University of Minnesota (Carlson) B-School Diary

Manish was admitted to Carlson with a full tuition scholarship.

An engineer by qualification, vocation and profession I was always interested in the larger scheme of things – be it the automatic lighter I constructed in school or the fuzzy logic based power dispatch controller at college or the 30GB data ware house I designed for my company recently.

I graduated in 1999 from REC Nagpur - India with honors in Electronics Engineering. Armed with the technical degree, I joined an IT consulting company to observe the intersection of technology and business. Over the past five years, I have observed and orchestrated cutting edge IT solutions to business problems in industries as divers as banking, stock exchanges, smart cards and retail, and client locations in India, Europe and the United States. I have also been instrumental in the business development efforts of my firm at the regional level.

Although an MBA from a top school was always on the cards, the last year was more than decisive in my decision to start my MBA this year. Over the course of last year, I realized more often than before that my technical qualifications and work experience fell short when I tried to comprehend business problems beyond the domain of IT alone. How does a company align its web-based operations with its physical stores and provide a unified façade to its customers? How will my client evaluate the effect of the use of RF-ID (Radio frequency Identification) on its existing processes and infrastructure?

Questions like these and my inability to reach decisive solutions, made me realize of a gap in my skill set and the skills required to understand business problems in its entirety. I could always work for a few more years and pick up these domains but an MBA I am sure will expedite my understanding of these business basics and also provide the decorum to attract recruiters who value my skill set – and also help me pay back my loan.

While I face the pre-course preparations and gear myself for the first day at class, I can’t stop but wonder if anyone could quantify the benefits that could be derived from this course such that it could be understood by every applicant who strives for it. This diary and similar diaries of other students, I believe, could be a humble start to decipher if the degree delivers as much as it claims or more. How relevant are the rankings provided by the various agencies? What happens to the 100,000 + MBA’s churned out annually by business schools worldwide?

At the end of the day, the degree is as good as the person behind it. As said by some wise person, in this case too the process is more significant than the end.

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