Business School

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.