<p>What do the top schools mean by "work experience"?</p>
<p>Can't I have a part-time job during my undergraduate years?
Summer associates, for example,.. etc.</p>
<p>I really don't want to wait another 3-5 years before I get my JD/MBA.</p>
<p>No. There are rare exceptions where some top business schools (Stanford) will take you straight out of undergrad. You would need to have done something pretty great for that though. No business school will consider what you did part time as an undergraduate full-time professional work experience.</p>
<p>Why do you want an MBA?</p>
<p>I think working as a corporate lawyer, your clients would favor you if you have an MBA.</p>
<p>If you want to work in corporate law I suggest you get into a top law school. JD’s are churned out en masse and unless you go to a top ranked school you will find it hard to break in. </p>
<p>MBA’s are useless without real world experience and no top program will look at you without it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Thanks, got it. I was thinking about the same thing. I think JD is more for me.
Do you think joint programs are good? (I was thinking of Harvard-Cambridge JD LLM program)</p>
<p>Top joint programs are fine, but they are also extremely hard to get into. Make sure the law school in the joint program is at least a T10-15 program and you should be fine. </p>
<p>Go google third tier law blog or something like that. If is a blog about low ranked law schools and how horrible the work is afterwards.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t know… I am a pretty motivated guy and I love challenging myself.</p>
<p>Go to a crappy school and get 200k in debt and tell me how motivated you are. Do yourself a favor and get into the best law school possible so your life will be easier.</p>
<p>I got an MBA right out of college, at a fairly top MBA school.</p>
<p>If you can go straight to MBA school, I would say do it.</p>
<p>In my opinion, working at some entry level job for two years is no really going to give you experience that will make your MBA studies any more useful.</p>
<p>But I would not advise law school. I graduated from a fairly top law school as well, and there are way way way too many lawyers nowadays. Even if you go to a top law school, the law of supply and demand will kill you. Going to a top law school will help you get a job at a top firm, which is critical, but a lot of people don’t last more than 2 years at a big law firm, and then they wind up at a 15 man mediocre level law firm, which is not even a real company.</p>
<p>Better, in my view, to get an MBA and work at a subtantial Fortune 1000 Company.</p>
<p>Those who think law school is good are watching too much TV, in my opinion.</p>
<p>For example, my son is good in English, and got 2300 on his SATs, and I would definitely discourage him from even thinking about law school.</p>
<p>This admittedly negative advice is not only founded on my own experience, but also on the experience of five of my friends, and my real life experience at working at 10 different law firms during my life, all of which are dead ends.</p>
<p>I was given this advice 30 years ago, and I pooh poohed it, to my misfortune.</p>
<p>Also, my MBA did my absolutely no good whatsover, when I worked at these law firms. </p>
<p>No one cared.</p>
<p>If you want to talk further, email me. I assure you that I know what I speak about.</p>
<p>Now that being said, in my opinion the MBA has been cheapeaned as well. Down here in South Florida, University of Florida is advertising their executive MBA program on billboards on I-95.</p>
<p>The best degree, in my opinion, is a BS from Wharton. Then you don’t even need to get an MBA.</p>
<p>floridadad, what year did you graduate from MBA, and what school did you go to (if you are willing to say)?</p>
<p>I just want to ask because, if you are a dad, then the condition might still be true as what you said (worth it to go to MBA without experience), but then again it might have changed… </p>
<p>i am just curious, I am considering the same issue too, and will like to know more</p>
<p>Harvard Business School has a “2+2” program that you apply for in your senior year of college. How it works is that they accept you when you’re still in college, and then defer your enrollment for 2 years so that you get 2 years of full-time experience and can then get more out of (or give more to) the MBA program. </p>
<p>All top MBA programs do accept a few students right out of college, but they are almost always jaw-droppingly smart and accomplished entrepreneurs whose accomplishments (when looked at without regard to their age) would have gotten them in anyway. e.g. someone who started and sold a successful software company by the age of 19. </p>
<p>Typical “internships” don’t count. </p>
<p>I think, regarding an MBA, you’ll get more out of it if you wait to go. First of all, right now you don’t have a ton of experience in a corporate environment – how do you even know if you want to work in finance or marketing or operations, etc.? You could very well go get an MBA in the wrong concentration and then realize too late that you’ve spent 2 years and are now $150k in debt for a job you don’t even really want. Also, most business schools have a heavy emphasis on classroom discussion – you’ll be able to add more to those discussions once you have first-hand experience. </p>
<p>And I need to echo some other comments here – think really, REALLY hard about law school. One of the reasons I think there are too many lawyers in this country (most of them miserable) is that law schools take kids right out of undergrad…so they get either 1) kids who don’t know what else to do, so they apply to law school as a default and/or 2) kids who have no idea what on earth REALLY being a lawyer means in the real world. </p>
<p>Either way, work for a year or two before applying to grad school – either as a paralegal or in a business role – to try to figure out what you really want. </p>
<p>This might seem like a “waste” of time…but I just might have saved you 3 years and $200k (for law school) if it turns out that the work and lifestyle aren’t for you.</p>
<p>One final thought – a joint JD/MBA is really only the right choice for a very, very small number of people. For most people, I’d advise against it.</p>
<p>one more note re: getting an MBA without much work experience is that post-MBA employers may be reluctant to hire you at a post-MBA level if you don’t already have a professional track-record to back up the hiring decision. Not impossible, of course, but will be much harder to compete in a job interview against someone who has a strong answer to, “So, tell me about your previous accomplishments”.</p>
<p>Note that some of the consulting firms would be more open to a non-experienced hire, but that could be quite a gamble.</p>