quit & find a new job in Seattle, we chose to rent an apartment farther from campus & commute 1-2 hours a day, etc. …Lots of costs and missed opportunities had to be made.

I added up both costs: the regular costs plus the missed opportunities that make sense to put a dollar value on.

We’ll make up all the tuition costs plus all the opportunity costs in less than 2 years and 4 months. In other words, after 2 years and 4 months we will have broken even from all the things we gave up like work benefits and salaries plus all the costs of school. The financial aid from TA’ing plus having a much lower pre-MBA salary (aka low opportunity cost) than the average student kept that pay-back time pretty low compared to averages for even the most inexpensive schools like BYU or Texas A&M.

We’ll make up just the ‘real’ costs (tuition, books & moving costs etc) during 2015. I think this is a misleading statistic, but it’s a stat you’ll probably read about from magazines and websites that try to evaluate how fast graduates break-even from going back to school. It’s misleading because it assumes you’re putting every single dollar you make towards your tuition costs or student debt. No one does that. In a perfect world you should take the money left over after your cost-of-living, and see how long it will take you with that money to pay off all of your school costs. No one reports that number because it’s hard, and cost-of-living is a little unpredictable. But I did for Christine and I because I’m a nerd, like to budget do things in excel. Assuming Christine didn’t work, we save for a rainy day & retirement, it will take about 3 years to pay off the cost of school using just the money “left-over.” 

You probably don’t have a great gauge if this is a good or bad amount of time to pay back the tuition, so consider this recent list of schools ranked by “payback period” or time it takes that school’s graduates on-average to put all their new salary towards their tuition costs.

Overall, we got a very good deal. A great deal. Partly because of being a TA, partly because I was lucky to find & land a good job, but fully because Christine was supportive, because we both worked very hard to make things happen, and because we were blessed.

Christine worked really long weeks and pulled all-night'ers regularly to be able to keep up with her job working remotely. Working remotely is way less efficient when you can’t talk to people easily, and get left out of the loop. I did okay in a demanding full-time program where basically everyone is smarter than me all while working 15-20 hour/week job, traveling all around the country pursuing an internship or full-time job, holding leadership responsibilities in my church, and maintaining a healthy marriage. I’ll be proud of my mediocre grades with my diploma, because it took quite a bit of work & sacrifice on both Christine and I’s part. And if you are a recovering MBA grad, a current MBA student, or thinking about an MBA, you should plan on being proud too. It was hard and we had to pay a lot of costs, but there was much more to benefit from it.

There are a lot of rarely discussed benefits to a getting a master’s degree. Everyone wants to talk about salary. There are a plethora of better reasons (and piñatas!) that I didn’t fully understand until after the fact. I’ll tell you about them in my last post.

Why not just try to get promoted at work instead of an MBA?

Why not just try to get promoted at work instead of an MBA?

This has two parts: generally speaking, and then about my situation.

In General

To decide between work or more school, I feel that everyone needs to know a couple things about themselves & their own situation.

First, it doesn't matter how much you make if you don’t even know what you’re earning money for.  You need to understand what your long-term goals and expectations are, so you can discover what kind of income is necessary to reach whatever goals you have.

How much income & what kind of lifestyle do you need to have an empowered, low-stress life? (Yes, you can still be happy in poverty, but I’m talking about your goal… and I assume it’s not poverty.) What amount will you need to be saving for your idea of retirement, for the needs of your family, and what kind of income does that require? What kind of debt are you willing to have 5, 10, or 20 years from now? Can you pay for all the schooling, housing, insurances, proximity to relatives, vacation days, or anything you consider a “necessity”?

Money isn’t the source of happiness, but things like proximity to family & friends, serving others, etc can be more likely to happen when your own life isn’t a mess. Surveys suggest that a person’s happiness doesn’t get significantly higher after earning above $80k a year. Take that with a grain of salt, as everyone is different, and the survey didn’t control of a person’s size of family or cost-of-living.

The point is it’s unwise to have expectations on what kind of life-style you’re going to have, but have absolutely no idea if it’s reachable based on the track that you’re on. I read a book about this guy who said ‘which of you intending to build a tower sitteth not down first and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?’*

Second, once you take a realistic look at your desires and their cost, then you need to look at how realistic the opportunity is where you’re working at, and the type of work you’re doing. Not just with where you work, but with your knowledge, experience and skills.

With work, identify what roles earn the income you discovered you need. Then see who are in those role: are they old-timers who performed well while waiting 10 years for the chance to come along, or are they really skilled, or the boss’s family member? If no one really makes the income your goals require, that’s an indication. If the only decent roles incomes & at work are for those who performed well and waited 10+ years, that’s also an indication.

Whoa… Brennen, slow down. It’s normal to have to wait 10 years for the better job. Yes, but you’re not considering the cost of waiting 10 years when you could obtain that same role/income in 3 years.  If you have to wait 15 years to make what your goals require, then I hope you’ve taken that into account when you calculated how much you need to earn with the timeframe you have to earn it.

Third, you need to consider the market value of the work you do. Do you have some valuable skills? Do you do significantly better than the other people who do your same job? Or are you easily replaceable? Is you job still going to be there and pay just as much 15 years from now? As awesome as you are, as good of a person you are, and as deserving of a person you are, job salaries tend to be based on 2 things: (1) how valuable & needed are your skills, and (2) are there too many or too few people that do what you can do?

So in general, if you need to decide between better jobs & income at the place you’re working at, I feel the best approach is to think about the bigger picture, and consider your opportunities, and consider how realistic it is to reach your goals with your current plan.

For Me & My Personal Experience

I really enjoyed working at Fidelity, however the paths that were available to me were just higher-level customer service jobs or micro-management of lower-level customer service employees. I could have pursued the Financial Planner route (a position called an ‘Account Executive’), but I had just come from Financial Planning and had a good understanding of what that route was like. My department director told me the new-hire licensing route I wanted to pursue at Fidelity would not be available to me or anyone from my department, which further limited my options.

I need to be fair and say there were advancement options that I qualified for that were outside of the call center. They just weren't the type of jobs that offered the learning I was looking for. If I got one of the coveted non-call center promotions, I still wouldn't be planning large projects, not creating business processes, doing my own investigations into large sets of data, not managing a team working on a single project, building any sophisticated Excel models, etc. I would not be making decisions for the company, but only for a client.

Advancement in a Fidelity call center is an interesting thing. Advancement is in pretty small steps there, but it can be pretty quick if you perform well. However, once you’ve gone 2 or 3 small steps there are some pretty big hurdles to getting the next significant advancement into a position where you actually have a small amount of decision-making ability or managerial responsibility.

One hurdle is that Fidelity is a very ‘lean’ company, meaning they have found about every way to reduce labor costs. One way is to temporarily promote people in their job duties but not give them a raise or permanent position in the higher-tier work. It’s called being on ‘loan’ to another department. Everyone who gets ‘promoted’ to a loan position for 6, 12 or even 18 months do the next tier of work without getting a raise, then go back to their previous job once they are no longer needed by the department or if they didn’t make the cut to be hired full-time. Because of the very seasonal and flexible staffing needs at a financial services call center, the majority of employees return to their previous position at the end of their loan.  So hypothetically, if I did just totally crush it and get all the best promotions, it would take an enormous amount of time of being in a very lean system. My costs of missing other opportunities were much larger than the benefit of staying years and years and hoping my train would come in at Fidelity.

I wanted to advance into the training and licensing department, but I mentioned my department director wouldn’t let anyone from my department move into the training department that helps get new-hires get their stockbroker’s licenses. I got a 3-month loan into training, but afterwards the needs of that department were so seasonal and unpredictable that everyone on loan got sent back to their old jobs or otherwise left the company.

The people at Fidelity are fantastic and nothing but a pleasure to work with and even hang out with, but those that advance full time into the first level of management (after paying their dues ‘on loan’) tend to be those who have no better alternative: unrelated undergraduate degrees, just high-school diplomas, or skills that only apply to lower-paying jobs. Because the skills needed at Fidelity are not technical, and the supply of willing employees his high, the wages are somewhat suppressed.

So overall, it’s a good company to advance in for specific people with different long-term goals than me. Our costs of foregoing other opportunities was bigger than benefits of working there in the long-term.

*(Luke 14:28)

Why not do an Evening MBA and still work?

Why did I prefer a full-time MBA over an evening, weekend, online or part-time MBA?

I looked into all the Part-time/Evening MBA programs around and decided not one of them was what I was looking for. The other options weren't bad, but because they didn't fit with me for three reasons. These are my reasons, but there's some other things that anyone deciding between full-time and part time school need to know.

1 - I didn't feel evening MBA programs in the Salt Lake City were the best for career-switchers.  

They are for people trying to advance in the company they already work for, or same line of work. They don’t provide much - if any - new work experience from internships or consulting projects. Ultimately, no part-time MBA sufficiently molded my resume to be what I needed. Even good online MBA degrees like with Arizona State University don’t overcome my apprehension.

That can't be right...I know lots of people how got a Part-Time MBA then a new job. Yes, you may, but it's rare that the new job was both an MBA level job and a truly big career switch.  Those who do generally have an above-average amount of previous work experience or some kind of unique skill they developed outside of their MBA program.

What about Fidelity where you used to work? Don’t they have an MBA recruiting program in their other departments? Why not "career switch" with them? Yes, they do with their investment research department and internal consulting department. I had an introductory interview with their Equity Research group after meeting Fidelity’s Director of Research when he was in Seattle. He gave me a fast pass for an interview with an HR rep. She and I talked about 30 minutes, but at the end she was very frank and said “ You can apply, but we rarely hire full-time MBA’s outside of our core schools" such as Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg and MIT.

I've found the best way to career-switch is to try to get recruited into a large company's MBA rotational program, where they have you work in a few different kinds of projects/roles for a while. Almost every major company has this kind of program, and they pull almost exclusively from Full-Time programs, not part-time.

2 - I feel there's no highly-ranked Evening MBA programs within 600 miles of Salt Lake City 

I'm defining “highly-ranked” as a top-50 ranked Evening MBA program, and feel it isn't too high of a standard. The U is the only top-100 school in the area at 52. 

Why does that matter? Schools in Utah that have an Evening MBA program (University of Utah, Westminster, UVU, Utah State) won’t post their admitted students’ average GMAT score, starting salaries, (etc) like higher-ranked schools because their job placement track record & other stats are not competitive... nor great recruiting material. Utah-based schools tend to post national averages (Like the U), selling the 'MBA Acronym' but not the school itself. I have strong feelings about the lack of value found in the Evening MBA programs around the Salt Lake Area not because the schools are bad, but because their graduates generally get local, undergraduate-level jobs with marginally better pay than before getting a graduate degree. That wasn't what I was going for. 

There's less of a draw for employers to recruit students if the school's true statistics are an employment-out-of-graduation rate of 80%, average starting salary of $60k, and average GMAT test score of 580 out of 850. The numbers would suggest that on average, higher-ranked schools would offer more experienced candidates with higher reasoning & quantitative aptitude than lower-ranked schools.

Aren't school rankings mostly a marketing play or a pride-thing that Ivy-leauge people trumpet around? I don't believe so. On rare occasion there are tools who like to remind others how great of a school they went to, but on average the graduates I know from top-tier universities are humble and grateful for their education. Rankings & stats matter for one big reason: It needs to be clear that when you get a job right out of school, your starting salary is influenced by the average salary stats your school has. Most large employers have a basic formula where they input the school's average salary & the candidate's previous work experience to determine how much they'll offer you. I've had more than one HR recruiter tell me this, and experienced it first-hand. HR departments are surprisingly open with sharing the methodology or reasoning on how they decide on salary offers.  

3 - A long, stretched-out time in school isn't what I was looking for. 

I did one quarter of 3 evening classes this year so I could work as a teaching assistant and take the classes I wanted. For three days a week I stayed on campus from 8:30am to 9:20pm with a 30-60 bus commute each way, then had regular 8-5 hours the other two days. It was really miserable leaving the apartment at 7:00am and coming home at 10:30pm. Why would I do anything similar to that for years for only a marginal benefit to me?

Many evening programs are 2 ½ to 3 years. Committing myself to a longer-than-necessary time commitment of working nights and weekends for only the marginal benefit of a local evening MBA was not worth the cost to my bank account, energy levels or relationships.

Things everyone should consider:

If you are thinking about switching careers, no type of MBA (evening, full-time, online) is a golden ticket. Employers want people with experience more than they want education.  Take the path with the most opportunity to get new work experience (projects, internships and such) before graduation because at the end of the day, employers ask for stories about things you've done, not what you studied in a class.

Was getting an MBA worth it?

Was getting an MBA worth it for me?

Have you ever wondered, 

“Was it actually worth it for him to quit his job and pay to go to school for 2 whole years? What about all those costs you have to make up? Why go to school full-time instead of an Evening MBA so you can still work? Why not just try to get promoted where you already work instead? Why not buy a house instead? Why move to go to school? Will this really be worth it for them? ”

Christine and I wondered about those things.

If you’re thinking about going back to school, you also may wonder things like these:

“Can I really afford it? What if you don’t get a better job? What if your new job is lame? What if you have to move somewhere lame? What if you learn very little that is useful in the real world, like non-applicable theory? What if things aren't really better because of it?”

We wondered about those things, too.

And I’ve written the answers for me and Christine. Every week or two I'll share an answer to one of the questions above. I hope they will be useful for people who were curious about why we even did this but don't feel comfortable asking, or are considering getting a Masters of Business Administration themselves.