Is an MBA Degree Worth Pursuing?

May 21st, 2010

MBAs have always been considered sure-fire investments, much like owning a house.  But, now that the United States economy is shifting in a direction it hasn’t seen in a while, the actual worth of an MBA these days is up for debate. If you research the worth of an MBA, you will find that the lines are divided, particularly when it comes to one of the latest buzzwords in the field—ROI.

ROI, or “Return on Investment,” is usually related to gauging the worth of products or services in the business world. But ROI is being applied to MBAs more and more these days, which can make the decision about enrolling in an MBA program exponentially difficult.

Graduate students pursue MBA degrees for a variety of different reasons.

  • Most MBA students enroll at least partially in hopes of advancing in their professional life and, consequently, making more money.
  • Some students earn an MBA at the behest of the company for which they work,
  • Few others enroll in an MBA graduate school in order to start up their own businesses.

These are all valid reasons for pursuing an MBA, and if you’re someone who has his or her sights set on that corner office with the fantastic view, then an MBA is mandatory.

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) has released its survey, which indicates that MBA degrees continue to lead their holders to increased salaries and that most students express satisfaction with the MBA programs they choose. When it came to being satisfied with the quality of the MBA program they chose, three-fifths of the students surveyed gave the value of their degrees such adjectives as “outstanding” and “excellent.” Full-time MBA students reported that they expected to increase their salary by 54 percent, while part-time students expected a 43 percent salary increase. Executive program students expected to increase their salary by 33 percent after graduation.  And over the course of a career, that’s some pretty astounding ROI, with returns way over the initial cost of investment.

However, many of the benefits of an MBA degree may not be reflected in a huge salary or prestigious job position. There are many less tangible gains to be had as a degree holder when you take into consideration the importance of having the ability to “speak business speak” and thrive in the business culture. Apart from social and business networks, you can also gain adept group communication skills from the MBA experience. At most business schools, the case method and class participation make up an important part of the curriculum. In a business school setting, you learn when to interact, when to keep silent and listen to others, when to be serious, and when to use humor to break the ice. This same group power dynamic exists in many business situations, from board meetings to team projects. Mastering the art of communicating in a group setting is one of the things that distinguish successful people from the rest, and it is learned very powerfully in a B-school.

BOTTOM LINE

To quote the old adage, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and so is the worthiness of an MBA.

One should examine the pros and cons of attending an MBA program against his/her long-term goals and the relevance of the MBA in achieving those goals. Often, many lose sight of the real intent of higher education – racing more towards the finish line (and the purported dollar signs) and forget to maximize the experience right in front of them. It is an opportunity to grow professionally and personally. You will likely be tested in ways you never imagined undergoing a tough MBA program. The MBA is worth it if you know what you can gain out of it. It is not an automatic passport to success; it won’t bring you instant fame and fortune. For that, you have to use the grey matter in between your ears. You’ll just have some MBA leverage to help you along, that’s all.

- PAVNEET TANDON

An English (Hon) from the prestigious JMC (DU), Pavneet is an expert English trainer for the CAT and the GMAT and mentors students at MBAGuru, INDIA’s Fastest Growing CAT Coaching Institute across its Delhi centres. Her adaptive style of teaching cuts across backgrounds and learning stages of students and helps them transition to their respective next levels.

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Start it Right to Get it Right

April 27th, 2010

They say, “Well begun is half done“, and it could not have been more aptly out for CAT aspirants. Though there is no substitute for hardwork, I believe it’s more of smart work that is crucial for your success in CAT. To crack CAT and to become a successful manager, one needs to put in a systematic and planned effort. In my view, there are 2 parts of CAT preparation that you must think through, especially when you start, in order to make the most of your preparation:

First part (written exam preparation)

CAT checks you on clarity of basic fundamentals and application of concepts. So, first of all, gauge your level by taking a diagnostic test (SWOT Analysis) and find out your strengths and weaknesses in all the 3 sections.

1)          Verbal Ability (English)

It is a common observation that people who read a lot are good at this section. So, the first few months should be devoted exclusively to reading and reading “critically and diversely”. For example: Reading editorials (preferably online), start with Novels preferably e-books so that you inculcate the habit of reading online.

Start working on your vocabulary by referring to a dictionary regularly or you can start with “Word power made Easy.” You should go through Guru Fundae books or Wren and Martin to improve your Grammar concepts and the “English usage section.”

2)          Quantitative Analysis (Maths)

Instead of focusing on Tricks and Tips, focus on fundamentals and basic concepts as CAT is about small twists in basic fundas. So, go through the guru fundae books. One should be familiar with numbers and basic formulae. Initially, don’t worry about speed as it will follow with clarity of concepts.

3)          Data Analysis (Reasoning)

I believe mind is like a muscle. As regular exercise is important for our body, similarly, regular practice is important for our mind. Try to solve puzzles, sudoku etc.

One should be familiar with all the different kinds of sets like Venn diagrams, Pie chart, Bar charts etc. Be comfortable and quick with percentages etc.

Second part (broader perspective)

Is your aim only to clear written exam? No. You want to become a good manager. So, what are the skills of a good manager?

i)          Inquisitive Nature/observation

ii)          Analytical skills

iii)         Communication skills

So, do you ever think while taking a Metro – Why it exists? Why do we prefer it? Is it a success or not? If yes, how? What goes behind? How do they make profit? How do they earn by these food joints or advertisements at metro stations? How we can make it more efficient?

Do you participate and listen to debates and group discussions? Have you ever participated in an intellectual debate?

If not, then start Today, inculcate it…..Form a perspective….It will not only help you in clearing GDs and PIs but also help you in the longer run, in life.

- ASHISH RANA

Ashish is one of the youngest and most passionate CAT trainers at MBAGuru, India’s fastest growing CAT Coaching Institute! And it is these qualities that make him a favorite among MBAGuru students across Delhi centres. Extremely approachable and ever-so-polite, his demeanor proves extremely effective when it comes to helping MBAGuru students learn the nuances of English and communication.

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The art of Learning

January 21st, 2010

I observe that a huge chunk of student community preparing for CAT and other MBA entrance exams joins coaching institutes of various hues and color in the hope that they would get the best quality faculty, best quality material, excellent experience of service delivery, very good management where their grievances if any would be redressed the moment they mouth the complaint, and the list of their wants goes on.

Did you notice that the entire focus of the students and even most of the coaching institutes is upon improving the above mentioned variables to the maximum extent possible, little realizing that the success of the student (here, securing admission to the B-school of desire, after clearing all the hurdles of the admission process of that B-school) depends only on one person: the student himself (without prejudice to the female gender, for ease of writing). By saying so, there is no attempt on my part to undermine the importance of all the variables. No doubt they are important, but unless the ‘receiver’ of that service is mentally prepared for that, all the efforts of the ‘deliverer’ (which includes all the variables mentioned) come to a naught. And none of these outside variables has any control over the germination of the seed of the mental preparedness of the ‘receiver’.

So, the first requirement for a student to learn anything in any coaching institute (or any educational institute, for that matter) is his mental preparedness. And so the first question which any aspiring student should ask himself is:

Is he mentally prepared for management education and all that it takes?

Only when the student answers it in the affirmative can the next step of learning begin. As a next step, the student after some basic research joins a coaching institute. Once he joins, there is a risk that he may leave the entire efforts of learning to the coaching institute and its faculty, and the moment this happens, his learning immediately stops and what begins is his focus on what is being delivered to him and its quality. If he likes it, he savors it like some sweet fruit; otherwise he starts complaining and expects the organization to fulfill his demands in the next minute. Would it not be pertinent here to ask the big question: WHERE IS THE LEARNING?

Whatever a student gets from the coaching institute are the resources for him and he should utilize those resources to the fullest extent possible. And for that, he must learn the art of learning. That brings us to the next question: How does one LEARN? A faculty teaching any concept in the best possible manner may not necessarily lead to learning of a concept by the student. Student’s learning happens when a particular concept hits him in the deeper recesses of his mind to that extent where he experiences a sort of ‘Aha’. It’s a pleasing experience! The deeper this experience of ‘Aha’ is, the stronger the probability of learning and heightened retention power. To gain this experience of ‘Aha’, one has to spend adequate amount of time with the concepts and this means that merely reading a particular chapter n number of times may not yield desired results. One can understand the importance of this experience when one realizes that such an experience is a result of creation of new networks between nerve cells of our brain. Each new network created means newer and newer learning. Moreover, the stronger the experience of ‘Aha’ is, the stronger the strength of this network and hence longer retention power. At this point, I would also like to mention that such creation of networks between nerve cells is always painful, which explains why any kind of new learning always entails a baggage of pain associated with it. Consciously neglecting this pain with the sole objective of gaining the pleasure of having learnt something new and fruitful is the real clue to the art of learning.

To experience this experience, besides mental preparedness (as already mentioned), one must be genuinely interested in that topic at hand. The interest in that topic may or may not be there already. A faculty teaching that topic in the class usually tries his best to generate interest for that topic in the minds of the students, but may not always succeed for the simple reason that getting interested in that topic lies completely in the hands of the student and not the faculty. If one is disinterested in a particular topic, then no amount of reading that topic or a faculty teaching that topic can create interest in that topic. Student’s interest in a particular topic or subject is either inbuilt or has to be created by himself. And in case the student is not able to create interest by any of the means, it becomes a major impediment to his learning quality for that subject and he continues to remain relatively weak in that area.

There is one more reason why one should be genuinely interested in any topic at hand. By being so, one’s thinking process gets naturally activated which goes beyond what is being written or taught. This step helps a student to experience mental growth with respect to that topic. Once this process happens across various subject areas, the overall growth is achieved and the student takes off to a different platform built on strong foundations. It is this strong foundation which creates scope for further learning and gaining higher level of skills required of in all the management entrance tests.

While we are talking so much on the various aspects of learning, how can we forget the importance of ‘common sense’ which plays an important role in the learning process? I can vividly recall an instance when I was in grade V and in my final terminal exams was asked the following question of Math:

 Q.         Find the value of 23 × 57 × 79 × 0 × 53

 I first multiplied 23 with 57 and the result with 79 and then got stuck with what to do with 0. Nobody taught me how to multiply a number with ‘zero’! Nobody is taught the table of ‘zero’, ain’t it! I had practiced numerous questions on multiplication in my fifth grade in order to gain good marks, but despite that I could not attempt this question and had to leave it as it is. You must be wondering what the big deal in this question is and that the answer is simple: ‘zero’. And when you say so, you are missing the whole point. I am trying to bring out the difference between learning Math and having common sense. The above question is not at all Math question, though it looks like one. If you see Math in the above question, you would never be able to get the answer and will be always stuck up where I was stuck up. But with simple common sense, one need not even do any computation and can easily speak the answer. There is no substitute for common sense in any area of study, leave alone Math. And ‘common sense’ is not and cannot be taught in formal education at all. It can only be appreciated and learnt from experience.

Therefore in any learning process, one must always look inwards, taking all the inputs from outside resources because the responsibility of success or failure in any endeavor rests completely with the person himself and not at all on external agencies.

 Ashu Jain

Ashu is an engineer from the prestigious Punjab Engineering College (PEC) and an MBA from the Pune University. One of the most experienced CAT mentors in the country, Ashu is known for his passionate yet objective approach to student relationship and for his exceptional Quant mentorship skills. At MBAGuru, INDIA’s Fastest Growing CAT Coaching Institute, Ashu anchors Academics.

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CAT-09: Turn it into an advantage!

November 29th, 2009

If you are a CAT-09 aspirant, this must be a tough time for you even if you are lucky enough not to have been at a centre where the test never took off or luckier still not to have been a victim of an isolated case of system mis-behaviour which might have caused you to submit the test without having completed it or something similarly disastrous. The anxiety of whether you would be able to attempt the test would have overtaken the usual, and understandable, anxiety of whether you will be able to perform to the best of your ability.

But then, things could always have been worse – imagine a situation where almost everyone else was able to attempt the test in the normally expected glitch-free mode and you were among a small minority left out. There would have been no one to take up your cause, or understand and empathize with you and the general perception would have been that you were trying to blame your poor performance on a system otherwise functioning beautifully. The media would have heaped praise on the IIMs and Prometric for the gigantic transition and your plight would have gone unnoticed.

So, first things first, you must stop worrying about whether you will be able to attempt the test or not. Statistically, the chances are that you will have a relatively normal experience. You should not even be thinking in any other way because that will take away your focus from doing well in the exam if it does happen normally.

Even if, God forbid, it does not pan out normally for you, for the first time in your life you can be sure there is a certain “safety in numbers” in this case. With so many test takers at the receiving end of a mis-managed endeavour, your chances of being heard and your complaints getting redressed shortly are significantly higher even if things do go wrong for you.

For those of you who could not take the test in the initially designated slot, again, there is no reason for you to believe that all your preparation would evaporate over the next few days and amount to nothing. Think of the cancelled slot as a cancelled mock test/AIRCAT, where you atleast you got within sniffing distance of the actual CAT. Would you have really worried as much had a mock CAT slot been cancelled? Surely not. And probability wise it is quite likely that with increased time and more knowledge about the new format, you will be able to do even better in the second shot you will shortly get, if the reports from Prometric and IIMs are to be believed.

So, summarily, stop fretting about what is not within your control and take control of all that you can. Test starting late, server crashing, password not functioning, system misbehaviour and anything remotely similar – none of these things are under YOUR control; hence, there is no point in even thinking about them. What is in your control is giving your best whenever the external factors behave properly. For that, you will need to stay in a relaxed and happy frame of mind. That alone will give you an insurmountable advantage over others in an exam where performance is finally measured in relative terms.

If you can see the troubled landscape of CAT-2009 as an opportunity for yourself, you are on your way to becoming a successful manager.

- Deekshant Sahrawat

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CAT-09: Hopes dashed as servers crashed..

November 29th, 2009

Half-expecting it yet half-hoping against it! We do not wish to sound prophetic when we say that what happened on CAT-09 day-1 was not entirely unexpected. Neither of the 2 ‘institutions’, IIMs and Prometric, involved in conducting the CAT aroused the sort of confidence needed to give a sense of ‘everything was fine’, especially for such a significant shift in the platform for such a significant and huge exam. Apart from a couple of media interviews, filled with paeans of self-praise for Promteric’s capability and expertise in conducting an exam on such a scale, there was little evidence of actual groundwork being done at a pace that was mandatory to make it a success.

One has to understand that IIMs are institutes of academic excellence, and one can expect a degree of error from their end as conducting tests is certainly not what they excel at. CAT is perhaps ‘the exam’ in terms of the planning and execution skills required to conduct it successfully and the track record of IIMs has still not been too bad in this regard, apart from the one leak in 2003. Where IIMs still had been failing surprisingly, and consistently, was the academic part of the exam or content of the paper .. but let’s leave it for another day and come back to the more pressing present.

After bagging the several-million dollar contract, Prometric was supposed to bring in the wherewithal to generate the content, plan the application process, have the software and hardware ready, across centres, cities and the nation and do whatever else was needed to make the historical transition from the pen-paper to the computer-based format. Afterall, they had the almost impeccable GMAT track-record to boast of.

That we think was the first incorrect assumption or extension thereof. GMAT, with 2.5 lakh test takers annually across the globe, is conducted over almost 250 days and has a geographical distribution that does not really ‘test’ the load bearing capabilities of the system. Compare that to the audacious plan of having almost an equal number of aspirants write the test over a 10-day period. We are already looking at a 25-time higher load on far more concentrated resources! Imagine a plane with a capacity of 200 trying to board 5000 passengers. Little wonder then, it did not take off.

The second place where things went wrong was extending the predictable atmosphere and tested resources of the GMAT labs with that of various colleges, institutes that Prometric tied up with as test centres. It would be interesting to find out how many of the systems being used across the centres are actually genuine ones and not assembled at Nehru Place or equivalent? And how many of them use genuine original operating platform or softwares would be another guess worth taking? To expect such a widely distributed, and inadequately controlled resource system to behave in a predictable manner seems more based on hope than on reason.

But let’s keep aside the 2 arguments made above for a while and let’s assume Prometric had build the capability much beyond its GMAT experience and was genuinely ready to take on a challenge this big. The question then is where was the actual on ground preparation? Right from an edit information button installed as a reaction to the students’ vociferous demand for the same during the application, to several extensions on the edit option (the last one still operational), to the last day revelation of non-disclosure (one wonders why?) clause, to what actually transpired on the first day of CAT-2009 and right down to the startling denial mode adopted by Prometric and IIMs – it seems nothing was ever in control and Prometric has continuously been playing catch-up with the problems rather than plan and pre-empt them through multiple redundancy and contingency plans, that are a basic measure in any plan worth something.

One could have and would have pardoned a few blips in a change as big as this. The gentler souls among us would have even sympathized with Prometric and the IIMs if a few aspirants bore the brunt of some technical glitches in one of the slots and took the 2 institutes to court. But the scale of mis-management is simply too high to be brushed aside as “isolated cases of technical glitches” as claimed by the test conducting agency. There is simply no fool-proof way to compensate the students who have suffered because of what is clearly a below-par effort made by Prometric. Well, for the students ofcourse, it is not Prometric but IIMs whose credibility has come under the scanner. Finally, for all of us, CAT for the IIMs is not because of Prometric; rather, it is the other way around.

So, here we are .. again, half-hoping and half-expecting .. this time for it; that mistakes are accepted, apologized for, and rectified so that the historical shift does not become an exemplary disaster. For those who are yet to prove capable of exam-management can certainly not be expected to or entrusted with disaster management.

- Deekshant Sahrawat

The author is an alumni of IITDelhi and IIM Calcutta and a founder member of Roots Education, where he anchors MBAGuru, India’s fastest growing CAT coaching institute. A state-level cricketer, he is also the lyricist for India’s premiere band, EUPHORIA.

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