10 Things one should know about MBA

Hi Friends,

Its been long since I last posted on CE. Reason I was busy with my MBA after a successful CAT 08. Now that I have completed my course and have settled in my job I am back here. I hope to be here consistently in future. Well this post is about some vital things that one must know before appearing for CAT or rather before deciding to take up MBA.

1. Your professional work experience matters in your selection but it matters even more in your recruitment. If you are an IT professional with 2-3 years of work experience who wants to make a career in Finance - be prepared to let go the work experience in IT. In all probability you would be hired as a fresher.
2. The Salaries reported are all bloated and in any of the top 10 B Schools (IIM-ABCLK, XLRI,NITIE,FMS,JBIMS,SIBM, IIFT etc.) around 85% of the people end up getting jobs with take home salaries of not more than 75k per month after tax. The average take home salary per month would be around 50-55k.
3. If you are an engineer (which all of us here are) with IT work experience then you need to differentiate yourself from others. Around 70% of the experienced junta in your class will be like you.
4. Each B-School has a strong area and generally one should choose a B-school based on one's choice of specialization. E.g. NITIE is the best place for Supply Chain/Operations while IIM-C is considered best for Finance. So if you have a specialization in mind then ensure that you find out which of the B-Schools are regarded highly in that specialization.
5. At all the Govt. Centres of Excellence i.e. IIMs and NITIE. You DONOT have to choose a specialization. Your Major and Minor are decided based upon your choice of electives. While in almost all the other B-Schools you have to choose your Major in 2nd yr. E.g. an SIBM passout will either have Finance/Marketing/Operations as his specialization and can get recruited for only those profiles but an IIM or NITIE grad can apply for any of the profiles as they are not constrained by specialization.
6. It is extremely important these days to have very good academic record in order to get into IIMs. I personally know a friend who had overall percentile of 99.50 with sectional break up Quants 98.xx , DI 98.xx and VA 93.86 %ile + 2yrs of workex with HSBC and did not get even a single IIM call. (either because of engineering CGPA 7.46 or 12th score 84%).
7. With fees of most of the institutions now being raised to about 10L, one should calculate the education loan outlay per month post graduation. Generally one is supposed to pay around 15k per month for 5 yrs. One should keep this in mind especially if you happen to get into a B-School which has lower average salary.
8. MBA course will surely be a great value add for anyone but for the value to get realized it will take some 5-10 yrs. So if you have a very short term horizon in mind and are contemplating entrepreneurship in 3-4 years post MBA then you ensure that you make a very careful decision.
9. Freshers tend to have it easy in terms of getting Finance/Marketing jobs. Especially if compared to an engineer with 2yrs of non-relevant work experience. So if you are a fresher (currently in your final year) and want to be in one of these two areas then either make sure that you get into a relevant job in these fields or crack CAT this year itself (which is always the best thing to do irrespective of whether you are a fresher or a person with workex 😀 )
10. At the end of the day only two things matter : 1. How good a person you are. 2. Brand - yes! no matter whatever one says, the brand matters quite a lot - at least for the initial push in your career. A lot of good companies recruit only from a select few B-Schools. So be very sure as to which B-schools you would want to go to and then prepare your CAT strategy.

There are a lot of other things as well that one should know but for starters these 10 should be enough.


The AUTHOR is - NITIE Class of 2010.