There's More in Life Than MBA (fwd)

[AnHai Doan <anhai@cs.washington.edu>]

>From vn-families:

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1. There's More in Life Than MBA ............................... Bo Peng 127
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On the way out of the graduation ceremony, when the "Doctor of Philosophy"
certificate feels as solid as gold in hand, you suddenly come to a
realization that there won't be a TA paycheck in your little mailbox next
month.  Five years in a foreign land.  All that hard work.

Your palms begin to sweat, almost ruining the certificate. Coming out of
the blackout, you quickly decide to do something about the imminent doom.
You apply statistical analysis and game theory, and soon arrive at the
inevitable, natural conclusion: turn right back to the good'ol school and
get an MBA.

So you push your wife to the Chinese takeout place around the corner, send
your kids back to China, cough up the last penny you manage to find under
the cushions and beg all your friends for loans, and go to one of the
top-tens. Or perhaps you'd get a bargain and get in one of the gazillions
of generic business schools. You wear garage-sale clothes, bring your own
microwave lunch, and study hard. You come out with another 4.0 GPA and yet
another solid-like-gold certificate. And you come to the same enlightenment
on cashflow, again. Two more years in a foreign land. All that hard work.

What went wrong?

                   Damn! Missed It by Just THAT Much...

Once upon a time, in the land of beautiful, all MBA were offered six-figure
salaries plus a BM'er (BMW), complete with sponge football, half a year before
graduation. Too bad, you're a decade late. Corporate America has learned,
with much pain and embarrassment, that the yuppies are big on ego,
arrogance, and hot air, but small on cooperation, responsibility, and
real-world experience. The job prospect for MBAs is still far better than
for physics PhDs for sure. But employers are much choosier now.

                   MBA Is Not An Academic Degree

I've never gone through an MBA program, but came very close once. This
doesn't give me much authority to speak on the topic. But I can't help
feeling that many Chinese MBA students, especially those with science PhDs
and subsequently awakened from lifelong Nobel dreams by reality, have
mistaken the MBA as yet another academic degree.

Why would a company want to pay six-figure salaries for a kid fresh out of
school?  Here are some plausible answers:

A. They're stupid.
        Once in awhile, sure. But, by and large, it's hard to defend this
        proposition.
B. They simply value education.
        Hey, this is the United States of America, partner.
C. MBAs are empowered by the knowledge they learned from the program,
   which is highly valuable to the company.
        What knowledge? Accounting? Business law? Non-linear, multi-variate
        regression analysis? You can get a top-notch bookworm, any kind
        of bookworm, for half the price.

An MBA learns a little bit of everything. It's a general degree. Generalists
manage, while specialists do the real work. But a smart specialist can
become a generalist easily. So what's so special about generalists?

Often more important than the "hard" knowledge, it's the people skill,
social skill that determines some specialists will never make good managers.
So a good MBA is a sharp dresser and smooth-talker who does above average
academically, hangs out with everybody in the class, joins all the clubs,
and hits it off with all visiting alumni CEOs. Perhaps the only kind of MBA
program that pays any meaningful attention to "hard" knowledge is finance.
But U of Chicago B-school is full of Chinese already.

If you treat the MBA program as your science PhD, you'd most likely get a
starting salary so low that the dean is willing to make it up for you out of
his own pocket just to avoid smudging the shining status of your alma mater.
If you went to a bargain generic B-school, chances are good that you'd be
digging out the GRE books again. The comforting thought here is that the
dean would not be ashamed mentioning your name, because he doesn't know of
any graduates ever getting a job.

                   You're An Outsider. Admit It. Deal With It

First generation immigrants, by and large, never have had a chance to
compete with the natives on the ground of social skills. They have the
best chance of excelling at the technical areas, sports, and entertainment
-- if we could refrain from citing the example of how the first European
immigrants competed with the Indians.

People skill is such a soft, fuzzy thing that it almost defies description.
I even doubt it has much to do with language skills. It is rooted in the
deepest void of the psyche, including things like sex appeal and racial
segregation instincts. Without being immersed (Jing4 Ying2) in it for years,
it's hard to get high reciting classical Chinese poems. The same goes with
social skills, especially in America where the society collectively suffers
from severe Short Attention Span Syndrome.

                   But I Can't Get A Job

On the overall scale, it's unfortunate that Chinese students have been too
concentrated in the pure sciences. Again, we're a few decades late.
The federal budget is not likely to get any better in our lifetime, and
strong competition is coming from our former communist brothers.

The thing to keep in mind is that there are plenty of technical fields with
good job prospects. Computer science is an alternative that's hard to miss
nowadays and it's likely to continue for quite some time. Accounting and
various engineering fields have always been there. Call me arrogant, but
switching from pure science to any of these fields is a piece of cake.

In a rational world, a good physicist, or chemist, or mathematician should
always be able to get a decent job. I'm not yet quite convinced that this
reality is totally insane. It just acts strangely at times. Open your mind
and prepare to be surprised.

Don't get obsessed with degree certificates. Out here in the "real world",
actual experience is almost always more precious than degrees. Get out of
the school sooner than possible; if you wait until you're ready to plunge
into the real world, you've probably waited for too long.

                   Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

It's grand and cool talking about the average and the iron rule of
statistics. But, on social issues, too many mistakes have been born because
people fail to distinguish the general perspective from the individual one.
How much a statistical conclusion, even when presumed solid, means to a
particular individual has to be determined on a per-case basis. As bold as
I have been lashing out the general impressions above, I will never dare to
apply it to any particular individual I don't know well.

It's your life. It's your call. Hopefully, it pays to stop and think for
awhile before FedEx'ing out that application and the bag of money.

Good luck.

Bo Peng <bpeng@lehman.com>