B-Schooled Podcast Episode #297: Why Do You Need an MBA?

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Timestamps refer to the audio.

Erika Olson: Hi there, everyone. I’m Erika Olson, and I’ve been an MBA admissions consultant at Stacy Blackman Consulting for over a decade now.

Today I’m here to talk to you about how important it is to actually communicate in your applications why you want an MBA in the first place. Now, I know this may seem like a “duh” topic. Isn’t the reason inherent in applying to an MBA program? Shouldn’t it be obvious why you want a business school degree? No, it’s not.

There are about four different profiles of MBA applicants who really need to differentiate themselves and talk specifically about why they need an MBA, and we’ll go into all of that. But what we find is that a lot of the people applying to MBA programs are already type A overachievers in the first place.

They do such a good job of conveying that in their materials that the admissions committee might think, huh, they don’t really need a spot at our program, because they’re going to do just fine on their own. That’s what you don’t want. You don’t want to oversell yourself so much that they think someone else is more deserving of the spot because they can actually help that person achieve their goals.

So I’m going to go over a few types of applicants who really need to think about this. And then I’m also going to talk about a few things that are honest reasons for wanting to get an MBA but might not be things you want to talk about directly in your materials. Again, this sometimes seems like a weird topic, but you really do need to convey why you need, not just want, an MBA.

(2:36) Let’s talk about the four types of candidates I mentioned, the ones for whom this is really important.

The first group is maybe one of the biggest pools of applicants there is: the people who are expected to get an MBA as part of their career path. I’m talking about people who have spent two years as a management consultant, two years as an investment banker, maybe a year or two in investment banking and then in private equity, and then they apply. They do this because everybody before them did it. This is what their companies expect. This is what their careers require. It might be because all their friends did it.

None of these reasons are good enough for the admissions committee. You’re an individual. You likely have different goals than all the people who came before you, and if you don’t take the time to think through those things, it’s going to be tough to differentiate yourself from everybody else who, quite frankly, might not have a lot to say that’s different from you when it comes to the kinds of projects they’ve worked on or the deals they’ve closed, or just those over-represented industry buckets you may all be in.

So you do not want to write something like, “My two-year program is coming to an end, and now it’s time for me to pursue an MBA.” No. That’s not what anybody should write. That’s not what they want to hear.

(4:13) A second group that needs to think a little harder about why they need an MBA is people who already have two or more degrees. If you already have a bachelor’s and another kind of master’s, or maybe even a PhD in something, it could come off to the admissions committee that you’re a quote-unquote degree collector, that you don’t really know what to do with your life, so you’re signing up for yet another few years to figure it out in higher education. You really need to do something in your materials that doesn’t reinforce that suspicion.

(4:51) The third group is what I’ll call experience outliers, those who are on either the younger or the older side of the applicant pool. If you’ve got less than two years of experience, obviously some programs have specific applications for those coming straight from college. But if you’re applying somewhere that doesn’t, you really need to think about why a little more life and career experience wouldn’t benefit you. Why now? Why is now a good time?

You need to convince them, because you’re supposed to learn from each other, which means people are supposed to learn from you. If you’re coming very fresh out of college, or with just a few years under your belt, that might not feel like enough to somebody who’s been out five years.

And then on the opposite end, if you’ve been out over 10 years, you have to have a really good reason for explaining why you’d be pursuing an MBA now. Admissions committees want to give spots to people they feel they can help in their careers, people they can accelerate, people whose career trajectory they can change. They want candidates who couldn’t achieve what they want to achieve without an MBA, who have already convinced them they’re likely to achieve their goals because they’ve already been high achievers, but who really do need the knowledge, skill set, and network that comes with an MBA program.

So if you’ve been out for eight years, it could come off like an MBA is more of an afterthought, like you’re just feeling stuck right now, or you feel like you went down the wrong career path. You need to make sure you’re not giving that impression.

(6:57) The fourth group of candidates who really need to spend extra time thinking about why they need an MBA are those who’ve already been mega, mega successful to date, and whose career goals don’t seem to require an MBA at all. If you’ve already launched your own company and sold it, if you’ve already run a business, there are a lot of situations where the committee would think, huh, maybe this person’s burnt out and just wants to chill here for a few years. We don’t get why they would need us.

That’s the last group I wanted to mention, where you really need to communicate why you need an MBA to be successful in the future. Everybody needs to communicate that, but for those four groups, it’s just that much more critical.

This is, of course, on top of making sure your resume is up to snuff, that your recommenders will have their letters uploaded on time and are the right recommenders, that your essays are compelling and position you well, all that good stuff. So that’s why I wanted to dedicate an episode to it: why do you want to get an MBA? Because most programs don’t straight up ask. That’s the tricky part. Even though it might not be a direct question in the application, it’s not something you can leave out. You have to convey it. You have to find a way to convey it.

(8:31) Let’s start getting into specifics. The “why an MBA” and “why this school specifically” questions are intertwined in your essays and even your interview responses, so you’ll likely want to cover both. But today I’m not going to talk about how to express your fit with any specific program. We have other episodes about that. For now, you need to show your research into the program by integrating classes, professors, clubs, and other parts of their special curriculum into your essays. Again, we have many other episodes on that.

What I want to talk about is how to clearly detail, at a more overarching level, what you still need to learn and what experience you still need to gain in order to reach your career goals, and how an MBA is the right degree and the right next step for you.

One of the most common legitimate reasons is to help you learn about another functional area or another industry. Let’s say you’ve spent your entire career in marketing, but you want to lead a company one day. You’re not going to be able to do that without understanding finance, financial statements, accounting, operations, leadership, and how companies run.

(9:50) On the flip side, if you’ve only been in banking or financial services, you might not have any exposure whatsoever to social media strategy, competitive strategy, digital strategy, or organizational behavior. If you’re coming from the military or the nonprofit world, that’s an even more untraditional career path, and if you’re looking to pivot into the private sector, you may have never been exposed to corporate America or any of the traditional business functions at all.

And that’s okay. I always like to remind people that there was a surgeon, a kindergarten teacher, a priest, and a pop star in my section at Harvard Business School, and there are many, many people with interesting and untraditional backgrounds in all graduating classes at the top schools. So not having any business exposure is certainly not a showstopper. It’s just that you need to remember to communicate why it’s important for you to have that exposure and what you want to do next.

Overall, if you want to change industries, move up in your organization, or lead with a wider purview than your current function gives you, you have an easy case to make for why you need an MBA. An MBA can supplement specific functional knowledge and introduce you to classmates who came from those functions or industries, people who can help you network and whose expertise you can learn from.

(11:36) Another common major reason to pursue an MBA is to speed up your career progress, or to leapfrog over peers so you’re not going step by step with each promotion you’d get otherwise. It can help you reach that next level more quickly. If you’ve been in the workforce for a while, you can plateau and find you’re not really learning anything anymore. Things might stall without an MBA to give you the skills and the networking experience of a management level or eventually C-suite position.

On that note, one of the main focus areas of most top MBA programs, and many programs in general, is leadership. All schools are going to cover case studies, have guest speakers, and do role plays. They’ll offer tests, quizzes, and other tools to help you figure out what your leadership style is. You’re going to learn management tactics, business strategy, competitive strategy, and organizational behavior, which is a big one.

So many things are critical to know if you want to run your own business, successfully manage others, or lead a division or a region. Those are all legitimate reasons to want an MBA, and ideally you’re tying them back to your specific career goals.

(13:30) Another great reason, and an even more common one recently, is being able to achieve a more global perspective and take in more diverse viewpoints. For those of you who’ve worked at the same organization your entire career, maybe you’ve moved around, but you’ve stayed in the same function or industry and never had any international exposure.

An MBA is going to provide you with classmates from all over the place. It’ll probably give you some international travel opportunities, or even international project opportunities. It’s going to open your eyes and help prepare you to compete globally. There are very few organizations that don’t need to worry and think and plan on a global scale these days, or at least consider a global customer base if their business is online at all.

And then there are, of course, many applicants who want to launch a business of their own one day. If you fall into this category, the worst thing you could say is, “I need an MBA because I want to run my own business one day.” That tells them nothing, and a bazillion people could say it. Being an entrepreneur is a whole new ballgame. You’re going to have a completely different set of worries and goals. You’re going to have to hire the right people. You’re going to need to know how to operate within the budget you have. Business school can prepare you for that undertaking and introduce you to potential business partners who believe in you, and maybe financial backers, and all that sort of thing.

But you don’t want to just say, “I need an MBA so I can start my own company.” You have to get specific and tie it back to your career goals. What kind of company is it? What specifically are you missing? What are the specific gaps in your knowledge, your experience, and your network?

Obviously, there’s no way I’m going to be able to cover every single reason out there for someone who wants to pursue an MBA and truly needs one. But I think those are a lot of the main ones.

(15:51) Before we wrap up, I want to talk about a few reasons that might be true but that you probably don’t want to mention.

Things like: you’ll make more money in the end. Yeah, okay, that’s great. That’ll probably happen. But that’s not going to get you any brownie points, just talking about money.

Another reason is that an MBA could help you move. If you’ve always been on the West Coast and want to live on the East Coast, or you’ve always been in the Midwest and want to go somewhere internationally, yes, an MBA can do that. But personally wanting to move is not a compelling reason for them to give a precious spot to you.

Let’s say you want to end up in London. You have to really make a case for why London Business School is the right fit, why what you want to do is best done or needs to be done in London. You have to make a case for yourself. And vice versa: if you’re an international applicant and you want to live in the U.S., you’re going to have to make a case for that, and not come off like you’re trying to figure out an easier way to get U.S. citizenship or something like that.

I also feel like an MBA is an investment in yourself. I personally feel that way. It certainly was for me. Decades after I graduated, it continues to be something that has positively affected my life and opened up doors that wouldn’t have opened otherwise. It’s something nobody can ever take away, and it gives you credibility. But again, those aren’t really things you can say, and so I just wanted to caution people on that.

I also think that sometimes people are so focused on the immediate short-term goal, on what they want to do right after they get an MBA, or that initial salary bump, or the city they’ll live in right after, that they forget this is about bonds and friendships and knowledge that are going to last forever. You’ll always have the alumni network to lean on. You’ll always have the school resources. I don’t think I realized that when I was in the thick of applying, and those are things I’m really thankful for now. If you can find a way to specifically address that, fine, but it’s hard to.

(18:39) So I hope I’ve convinced you that in the process of pulling together all your materials and working on your resume and essays and all that stuff, you should be figuring out a way to highlight not only your achievements and what makes you you and what makes you tick and why you’d be an asset to the class, but also why you deserve a spot because you really truly need an MBA.

And again, there’s not necessarily going to be a straight up “why do you need an MBA” prompt. If you really can’t find a way to fit this answer into a very short essay set, that’s okay. Just be prepared to do it in an interview. But if there is an opportunity to point out gaps in your knowledge, don’t be afraid to do that. If you’re perfect, why should they admit you? You will learn nothing.

So don’t be afraid to point out your gaps, what you’ve never had exposure to, what you’re lacking, and how exactly an MBA, ideally an MBA from their program, would help you. The admissions committee is not looking to put together a group of people they can teach nothing to, and who have nothing to learn from each other. So make sure you take those opportunities to communicate that.

I will leave you with a quote today from the one and only Albert Einstein, which I think is relevant to everything we talked about today: education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.