Grad School Considerations
If you ask me what you should be thinking about when you're going to graduate school, I would say: most graduate programs are really short. There are a lot of one- or, at best, two-year programs. If you're looking to pivot and change careers out of a one-year program, good luck. Even with two years it's tough, but at least you have a summer in between to try to do an internship.
Here's something you're probably not thinking about when you’re looking at a graduate program to help you with your career pivot: when in this program would you be applying for internships? The answer: in the fall semester of your first year. Think about it: if you're trying to move from marketing to finance and you do an MBA, you'll be applying for those finance internships before you've even taken your core finance class. That's something to consider.
In other words, the program itself won't give you the knowledge you need before you have to apply for jobs in your target field. You still end up having to position yourself for the change you want without being able to claim that you have done projects in class or learned a lot of new concepts.
Is it even worth doing a Master’s program then? Furthering your education is valuable not just for the knowledge you gain, but also for the signaling such an endeavor provides. Doing a program certainly signals that you're more serious about something, and that's a positive, valuable signal. But that’s not enough. Simply attending the program and doing all the things that students are expected to do (going to class, turning in assignments, even getting top grades) won’t turn a job search into an accepted job offer. You still have to learn to market yourself. You may end up in a school or program that gives you a lot of resources for this…or you may not. A key success factor of the job search—and of life in general, really—is marketing yourself, and those are skills you realistically can pick up outside of a graduate program. That's something worth bearing in mind. You may not need another degree to undertake the career pivot or transition you’re seeking. (And conversely: another degree never guarantees a successful career change.)
MBAs are about the Network and the Location
More specifically about getting an MBA: an MBA is very much about the alumni network of the school you attend. This is something I didn't realize when I was applying for MBAs, and in retrospect, yes, I would have changed my application strategies had I been aware that half of the value of the degree was the alumni network.
A lot of people do their MBAs where they would like to settle down. I went to Washington University in St. Louis, and there were lots of people who had either grown up in the area and had moved to a big city, worked some time, and come back, or they were already in the surrounding Midwestern areas. My business school has a very strong alumni network in the St. Louis area. Folks either picked the school because they wanted to be in the area, or they stayed on after their studies. Are you surprised?
If you study in the Midwest knowing you’d like a job in New York, you will find that the alumni base of your school in the Midwest is thinner in New York than in its home state. However, if you were to go to a school in New York, you would find lots of alumni in New York, even if that school is arguably not as well-ranked or not as prestigious. That is something worth thinking about: part of the lasting value of an MBA to you is its alumni network, and that alumni network may very well be more localized, especially if it's not a super big school like Harvard. Harvard probably has alumni everywhere. They also have over 900 students in every single MBA class, so the alumni count adds up.
If you are want to be in tech and/or startups and/or California, then Stanford would very likely be a better choice than Harvard. Obviously, this depends on if you can get into both and have the choice. And yes, of course people do move around after graduation (and in life in general). My MBA classmates scattered across the country to Seattle, Austin, San Francisco…even a few to New York City. It’s just that the number of alumni you can tap on the shoulder matters more when you’re trying to leverage your network for new opportunities. At the intersection of your target city and your target field, how many alumni might you find in your network that you could reach out to, that might respond and be helpful to you? You increase the likelihood of finding relevant and helpful connections in locations and/or industries that are “alumni-dense,” which is why I think it’s important to consider the location and/or industry-strength of the business school you get your MBA from.
Even networking is a numbers game.
Universities know why they’re offering Graduate Programs; do You know why you’re attending one?
Lastly, I want to acknowledge that there seems to be more and more graduate programs, and there are a couple of reasons why universities are offering them.
One: it's a cash source. It's relatively lower cost for a university to open up these one-year Master’s programs and grant a degree. They charge a lot of tuition, but you're not really there for a long time. They don't have to give you a ton of resources (you only have a year, after all), and then you're out! It's definitely a (lucrative) revenue source for universities. And universities, even the nonprofit entities, are still looking to make money to stay afloat because they need to keep other programs subsidized, keep the lights on, keep research running — lots of pieces to their operations.
Two: it helps prolong a graduating senior’s job search respectably. This applies to anyone, but it has a particularly great impact for foreign nationals. A lot of international students come to the US for their undergraduate studies, and a good portion of them want to stay to work and live in the US. Universities open up additional one-year programs such that students who are graduating and haven't gotten a job can try to continue to stay in the US. By doing an additional program, they can prolong their job search while hoping to get a job through the OPT program upon graduation and eventually getting on an H-1B via the annual lottery. That's also why a lot of universities are putting out STEM programs, so students can qualify for a three-year OPT rather than a standard one-year OPT.
Three: for the knowledge — or is it education credential inflation? Either way, students apply to programs because they think they need more knowledge either to get into a different career or to advance in their current career. In my opinion, a one-year program can't teach you so much that you learn more than you would through an equivalent year of on-the-job experience. It would be rare to attend a one-year program with no working experience and get the job of someone who has five years of working experience in that exact area. (Dare I say impossible?) No matter how much schooling you have, your technical knowledge is still not applied knowledge, and that's something to be aware of. If you are already working in the field and you feel like you're missing some technical background or some theory or whatever, enrolling in formal studies can supplement your working knowledge and experience by giving you more background, more context, or just broaden your perspective. You’ll likely be passionate about the material and get a lot out of it because you know enough to ask questions and dig deeper. However, if you're looking to get a brand new field and you're trying to switch into that industry via studying, be aware that a one- or two-year program is perceived to be limited in how much knowledge and skills it can impart to you.