<p>I am a senior student from a prestigious UK university.
I want to enrol for the Dual Degree Management of Technology program at UPenn ( recieving a Masters in Computer Science and MBA from Wharton in the same two-year period).</p>
<p>I am 21 years old. I have one years experience working for a large consulting company and a few small internships.</p>
<p>I want to know: do I have enough experience to apply for such a program or are MBA usually for very experienced leaders of business?</p>
<p>Jobs for MBA’s vary considerably depending on your experience and the elective courses you take while in the MBA program. Without previous experience, the only real route for an MBA is in the financial sector - most companies will not hire someone for a “management” position when they have never held a professional job. The program you cited would be professional suicide without experience - it is clearly poor preparation for finance, but you would need experience to take advantage of the MBA. Even worse, having an MBA and not using it is worse - you would be hard-pressed to find a job as a programmer, since prospective employers would assume you were just biding time for a management job and were not serious about the current opportunity.</p>
<p>brilliant reply. thank you so much.</p>
<p>Let me add something which may spice things up.</p>
<p>What if I want to be an entrepreneur?
I don’t intend on working for anyone upon graduation so the MBA would be purely for my learning not so much for a perspective employer.
Thoughts please?</p>
<p>It’s hard for us to judge without knowing more detail about your professional experiences and more importantly, what you got out of your work experiences. </p>
<p>About courses, you can probably learn more if you can relate your coursework to your past experiences. If you learn about a case study, then remember an instance it applied to you, you will probably get more out of that lesson. That’s one reason most people go into MBAs with a couple years of work experience.</p>
<p>Another thing to consider is that many of your classmates may be in their 30s or even 40s. Do you learn a lot when around people with a lot of experience? Will you be comfortable with people 5-10 years older than you? I’m not just talking about class projects, but the overall social experience like going to bars. Many people say the best part about an MBA is the networking, and you should try to be well-prepared to capitalize on that experience.</p>
<p>Even though you want to be an entrepreneur, the concerns cosmicfish brought up still applies. Unless you’re independently wealthy, you’ll need to convince investors you will succeed. Even if you are wealthy, you still need to find a good team to join you. More work experience definitely helps.</p>
<p>On the other hand, getting an MBA now could help you launch your career earlier. A lot of business schools are accepting more students without full-time professional experience, but that could be because of the growth of finance, which doesn’t require much work experience.</p>
<p>I would suggest talking to your supervisor about your plans (assuming you’re still working there). He/she would have good advice, and will need to write a letter of recommendation if you decide to apply. Also post this in the business school forum. Start writing your personal statement; it’ll help you decide if an MBA is the right thing. Taking the GMAT/GRE now doesn’t hurt either because scores last for 5 years and your test-taking skills may get more rusty after leaving school.</p>
<p>If you have a good idea for a company, consider starting it now while in school. Startup costs for internet companies are pretty low and you can probably enter contests to get funding. Even if you fail, you would have learned a lot.</p>
<p>I’m moving this from the graduate school forum to the MBA one. You might get more responses there.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m afraid I can’t agree with that. A whopping percentage of inexperienced MBA’s (from top schools such as the aforementioned Wharton) become consultants. It is an enduring mystery of the business world why they persist in engaging consulting firms that employ inexperienced consultants, but regardless, they do so all the time. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, if that is the real problem, then the answer is simple: don’t mention your MBA on your resume. After all, there is no rule that stipulates that you must list every degree or qualification you have ever earned. You are free to omit items as necessary. For example, I know several guys who have multiple versions of their resumes, some of which list their PhD’s, and others which do not, and instead play up their practical experience. </p>
<p>In the case of the OP, he wouldn’t even need to explain an uncomfortable gap in his resume, as may be the case for others. He mentioned that he would be in the Penn 2-year CS program, and that plugs the gap fully. Nobody needs to know that he’s also at Wharton. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sure, but regarding the investing angle, that’s where the Wharton connections come into play. Let’s be perfectly honest: venture capitalists generally only come from a handful of schools, Wharton being one of them. {I assume that the OP didn’t come from Oxbridge and hence lacks current venture capital connections.} Much, probably most, venture capital investment is brokered by social connections. If you didn’t come from one of that select group of schools, then you don’t have an easy pathway to find funding. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>To be clear: the entire above conversation of mine presumes that the OP will actually be admitted to Wharton, a daunting prospect for somebody without work experience.</p>
<p>But assuming that he does, it’s, frankly, hard for me to find reasons why he shouldn’t take it. While I agree that he may not derive as much benefit from the program as somebody else with more experience, the program would almost surely be a better developmental experience than any job he could take during the same timespan. {Let’s face it: most entry-level jobs aren’t highly conducive to personal development.} </p>
<p>One option that the OP could take is to enter the program and then temporarily withdraw after 1-2 semesters in order to pursue other opportunities, such as entrepreneurship. Heck, why not? I know one girl who has already withdrawn from Harvard Business School not once but twice in order to pursue, believe it or not, a film directing career. But she nevertheless returned and graduated with her Harvard MBA last summer. Steve Ballmer withdrew from Stanford GSB to join a certain startup, and that seems to have worked out rather well for him.</p>
<p>Forget entry into Wharton with your background. It’s not about your excellence or intelligence. You just don’t fit the profile, unless somewhere in there you’ve started a company or worked a very, very responsible job. It seems unlikely given your age and what you said. You won’t get in. Two years at Penn in CS won’t change their minds on that, barring some stellar work or idea you do on the side.</p>
<p>If you want to be an entrepreneur and you want your entrepreneurship to have a computer focus, try to go to a US West Coast school to study CS – Stanford or Berkeley – and then get yourself into one of their business programs after you’ve earned more stripes. Get into the Silicon Valley milieu and go for it. Wharton has spawned great entrepreneurs to be sure, but it’s spawned a lot of a lot of things (it’s a massive school), and there are other schools that are hands-down better to train entrepreneurs. Wharton itself has bemoaned openly sometimes that it has not a top-rate engineering/cs school to which it is adjunct. Its alumni have bemoaned that its approach to entrepreneurship is out-of-step with tech-focused entrepreneurship.</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>As the first poster responded, the MBA would be a weighty millstone 'round your neck. If you are applying to big companies, you’ll come up short in terms of experience. If you are trying to be an entrepreneur, candidly speaking you still don’t have the track record that’s going to convince someone to part with a lot of money to back you just because you have a Wharton MBA. If you actually have to hide the MBA from the market, doesn’t that suggest it’s a really bad idea to undertake at this time (except of course for the pure education of it)?</p>
<p>I didn’t see you say you want to go into VC. As a class, VC is sucking wind. So if you are counting on that or on funding from that, be very strategic. Wharton is not bad, but is not one of the best schools to go for VC…</p>
<p>My two cents.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I still don’t really see all that much of a downside. People hide aspects of their background from their resumes all the time. For example, I can think of a number of people who, after college, moved to Hollywood to try to pursue acting careers which failed, and so now are successfully pursuing other careers. Every one of them pointedly chose not to omit their itinerant years on their resumes when they mostly waited tables and took other low-end jobs while waiting for the acting break that never came. And they even had to plug a chronological gap in their resume; in the case of the OP, he has the built-in excuse of saying that he is simply pursuing an MSCS without needing to mention a Wharton connection. </p>
<p>Like I said, in the absolute worst case scenario, he can always just enter Wharton and then withdraw quickly (while perhaps remaining enrolled in the CS program, or perhaps even withdrawing from that program as well). By doing so, he builds a placeholder for himself in that his future re-enrollment into Wharton is secured (perhaps subject to some time limit). As I mentioned before, I know one woman who withdrew from Harvard Business School twice to pursue a film directing career. But she did so knowing that her seat at HBS was secure, to be reclaimed as necessary. </p>
<p>But that’s not possible if you never officially matriculate. If you actually reject such a program, you have to undergo the admissions process again, which for the top MBA programs, is a highly stochastic process. For example, I know one guy who was admitted to several top MBA programs and turned them down in order to pursue a promising business opportunity, and then reapplied the following year…only to be rejected by some of the very same schools who had admitted him the previous year. He would have been better off if he had accepted, matriculated, and then withdrew, for his seat would have been waiting for him upon his return. </p>
<p>None of this is to say that the OP will necessarily be admitted to the program in question in the first place. I do not dispute that his odds are low. However, assuming that he does get in, I struggle to figure out reasons why he shouldn’t do it, which would seem to be the case only if he happens to find a job opportunity so amazing that he can’t even afford to take the time to enter the Penn program and then quickly withdraw. And, let’s face it, most newly minted college graduates are not provided with such amazing job opportunities.</p>
<p>Sakky, I like your creative solution: get into Wharton, drop out, go do some things, and then come back. Uh, wouldn’t i make more sense just to wait? That way he wouldn’t lose the deposit he will have paid. People do omit things from resumes, true, but savvy interviewers will suss those out – and they do – and then this guy would have something to answer for and frankly it would look flaky. Also, Wharton won’t hold that spot open indefinitely. Many schools require an admittee to reapply in such cases, and how would that look? Theoretically what you’ve said is true, but it makes no practical sense. It won’t matter anyway because they OP has a minimal chance of getting in. Wharton isn’t the most selective school – the usual suspects and others let in fewer applicants as a percentage (Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, Columbia, Stanford), but it is no cake walk and this won’t help. Why should this guy bend himself into a pretzel to gain no material advantage, pay more and risk more?</p>
<p>If it’s really just about education and he just wants to be an entrepreneur, my advice is what I am sticking with. Go be an entrepreneur after getting the CS degree, and then apply when you’ve got a story to tell…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Uh, no, because, like I said, what if he doesn’t get in the 2nd time around? As we all know, B-school admissions are highly stochastic, and it is entirely possible that you could get in one year, but not the next. In fact, admissions officers specifically state that their goal is to continually increase the admissions difficulty, hence ensure that former students can no longer get in under the most current admissions regime. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Really? Again, how? Why? If you as a recruiter saw somebody graduating with a MSCS, would you automatically suspect that he was also in the MBA program and had then dropped out? {If you truly had that sort of perspicacity, why are you even wasting your time recruiting students at all? Why not just become a Don Draper-esque salesman with the power to deduce what his customers are not disclosing? Or, even better, why not become a highly paid professional negotiator?}</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But we’re not talking about ‘many’ schools. We’re talking about Wharton, which allows leaves of absence for up to 5 years, with administrative permission.</p>
<p>[Academic</a> Policies: MBA Resource Guide - The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania](<a href=“http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/mbaresource/academicpolicies/index.cfm#leaves]Academic”>http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/mbaresource/academicpolicies/index.cfm#leaves)</p>
<p>Nor do I think that the administrative permission would be particularly difficult to obtain - as I would have to assume that an interesting business opportunity would be a perfectly acceptable reason to take leave. This is a business school, after all, hence the purpose of the program is supposedly to foster business. After all, Harvard Business School allows students to take leaves of absence seemingly at will for such business-oriented opportunities as…directing a film. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How so? Like I said, it seems to me that it makes perfectly practical sense. By locking down your admission, you reserve your seat and thereby shield yourself from the vicissitudes of the any future admissions cycle. Who knows how strong the applicant pool will be in a future year? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How exactly would the OP lose his deposit? Assuming that the OP is going to attend Wharton or some other top B-school someday, he would have to pay a deposit fee one way or another anyway. </p>
<p>Besides, frankly, even if he did lose any deposit, I think that’s a fair price to pay for having your Wharton seat guaranteed. I know I’d pay for that, and surely plenty of other people here would too. Furthermore, once the deposit is paid, the OP could then even apply to higher-ranked B-schools such as HBS or Stanford, and if he gets in, he could choose to forfeit his deposit to go there, but if he doesn’t, oh well, he just reclaims his seat at Wharton. </p>
<p>I personally don’t see how that’s any more of a twisting of the rules than what already happens now. For example, if that woman I mentioned had attained smashing success in her film directing career, she would have surely continued to pursue it and never finished her degree. If not, oh well, she just goes back to collect a Harvard MBA. Similarly, if Microsoft had failed, then Steve Ballmer - who had dropped out of Stanford GSB to join the company - would have surely returned to collect his Stanford MBA. </p>
<p>Heck, I was just talking to one (Chinese) guy who had withdrawn from HBS to move to China to start a business venture. The plan is simple: if the company succeeds, then he won’t ever need to return to Harvard, or even to the United States for that matter. But if the company fails, oh well, he just returns to the program and finishes his MBA. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Again, I don’t see how he’s risking more. If anything, he’s risking less. By guaranteeing your spot in a top MBA program, you’ve reduced your risks. </p>
<p>But I agree that all of this presumes that he can actually be admitted in the first place, and I have always agreed that such admissions would be difficult indeed. But presuming that he does, exactly why wouldn’t he take it? I know I would. I think the vast majority of people here on CC would. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And like I said, why wouldn’t that be possible with the dual-degree program that incorporates a MSCS? As I said, in the absolute worst case scenario - one that I find difficult to contemplate - he could always simply choose to omit his Wharton MBA and list solely the MSCS. Nobody needs to know that you had earned another degree while amidst that program.</p>