From history major, to MBA holder, some questions!

Graduate School Business School - MBA
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<p>Greetings! First, is it true that a graduate with a BA in History or some other liberal arts major can go to graduate business school for an MBA?</p>

<pre><code> If this is true, then could a graduate of history go immediately to business school after graduation, or would work experience be required, how much? As far as work experience, what would someone with a history major do to fulfill this requirement? What would "work experience" necessitate? Would the GMAT have to be taken?

        Lastly, how many years does it take to graduate from business-MBA school? Thanks!

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<p>usually 4 years of work experience or more.</p>

<p>history majors can get business jobs, if you look at where Dartmouth history majors go after graduating many of them enter investment banking.</p>

<p>it takes 2 years to graduate from an MBA program.</p>

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<p>REL - love your work in that civil war thing. Keep up the good work.</p>

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<p>Of course Dartmouth history majors can get jobs in business- they went to Dartmouth. If you go to a second tier liberal arts college, businesses are not going to be knocking on your door.</p>

<p>Time and time again I have seen this. The more prestigious university you go to, the more flexibility you have in choosing your major in regard to getting jobs at consulting firms, banking, and venture capital. </p>

<p>What do I mean? Over the years I have read a lof of bios of people. I see people who went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton with degrees in English, history, and classics who end up getting jobs at prestigious banks, venture capital, etc. I have also seen that economics is a popular major if you went to a very good liberal arts school-that major will help you. And of course, if you did a business degree from a good school, that is an option. I NEVER HAVE SEEN someone who went to a second or third tier school who did a degree in English or history get a job at one of these firms. </p>

<p>I am sure someone will disagree. I sincerely believe this is "how it works" Of course, if your parents have a lot of money and connections, then you will probably get whatever job you want.</p>

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<p>Everything you stated is pretty obvious.</p>

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<p>It might be pretty obvious to you but may not be to some people. Some students are pretty naive- its not their fault, its what they've been led to believe by ignorant high school counselors, teachers, and parents.</p>

<p>They think that if they simply go to a "good" school, study hard, and get good grades, job opportunities in many fields are going to be available.</p>

<p>Look at venture capital for example. At Boston firms, if you didn't go to Harvard or MIT, the probablity you are going to get a job at the entry level or MBA level is low. In San Francisco, at these firms almost everyone went to Stanford.</p>

<p>Right now, its fashionable in academia to tell students that they don't have to go to the Ivies to get a "good" job and that your college experience is more about "fit". But if you want a job in consulting, investment banking, and a few other fields, your chances are so much greater if you go to the right schools.</p>

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<p>I know of 2 guys (psychology and history majors) who graduated from Yale and both have made it big in investment banking in NYC. Neither of these two guys were that smart, but they went to the right school. If you are going into the workplace straight out of undergrad the school makes a huge difference. If you are from a lesser school and attend a top grad school, perhaps the undergrad school makes almost no difference.</p>

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<p>I think it bears mention that you don't really have to be that smart to do well in investment banking. Except perhaps for those guys doing modeling work, investment banking really isn't that hard to do. You have to be reasonably intelligent, but you don't have to be a genius. I know many former investment bankers, and they have all said that the intellectual content of their tasks was not all that high. They weren't doing things that were really complicated.</p>

<p>What you really need in investment banking is a lot of social skills and a good social network, because that's what you need to close deals. You also need a strong work ethic and stamina. The work isn't that complicated to do, but there is just a LOT of it. </p>

<p>Look, if investment banks all just wanted brains and nothing else, they would be hiring only Phd's in engineering, math, and physics from schools like MIT or Caltech. It is true that they do hire some of these people. But they also want to hire those schmoozy blow-dried smooth operators.</p>

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<p>Yep, after a while I-banking is the same **** with slight variations. It's mostly how long can you sustain staring at 290,000 cell deep spreadsheets of financial models. </p>

<p>Also, at top schools students get exposed to I-banking and consulting that they know what these firms are looking for before interviewing. Many elite schools often coach the student well before the interview on cases and mannerisms that even if you went to a good school, you'd be disadvantaged in interviewing because you won't be as prepared.</p>

<p>Consulting firms are basically looking for smart people and they school you went to is an indication of that.</p>

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<p>A dissenting opinion: the investment bankers I worked with in NYC were, as a group the smartest cohort I have ever been around, either before or after. I found them to be, as a group, pretty darned smart. Not all of them took higher-level calculus, but a lot of them were nevertheless mathematically apt and quick with extrapolating and conceptualizing lower-level math concepts. A lot of the people who were not math stars had outstanding verbal skills, which were probably more important. And some of the people who seemed to have neither turned out to be outstanding at making presentations, leading a group of professionals towards a goal, or getting sophisticated corporate clients to trust them.</p>

<p>The preponderance of these people were graduates of leading MBA programs, which typically require high GMAT scores to gain entry. And most of them also went to leading undergrad programs, which frequently require very high SAT scores. Then these people had to withstand a rigorous interview process, which generally required them to demonstrate their mental quickness at some point along the way. They were in fact, IMO, quite smart by most reasonable measures. Very smart.</p>

<p>Intellect alone was not the sole criterion, which is why they didn't just recruit the entire Cal Tech freshman class. But it was one highly relevant parameter in the process, and the results were evident to me.</p>

<p>For the jobs where the form of intellectual horsepower needed was largely quantitative, they did recruit the smartest quantitative minds available. Not just MIT undergrads. but their professors. Stanford PhDs, etc.</p>

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<p>krkbts is right, the better school the better the options. I went to Dartmouth, was an anthro major, and got a job at a top 5 consulting firm and got into a top 5 MBA program within two years. Many of my friends from Dartmouth with the most random of majors got amazing jobs at banks, consulting firms, non profits, etc. </p>

<p>At my MBA program it seemed graduates from the Ivies majored in almost anything, but a great majority of the students outside the top undergraduate schools majored in something practical like finance.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
A dissenting opinion: the investment bankers I worked with in NYC were, as a group the smartest cohort I have ever been around, either before or after. I found them to be, as a group, pretty darned smart. Not all of them took higher-level calculus, but a lot of them were nevertheless mathematically apt and quick with extrapolating and conceptualizing lower-level math concepts. A lot of the people who were not math stars had outstanding verbal skills, which were probably more important. And some of the people who seemed to have neither turned out to be outstanding at making presentations, leading a group of professionals towards a goal, or getting sophisticated corporate clients to trust them.</p>

<p>The preponderance of these people were graduates of leading MBA programs, which typically require high GMAT scores to gain entry. And most of them also went to leading undergrad programs, which frequently require very high SAT scores. Then these people had to withstand a rigorous interview process, which generally required them to demonstrate their mental quickness at some point along the way. They were in fact, IMO, quite smart by most reasonable measures. Very smart.

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<p>Uh, I don't think anybody is disputing that they have to be relatively smart. They just don't have to be geniuses. </p>

<p>I'll put it to you this way. I know plenty of MIT Sloan MBA grads who got bulge bracket investment banking jobs. All of them have said to a man that they don't really feel that they are that intelligent relative to the non-Sloan graduate students at MIT. Heck, some of them even said that the Sloan MBA was, frankly, the only degree from MIT that they could have reasonably completed - that they felt they would have been absolutely crushed if they had tried to get, say, a degree in EECS from MIT. In fact, frankly speaking, the entire Sloan School is sometimes stereotyped by other departments at MIT for not being intellectually rigorous compared to the rest of MIT. I personally think that's a rather unfair characterization (as I would argue that the Sloan School is clearly more rigorous than is, say, the MIT Media Lab), but certainly the perception is there. </p>

<p>The same thing is largely true of Harvard Business School. I know many HBS students who feel that they are nowhere near as smart as many other students in other programs at Harvard. Schmoozier and better social and speaking skills, yes. But smarter? Not really. </p>

<p>I think the stats clearly bear this out. Just look at the average GPA's and standardized test scores of the top B-schools. Frankly speaking, they're not that high relative to most grad programs. For example, the highest entering GPA for a B-school was a 3.64 at HBS. Other M7 schools admit people with GPA's of 3.4-3.5, and places like Dartmouth Tuck, Michigan, and Virginia Darden are a 3.3. Similarly, the average GMAT scores of the top B-schools is around a 700 (about a 93rd percentile). Frankly, that's really not that high. Not when you consider that the top 10 law schools admit people with a 3.6-3.7 GPA and about a 169-170 LSAT (which is about 98th percentile). </p>

<p>But that's exactly what I have been saying, and you have agreed with - that you don't really have to be THAT brilliant to become an investment banker. Frankly, if you are just looking for pure intelligence, there are smarter people you can find within the same university than just the MBA students. Again, taking it back to the example of MIT, MIT is chock full of brilliant people. </p>

<p>
[quote]
For the jobs where the form of intellectual horsepower needed was largely quantitative, they did recruit the smartest quantitative minds available. Not just MIT undergrads. but their professors. Stanford PhDs, etc.

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<p>Yeah, the key word is what you just said - 'available'. In fact, I was just talking to one of these 'available' people at MIT, a PhD candidate, and he told me that, frankly, the reason why he is interviewing with the banks is simple - he doesn't think he will be highly successful in the world of academia. Science is his true love and frankly, he would prefer to just be an academic scientist. The problem is that he doesn't think he can even get a decent tenure-track position at a decent school, and even if he could, he doubts whether he can win tenure, because the truth of the matter is that hasn't published very much, what he has managed to publish has been in the lesser journals and has, frankly, not been that well regarded, and his chosen dissertation topic is not really a hot field anymore. Hence, he doesn't think he will get placed anywhere decent, and he's not willing to go to a no-name school, as he doesn't feel that he will really be able to do the kind of science he wants to do at a no-name school. </p>

<p>Hence, he is now pursuing a finance job, and picking up the MIT Financial Technology certificate basically as a consolation prize. He even called it "playing with the kids". What he's doing is "playing with the kids" - that he knows all of the stochastic mathematics, numerical analysis, and statistical theory that the computational finance guys are using. Heck, that's all old hat to him. So he's "playing with the kids". If he could get placed in a tenure-track position back at MIT, or at Harvard or Stanford or Caltech or places like that, he would jump at it. But he doesn't think he can, so he'll just go 'play with the kids'. Computational finance is obviously no walk in the park, but it's nothing compared to the kind of stuff he was dealing with in his PhD program. </p>

<p>I think that's how it is at most of these top flight technical PhD programs. The superstar students get placed as assistant profs at the top programs, and the top ones of those will get tenure. The ones who are not that superstars- they are the ones who tend to end up going to banking. I highly doubt that too many people who really complete a PhD at a place like MIT unless they truly truly love the subject. It's just too much work for you to do something that you don't really love. So anybody who can complete that degree loves the subject and would want an opportunity to pursue it as an academic. It's just that not all of them get that opportunity. For those who don't, they have to find something else to do with the rest of their lives, and that 'something else' can be finance. </p>

<p>The truth is, academics are not really motivated by money. Heck, getting a PhD is a pretty foolish venture from a financial standpoint - you can probably be better off financially by just getting a regular job. So it's quite hard to tempt academics with money. They are looking to pursue their passion. Heck, even in business school, most business school profs could probably make more money by just resigning from the faculty and starting their own consulting firm. It's not really money that they're after. You can get these guys if they can't get tenure, or in the rare cases where they get bored (like James Simons did). But the point is, I think all academics realize that they can make much more money than they are making by doing something else. Money is generally not their primary motivating factor.</p>

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<p>"Uh, I don't think anybody is disputing that they have to be relatively smart. They just don't have to be geniuses. "</p>

<p>Sorry I took you to be disputing it when you wrote :</p>

<p>"I think it bears mention that you don't really have to be that smart to do well in investment banking. "</p>

<p>My mistake. Apparently.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
"Uh, I don't think anybody is disputing that they have to be relatively smart. They just don't have to be geniuses. "</p>

<p>Sorry I took you to be disputing it when you wrote :</p>

<p>"I think it bears mention that you don't really have to be that smart to do well in investment banking. "</p>

<p>My mistake. Apparently.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Didn't I also say the following?</p>

<p>" You have to be reasonably intelligent, but you don't have to be a genius."</p>

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<p>
[quote]
But that's exactly what I have been saying, and you have agreed with - that you don't really have to be THAT brilliant to become an investment banker. Frankly, if you are just looking for pure intelligence, there are smarter people you can find within the same university than just the MBA students. Again, taking it back to the example of MIT, MIT is chock full of brilliant people.

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</p>

<p>I don't necessarily disagree with this sentiment, however, a few caveats:</p>

<p>1) The top echelon of investment bankers (heads of divisions, top M&A specialists, top derivative structurers, top prop traders, etc.) are some of the smartest, sharpest people one will ever come across - indeed, most bulge bracket firms employ a number of PhD quant jocks (literal rocket scientists) in their respective derivative groups. Now granted, this is not representative of the majority of i-bankers, and even less so in the entry-level analyst group (but then again, their work is more sheer number crunching and grunt work rather than high level finance - hence, they are looking for relatively smart people, good leaders, good team skills, personable/presentable (to a potential client), enthusiasm for the business, diligence, work ethic, etc. - things that one cannot measure by GPAs / GMATs)... which leads to point 2:</p>

<p>2) The best and brightest minds in the world don't necessarily make it in the real world. Of course there are plenty of examples of brilliant people who are runaway successes in the business world (Andy Grove, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs all immediately come to mind)... </p>

<p>but more often than not, Executive Boards, CEOs, Chairman of Boards, are run by people who may not be "PhD-level" smart but they do have other unique skills (that are arguably much more important): things like exhibiting strong management skills, possessing natural leadership, understanding esoteric concepts and turning them into a business opportunities, understanding the competitive landscape and positioning thier firms to adapt to changing business environments, can "think out of the box", are good at delegating, are good at hiring talent, are good at bringing the best out of their employees, are good at selecting division heads - THESE are all "intangible" skills / qualities that one cannot readily measure with a standardized test... and these are the skills that are truly hard to come by (if you want to talk numbers, think about the sheer number of brainiacs there are in the world - look at China and India alone vs. the number of people who can successfully manage, run and lead a multinational corporation)</p>

<p>The simple fact of the matter is, intelligence is important in getting you an interview / getting you in the door... and of course it will help to be smarter than the next guy in order to reach that next rung on your race to navigate the corporate ladder, but the higher one goes, you realize that innate "intelligence" is already assumed to a degree, and what really matters is your ability to play office "politics" - get people to see things your way, get people to back you, go to bat for you - the "soft" skills. I believe that in part explains the difference in the statistical makeup of business schools (vs. other grad schools) because b-schools not only need smart candidates, but they also try and identify things other than pure brain power (e.g. captains of varsity sports, president of a student council). Business schools realize this - they know that intelligence alone (and of itself) is simply not enough in the corporate world.</p>

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<p>From slipper 1234: "krkbts is right, the better school the better the options. I went to Dartmouth, was an anthro major, and got a job at a top 5 consulting firm and got into a top 5 MBA program within two years. Many of my friends from Dartmouth with the most random of majors got amazing jobs at banks, consulting firms, non profits, etc." </p>

<p>I went to Kenyon-which is a good liberal arts college but is not considered first tier. Upon graduating, almost no one I knew got jobs at the top consulting firms or investment banks other than a couple of rich, well connected people or econ majors. Most people seemed to go right back into school for a Master's, Law, Medical or PhD program.</p>

<p>Now that may be fine for some people. I for one would have liked to have gone to a college where good organizations actually recruit students on campus. I find it disturbing when administrators at colleges constantly talk about how wonderfull the school is doing and downplay the difficulty their graduates have in finding decent jobs.</p>

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<p>I think this confirms that going top tier is critical if you want a liberal arts degree and a straight shot into elite firms (this is the best way by far IMO). If you can't get into a top 5 LAC or top 15 USNEWS school, my advice is to major in something like finance.</p>

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<p>"Most people seemed to go right back into school for a Master's, Law, Medical or PhD program.</p>

<p>Now that may be fine for some people. I for one would have liked to have gone to a college where good organizations actually recruit students on campus. I find it disturbing when administrators at colleges constantly talk about how wonderfull the school is doing and downplay the difficulty their graduates have in finding decent jobs."</p>

<p>That's something to keep in mind whenever these % PHD numbers get trotted out. Many liberal arts colleges do not attract many recruiters to campus. Recruiters simply do not think they will see enough qualified and interested applicants to make the visit worth their time, compared to other schools where they can interview.</p>

<p>I suspect that a number of these future PhDs are steered in this direction in the first place because they can't easily find jobs.</p>

<p>Let's say you're a senior, it's January, you can't get a job because nobody is recruiting on campus and you can't take time away to leave for very long. If you leave with no plans for the following year you may get cut off from your parent's medical coverage. Among other issues, like not having a place to live. So what do you do, when you've no better idea? Apply to grad school, obviously.</p>

<p>I explained this to my own daughter, but she went the LAC route anyway. Let's hope it works out for her/us. Coming in, she had no plans to become an investment banker. But, all things being equal, it would be nice not to have unexplored paths cut off prematurely.</p>

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<p>I wouldn't necessarily completely agree with slipper. From what I've seen in IB recruiting anyway, it is still better to go Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Tufts, Middlebury, Colgate, Hamilton, Colby, Bucknell, Connecticut College type of school than to major in finance at schools below this level. I would say majoring in finance and doing well at a UVA, UMichigan, BC type of school is equally helpful to attaining these jobs. However, majoring in finance at even decent, but not great schools such as a Penn State, Villanova, Providence, UMaryland, URichmond type is going to be less helpful for these upper echelon jobs. For strategy consulting, which is what I think slipper went into at first, I would agree. From what I've seen, if you didn't go to one of 15-20 schools, you basically have no chance of getting in. There are, however, many other alternatives to these industries and people on here treat it like IB/MC is the be all/end all and nothing else exists. Granted, that may be easy for me to say because I did go into one of those (initially); nevertheless, for people of that mindset, bear in mind that 90% of undergrads that go into these two areas are no longer working in these areas three years later.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
That's something to keep in mind whenever these % PHD numbers get trotted out. Many liberal arts colleges do not attract many recruiters to campus. Recruiters simply do not think they will see enough qualified and interested applicants to make the visit worth their time, compared to other schools where they can interview. </p>

<p>I suspect that a number of these future PhDs are steered in this direction in the first place because they can't easily find jobs.</p>

<p>Let's say you're a senior, it's January, you can't get a job because nobody is recruiting on campus and you can't take time away to leave for very long. If you leave with no plans for the following year you may get cut off from your parent's medical coverage. Among other issues, like not having a place to live. So what do you do, when you've no better idea? Apply to grad school, obviously.

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<p>Well, in fairness, to counterbalance this, I think it should be pointed out that plenty of students at the big research universities also end up with few opportunities. I know people who graduated from Berkeley who ended up working at the mall. One guy who recently graduated in math reported to Career Services that he's working as a waiter at Kell's (a local campus bar). And of course that's a guy who actually reported what he's doing. Lots of Berkeley grads who end up in mediocre jobs don't even report what they're doing, probably because they're ashamed.</p>

<p><a href="http://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Math.stm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Math.stm&lt;/a> </p>

<p>Nor is this specific to Berkeley only. Lots of other large research universities churn out grads who end up in taking mediocre jobs that they could have gotten right out of high school. I know graduates from UCLA, UCSD, and schools like that that have ended up waiting tables, answering phones, washing dishes, and those sorts of things. </p>

<p>These large schools have prestigious recruiters coming to campus to interview. But they also have lots of people COMPETING for spots. For example, at Berkeley, interview spots through Career Services is assigned by lottery. I know a guy who bid on all of the top strategy consulting firms and investment banks, and didn't get an interview slot with ANY of them. Instead, he was put on a wait-list for a bunch of them, and none of the wait-list spots got converted into actual interview slots. </p>

<p>It doesn't matter if big-time companies come recruiting for your company if you can't even get a job with them, or even get an interview with them. Who cares whether your school brings in top-notch companies to recruit if you as an individual student can't even recruit with any of them? It's as if, from your perspective, they didn't even come in the first place. </p>

<p>At least you can say that the LAC's heighten your chances of getting into a PhD program. Maybe that is indeed because the grads have nothing better to do. But hey, that's better than nothing. At the big research universities, some students really do get nothing, in the sense that they can't get a job with a top company, and they can't amass an academic/research record that is good enough for a PhD program either, and thus end up in a mediocre job.</p>

<p>The point is, LAC's and research universities all have their strengths and weaknesses.</p>