As I approach the halfway point of my Evening MBA degree, I
have learned two things.
Business school is really really easy. To get an MBA degree, mostly you just have to
show up, and even that is often optional.
The concepts are rarely complicated, mostly different ways of framing
basic ideas. There are weekly cases and
articles to read, but you can get by with a quick skimming ten minutes before
class. Group projects and papers tend to
have small deliverables, because you want to be concise in business. Besides, there aren’t usually right or wrong
answers, so you get a lot leeway in writing about whatever you feel like. There
are tests, but don’t worry, you almost always get a cheat sheet, and grading
tends to be exceedingly generous. Plus, it
doesn’t matter if you do badly anyway, since no one cares about your grade and
nearly everything rounds up to a B.
Business school is really really hard. You wake up at some ungodly hour to be at
work at some slightly less ungodly hour.
You spend the next eight/nine/ten hours dealing with customers,
coworkers, machines, and whatever else drives you crazy. After that it is off to class for another
three hours of keeping your brain open to new things, before, if there is no
traffic or transit delays, getting home some fourteen hours after you
left. And then you get to do again the
next day, or perhaps you get an ever so relaxing normal workday first. In the time you aren’t in class, you need to
figure out to be a worker, a student, a group member, a friend, a classmate, a
family member, a partner and yourself. You
hope classes end a little bit early, even though you know exactly how much each
hour costs you, just so you can a little extra time to recover. There are few breaks, so in time your will to
live will become a distant memory. You
look forward to that brief time every Saturday that you can sleep in and not
feel exhausted. You lose contact with
those around you, as they aren’t quite as interesting as staring blankly at a
wall.
