The Truth About Business School

Introduction It's crazy to think that two years has just flown by and I've graduated from my MBA at Wharton and previously I had made a video about the good the bad and the ugly about the MBA experience but that was during my first year and now that I've graduated I've gone through the entire program I've been through more great stuff and experienced some really fantastic experiences and also have seen a lot of drama and more distasteful things from the MBA experience and so this video is going to have totally new fresh points that I want to cover for the good the bad and the ugly parts of the MBA experience. I'll be going into three things that I found good bad and ugly and let's start with the good. The Good The first good is that electives can be really really interesting classes and this is in stark comparison to my previous video where I kind of talked about how the classes can be very meh and boring and not very additive because I've already had a business education in contrast I think the electives can be really really great in an MBA The first class I really enjoyed was leadership in the decision-making chair and this was taught by William Lauder who was the former CEO of SA Lauder he's also a billionaire and he would just bring in speakers each week and we would just listen to them talk about leadership so speakers involved Cesar Conde who was the chairman of NBA NBC Universal, Alex Gorski the former CEO of J&J, and then Kat Ko the COO of Athletic Greens and she was by far the best speaker I've ever listened to in public in my entire life I also really enjoyed advanced topics in private equity made a video about that pretty recently so you can check that out and then I also took a class with Angela Duckworth who taught leading with grit and she was just also one of the best professors I've ever had because she was just so passionate about her topic would just bring up a lot of interesting psychological facts throughout the entire course and also was just really funny and a really great public speaker so those were three of some of my favorite classes. The second good aspect of the MBA was what I call the playground mentality and so what I mean by this is that there was just so much diversity of people and thought and everyone was just okay with each other to a certain degree and were just willing to be friends with everyone, very open, willing to get lunches and dinners with people versus as I personally got older in life I started gravitating more towards people who either like looked like me or thought like me and then so I feel like things were just very different in business school where everyone is just very interested in getting to know one another. The third good thing is that I think there's a really good constant pressure of pushing people to go outside of their comfort zones and at Wharton we kind of jokingly call these stretch experiences and I think this was so important because most of life you kind of just coast and do whatever is comfortable to you right but at school you're kind of pushed to partake in new activities, take up new hobbies, maybe start a business. There's so many new things and opportunities that come your way and I think everyone who leaves the MBA experience comes out totally different and if you don't you kind of did the experience wrong To give you some examples, personally from my side I traveled to Kenya and Georgia, Georgia the country, and these are two countries that you know maybe I could have gone to but wouldn't have otherwise been at the top of my list I also joined this team called Follies which puts on a Broadway type musical for like three hours roasting the MBA experience which was a ton of fun, met a lot of funny kind of weird quirky people and then also went to Quantico which was like a 24-hour military simulation and then some of my other friends like joined the rugby team, took furniture design classes, I took a coding class and then a lot of my friends actually went to Antarctica So I think when you leave the MBA experience you realize how to kind of live a much more fuller life and you're kind of a more well-rounded human being in a sense and I think that's one good thing you really can't take away from the MBA experience Now if you're watching this video because you're trying to get into a top MBA program but haven't yet taken the GMAT or are struggling to get a really good score like I did when I was studying then I highly recommend today's sponsor for the video Target Test Prep which I credit a lot for helping me get a 750 on the GMAT Target Test Prep has been helping students crush the GMAT for 16 years and covers quant, verbal, and data insights for the new GMAT focus with 52 rigorous chapters broken into 1500 lessons, over 4000 realistic GMAT problems, over 1300 instructor-led videos, 1200 digital flashcards for studying on the go, and live online support from GMAT focus experts Target Test Prep is also the only company on GMAT club with a perfect five-star rating and they also have the highest score improvement guarantee of 130 points You're also able to customize your study plan and practice tests to whatever works best for you and so if you're interested be sure to use my code RARELIQUID15 to get 15% off and use my link in the description if you want to also check out TTP for five days completely for free All right let's now go into what you're probably more interested in which is the The Bad bad Let's start off with the first one which is that a lot of MBA students and classmates really come from a lot of privilege and wealth Now for me I went into the MBA with not a ton of savings because if you've been following this channel you know I went in right after my first business failed and I took out loans to pay for the MBA experience but with that said I was very fortunate in being able to run my business that's profitable and so I never really had to worry too much about money but my friends who I asked for some insight for this video they would mention about how a lot of times when you go out to events or when you're traveling there are a lot of costs that are really tough for everyone to kind of just adjust to so for example going to michelin star restaurants when you're traveling or just seeing so many luxury goods when people are in class. Another example is when bankers have to do recruiting they have to go all the way to New York and that travel back and forth can be very very expensive from Philadelphia or also just staying the night you know there are a lot of luxuries that the rich and wealthy have even in MBA that a lot of students don't. There are also a handful of people who just come from really really rich families and when I heard about how some people's parents do whatever they do I was like what the like holy sh*t and so I think anyway going back to the main point the reason I think this could be a bad part of the MBA experience especially the more elite school yet that you go to is that a lot of times when you're trying to travel or enjoy yourself by doing things with your friends you may not always be able to afford certain things and that could lead to feeling left out or take away from your experience a little bit. The second bad thing about the MBA experience is that it can be and usually is a socially exhausting experience and you're constantly going to events meeting people going traveling together just throughout the entire calendar year and it takes a long time really which is what I kind of realized to really form those relationships where you feel like oh these are my people like these are people who I feel very very close to even if you're having a lot of fun and within the first six months or 12 months every really great friendship takes a lot of time and history to build right you need to be there for each other during the hard times etc so I think what's tough and socially exhausting especially in the first year gets better in your second year is that you're just socially exhausted by meeting people all the time and it's something that can be very draining and it's also a little bit of a mind f*ck in a sense where you feel like oh I'm meeting all these people and should be fun all the time but why do I feel so tired and exhausted? The third bad thing is kind of the opposite of the third good thing I talked about which was how you're constantly pushed and there's this good pressure to kind of step out of your comfort zone and so the third bad thing is that there's also this constant fear of FOMO which is the fear of missing out and this constant kind of layer of anxiety and let me kind of break down as to why that is so let's say you are an MBA student and if you don't have a family that's paying for you or you haven't saved enough money then maybe you're taking out loans for 100k or 200k or at the very least you're giving up two years worth of income right and so everyone comes into the MBA experience wanting to maximize these two years in whatever way possible I think this kind of thinking doesn't always permeate every single day where you're like oh my god I'm paying this much I have to go to this or you have to go to that event I have to make the most out of everything that's not really what it is but I think that is the underlying kind of foundation for every single MBA student and so what this eventually kind of means is that when it comes to a small event where it's like a small group dinner and it's with people that you really really like or if it's an annual huge event that everyone wants to go to but there aren't a lot of tickets this really creates a lot of FOMO as I mentioned like fear of missing out and this constant level of like anxiety of like oh man should I go to this event should I go to that one I really I heard like this event was good for that one was good and then there can be a lot of like feelings kind of hurt if you're not invited to a certain like small group dinner because you can't invite everyone and people have to be left out a lot of times right so there's this constant level of anxiety that you feel as an MBA student of wanting to make the most out of it now before moving on and in case I haven't scared you away yet and maybe if you're watching this video because you want to understand what the real life of an MBA student is like then I recently announced a how to get into MBA course called liquid MBA we have a 24 hour trial we have a discord community you can join for free and then we have a money back guarantee as well I don't want to take up too much of your time so I won't go into it any more than that but I'll leave a link to it down in this description of this video. All right let's now go into what I think is the reason you clicked onto this video which is the ugly aspects of the MBA experience The Ugly [Music] The first is that career resources honestly really suck especially if you're not recruiting for banking consulting or tech. The reason this is such an ugly aspect of the MBA experience is that the whole reason for anyone to pay all the money that they do to get an MBA or to give up the two years of income is ultimately to get another really really good job right but when it comes to recruiting you're kind of left on your own especially if you're not recruiting for banking or consulting I'd say even for tech there are some resources that the school provides but it's not really that great and so if you think about it you're paying all this money to get a job but then if you don't go into two very very kind of stereotypical type of industries banking or consulting then you're really left on your own it can be very very stressful for you to have to figure out all of your career stuff kind of on your own when you're kind of paying the school a lot of money to help you get there and of course the school is helping you get there with their brand and all of that but with that said you would kind of imagine that with like 150 to 200 000 being paid the school would provide a really really strong platform for you to be able to recruit for a variety of different industries but I'd say it's only really great for banking or consulting The second ugly aspect of the MBA experience is that there are a small but loud minority of people who are just really bad apples I would categorize the bad apples into four different categories the first of which are cheaters and there's this running joke that MBA stands for married but available and sadly I can't say that I have never seen people cheat second are sexual assaulters which is also crazy there's all these people who are in their 20s and 30s and you think they'd all be just like responsible adults but there are people who really overstep a lot of boundaries and really creep a lot of especially girls out so that's number two number three are what I call like de-gaffed people like people who just will not give a f*ck about you because they come from a certain background or they don't think that you're worth their time and then fourth are the clout chasers and uh these people are so insufferable and so annoying they have to kind of like maybe in like during class discussions or just like on one-on-ones about like how they're sponsored from a certain company aka like a company is paying for their sponsorship or paying for their MBA tuition or like just posting on LinkedIn all the time like there was this one experience where this one person we were on this trip and we were doing like a one-hour hackathon thing of like for a company and then it was literally just so honestly bs it was just like a one-hour thing that our team put together and then there was just like a competition where the winner was selected by audience clapping and so it was just such a joke and then that person put on their LinkedIn that they had won this hackathon and I was just like what like why would you post that this is such a not a real competition at all but from the outside looking in you might look at that on LinkedIn and be like oh wow like that's impressive right so that's clout chasers so I would say that what's really important is yes these are really really bad types of people that I'm talking about but with that said I think like they exist all over the world and there are a very very small minority but they can kind of have a loud voice in a sense or create a lot of commotion so it can sometimes seem like they take up a lot more of the class size than they actually do The third ugly aspect of the MBA experience is the kind of extreme social ostracization via the MBA echo chamber so let me explain what this means basically during the MBA experience things just spread like wildfire because you have all these people who paid all this money and are part of this one big community where there isn't a lot of enforcing of good cultural norms right it's not like we're trying to protect each other like a family per se it's more so sometimes can feel like people are trying to weed each other out in a sense where if you do something minor like a social like you say something wrong in class or something like that it'll just spread to everyone and then you can kind of get ostracized for that and another example I have is that one of my friends kind of made this like mistake with another friend and kind of got ousted from a community um another friend who I think this is kind of more their fault but they overcharged people during like a trip and that spread like wildfire and also kind of doesn't help that organization I'm part of that I mentioned earlier called Follies which kind of roasts the MBA experience also roasts people individually for their kind of social mistakes or whatever usually it's pretty funny but sometimes it can get a little out of hand I guess but either way if you do anything that's like super wrong everyone can know about it so you have to be so careful with your reputation when you're an MBA student and that can create a lot of inner turmoil and also I guess what's worse is that sometimes like the wrong ostracization of people when maybe they should be given a second chance right so that wraps up the good the bad and the ugly of the MBA experience but I didn't want to leave you guys with such a bad taste of the MBA I want to kind of reiterate actually that I really had a great time during my MBA experience I made a lot of really great lifelong friends really exposed myself to so many different new kind of experiences I never thought I would and also on the other side when I mentioned things about like bad stuff about like the recruiting aspect or career resources people still end up leaving the MBA usually with at least $175,000 in total compensation or if you're going to banking it's usually over $300,000 in your first year and so a lot of great career outcomes and I'm sure over time the alumni network is going to be something I really tap into a lot as well and so yes the MBA experience involves sometimes bad apples and then there's like a lot of social pressures and all of that but honestly you have to be mentally tough and kind of get through these experiences and I think most people leave the MBA experience stronger with a better mindset broader perspective and etc and so yeah there's bad parts and ugly parts of any organization any community just so happens that I talked about it in this video so with that said thank you guys for all watching and I have a video that you'll see on the next screen about me graduating and so if you want to check that out you can watch that video thanks so much as always for tuning in hope to catch you all in the next video thanks guys and peace out