I knew I wasn’t going to business school at a dive in Idaho playing pool with Emily, Grace, Will and Otto. We were a bit sauced and a was looking out at them when it suddenly struck me that going to school would mean walking away from all of it. In my slow moving mind I couldn’t figure out why I had pushed so hard against this in the first place. It had been coming for a while but that specific memory sticks out in my mind for just the simple feeling that I wasn’t meant to be walking away from all of this at such a time.
There are 3 reasons, hopefully succinct about why I decided not to go to school.
- Emily - There are lots of jobs but who you pick to spend your life with determines your happiness. Em and I aren’t engaged but we’ve been dating for four years. That is to say, we’re serious. Going to school or not going to school was a bit of a “put up or shut up” situation. I chose to put up. We could feasibly have done two years of long distance but I am confident that we wouldn’t have grown as a couple, grown together, if we weren’t together. When it came down to it I would bet on Emily every time. \
- Career - An MBA can be an amazing career enabler, an accelerant. But, what gets me most excited about an MBA is this idea of it as a “retreat.” For two years you are walking yourself off from the real world in order to lean in to figuring out just what you want to do with your life. I love the idea of setting that time aside, without external pressures, to reflect. But, after spending time with students I did not hear that theme. What I heard was internships and clubs and jobs and pay. All important but also all part of what I have in my day to day life. You know what’s cooler than an internship? A job! You know what’s cooler than wine club? Researching wines and drinking them thoughtfully with your friends. An MBA wouldn’t necessarily accelerate my career (it could, maybe!) and it wouldn’t give me the space to reflect and retreat in the way I wanted. In short, it was too little of the things I wanted and too much of others.
- Risk Averse - An MBA funnels people into a few narrow paths. Top MBAs funnel people into even narrower paths, namely consulting and finance. As someone who is generally risk averse, I have a sense that I would shift my focus towards those paths, away from some of the industries and careers I would find most interesting, in favor of prestige, flexibility, and compensation. Not pursuing a full-time MBA allows me to head this off at the pass, in essence forcing me to lean into the places I want to be.
An MBA admissions office so often describes the MBA as being a deeply personal choice. I agree with I this. Having the wisdom to determine the value of something when it has real trade offs is a learned skill. I would encourage anyone to explore the path and use it in the way that still sharpens steel; to refine your own idea of what a journey should look like.
One thing you won't hear me talk about is how much more money you can make post-MBA. I don't think, if your undergraduate education was sufficient, that you will necessarily have access to a higher paying job unless you go the route of consulting or finance. Both paths serve as career Red Bull but neither one particularly interested me. I've watched my roommate do it and from an outside vantage point it is external validating and internally deadening. My own route was never one of those.