7 things I wish I was told before the MBA
In the excitement of starting my MBA journey, I didn't really put much thought into what sorts of tools and organizational habits would make my life easier. In the course of a 16-month MBA, you spend about 480 hours on coursework, and another 1,900 hours on study. This means that you learn to become really efficient and disciplined. Instead of hoarding those lessons learned, I wanted to share some thoughts on how to get better results from the MBA experience (or whatever new learning endeavor you may find yourself in). I really wish someone had told me…
1. It's a serious mistake to commit all your notes to paper
In this digital age, it seems an odd choice that I carried around one inch binders full of printed readings and PowerPoint slides for each course. I have always loved committing my thoughts to writing as a way to reinforce the learning, but I truly regret not creating OneNote notebooks for all my classes. First, it’s incredibly easy to organize research when you can select key information, paste it into the journal, and the program automatically sources the text so you don’t spend time looking through numerous references later. Notes are searchable, you can tag them as To-Do’s, key ideas, projects, etc. Bummer. So now I’ve got a shelf full of one inch binders that represent the 25 courses I’ve just completed. I guess one day if I’m particularly interested in finding a key concept I can thumb through the pages to try and find the lesson...
2. Create themes and be diligent in keeping them up to date.
The MBA is not a depreciating investment-- it grows in value over time as you find ways to apply the learning. Keeping this in mind, you'll want to organize the 50 or more frameworks that guide analysis, decision-making, and planning for easier accessibility in your post-graduation life. If you have profit and loss responsibilities, as an example, you could create a notebook for “Things that will increase revenue”, and “Things that will lower costs”. Taking your current or future career into consideration, and grouping the key information and frameworks is so incredibly valuable I can’t emphasize this enough. Again, I would have liked to do this in OneNote. Towards the end I started, “A reading list for when I finally can read for pleasure” because there are endless recommendations that the profs give you in each course.
3. Be strategic in managing the reading workload.
Apart from a handful of rockstars in our class who read EVERYTHING (you know who you are) there are simply not enough hours in a day to complete all the readings, assignments and prep for each week while also carrying on with your work committments. I am incredibly selfish with my commute time, it is my brain-dead time of the day where I try not to be on the phone, or multi tasking. I enjoy driving, so I drive. If you want to be more efficient than I was, you could invest in a high-quality eReader app and utilize the drive time to plough through the assigned cases and readings. Depending on how you commute, this time of day could really be a way to optimize your study time.
The low-tech approach would be finding a VERY reliable and like-minded study partner to divide the workload. Case reading requires a different skill set than textbook reading to identify the key issues, the contributing factors, and the information that guides the solution. If you and your partner agree on a system of highlighting, colour-coding and sidebar annotations, you can save hundreds of hours over the 16 months. Despite the extra effort in critical thinking and annotating, it doesn’t add to the overall workload, and in fact would have made me a better reader.
4. There are additional costs of doing an MBA that must be considered.
Each week, you need to find 30-35 hours to study, read and write (or possibly more if you intend on reading EVERYTHING). What is an hour worth to you? I decided it was worth it to free up three hours in a weekend by hiring a housekeeper. I was fortunate to find one at a pretty good price, but let’s assume it’s $100 per week. The total additional MBA cost for a housekeeper is therefore $6,400. Where else can you save time? Cooking and preparing meals. There is already a risk of adding to the numbers on your scale due to all the sitting/studying (we will discuss that one in #7) so having nutritious meals within reach is VERY important. Looking back at it, I wish I HAD spent more money on prepared meals or hired some sort of meal delivery service. Our friends in Vancouver and Toronto have much better access to these kinds of services, but I’ve found SimplySupper and Dinner Factory to be the most popular in Edmonton.
· Housekeeper… $6,400+
· Healthy meal prep … $9,600+
5. The networking is just as, or more important than the learning.
Speaking to friends who had already completed an MBA, they emphasized the importance of the lifelong connections that are established. So you’ve probably heard this one before but I wanted to provide some examples. Queen’s Executive MBA is a cross-Canada program that delivers the MBA experience via smart classrooms, meaning all 80 of us watched a live stream feed of each professor from the comfort of our home city boardrooms. Three times in the program, for a total of four weeks, we all gathered in Kingston, ON to take classroom sessions as a group. During these intensives, there isn’t a minute of the week where you don’t have an opportunity to connect and hang out with your cohort. From 6 am yoga sessions, to curling bonspeils, to running groups, there were just as many non-academic hours as there were classroom hours. And then of course, the DGCC pub that put up with us during these visits. You simply cannot share in an experience like this and not come away from it with new friends and mentors. My value-add tip is: make an effort to dine with, chat, and hang out with each and every one of your classmates. My memory isn’t always sharp, so I took the time to jot down one or two keywords in my contact spreadsheet about what they did, or the industry they were in. You truly never know when you’ll need to know someone in a polar opposite industry to your own.
6. Prepare to seriously reconsider your personal values and life plan.
Many people feel a great deal of angst towards the latter stages of the MBA. You've overcome the impostor syndrome (looking around the class on the first day wondering how the hell you fooled the director), you’ve grown as a person through the challenges you’ve overcome, and now all of a sudden you are looking at life a lot differently. On top of being exhausted and fed up with not having a life, you will also be anxious about the future. The shortcomings of your current job will seem glaring because you are armed with new knowledge on ways to improve those challenges. You may find interests that weren't even on your radar prior to beginning the program. Your new network may offer you access to opportunities in far away cities or countries.
I wasn't prepared for that overwhelming sense of angst, so I made use of a career coach and began charting out my values and priorities from scratch. They are vastly different from what they were two years ago, and I would really challenge anyone who says they walk away from a program like this with the same lens on life as when they started.
7. Something's gotta give.
You simply cannot maintain every commitment that you had pre-MBA. This looks different for everyone—time with kids, spouse, friends, volunteering, extra assignments at work, mentoring, etc. — but my major sacrifice was my health. I wish I could say I slacked at work but that wasn’t the case. I gave up my after work "therapy sessions" at the gym, and I do think I suffered because of it. I need to run to level my stress and reset my mind. I need to lift weights to drown out the day and focus on something simple and repetitive. Some very good advice that we received at the beginning of the program was, for me, too difficult to enact. That advice was: just do a little bit. I am a very “all or nothing” type of person when it comes to eating well and exercising, so I wasn’t successful at embracing the scaled down version of my marathon gym sessions for the new 20 minute version. It seemed to lack impact so instead I decided to forgo it altogether. Having lived through the juggling act and the decisions around what to do and what to sacrifice, I would encourage others to simply move for 20 minutes. Hammer out the farthest distance you can in 20 minutes and then shut it down and get back to the books.
Absorbing the full impact of an accomplishment is difficult for me. I have rarely stopped to celebrate a life milestone, and never have I turned down the frenzied pace at which I try and soak up experiences. I'm beginning to believe that in behaving like this I am losing some of the value of the experience. Crafting next steps, to-do lists and goals is in my nature, but I'm seeing that there are costs associated with never fully allowing myself to process and appreciate what has just been completed. With this realization, I'm going to take some time to focus on those value systems rather than the goal lists. This exercise will be posted in the next few weeks, so expect to see a little update in your inboxes soon!
