2 part question:

a.) How would you compare the level of difficulty between an undergraduate degree at TAMU in engineering and their MBA program? I'd be interested to hear from someone who's done both.

b.) How much harder if any would you think a Top 5 MBA program like Harvard would be compared to a TAMU MBA?

Try to be unbiased, thanks.

a) Undergrad engineering was way more intellectually difficult. MBA classes are not that hard...

b) Probably not much at all. The big difference you will see between a Harvard caliber school and a TAMU caliber school will be quality of fellow students (both experience and intelligence) and the CV of the faculty.

The great majority of MBA classes don't offer anything earth shattering or extremely difficult. If you understand math and have good common sense, things are pretty straight forward. Applying concepts to the real world is where things get to be a little more interesting (just like in engineering!).

Took two MBA courses at A&M as part of my MS in Electrical Engineering (electrical engineering closed that loophole after I convinced about 20 engineers to come over and raid Mays with me back in Spring 07).

Anyhow .. MBA kids were 100x smarter than the Mays undergrads who were taking the MBA courses as honors whatever, or business honors or whatever fancy program, they thought they were hot sheet and they were dumb as stones, one of their "honors" students told me that business students are superior because they have a pretty building, Im not kidding.

Courses were easy, made the best grades in the class, me as well as the engineering kids that I brought with me, we all rocked. MBA students were also pretty sharp, but you could tell they were from a different culture lets say.

Engineering undergrad prepares you to think that pretty much anything else is easy, law school is easier, engineering grad school is easier, likely med school is easier and MBA is way easier.

As the previous poster said, the only thing that is different about undergrad business and MBA is that the quality of the kids doing the MBA goes up.

[This message has been edited by Randy03 (edited 8/24/2009 2:23p).]

I just wanted to add a 2nd post, because my usual disdain for business students seemed to dominate the first one.

I actually considered going to law school, get an MBA and eventually settled on getting a MS in engineering.

Essentially it is a personality question and what will make you happy.

If you would prefer doing powerpoints all day and balancing budgets, then the US middle management degree (MBA) is what you need.

If you would prefer to not deal with so much politics and actually do technical work, but likely limit your chance for promotion to management positions, then doing a MS in engineering is for you.

Also as I said, its more about the people you want to deal with, if you want to deal with nerds and you understand nerds, then going farther in engineering is a good choice. I looked around at doing a lot of stuff after undergrad and just didnt feel like US business students even at the grad level were on a technical level where I could discuss things with them. It was the same with lawyers, they just werent my people.

I went so far as to move to Europe where PhD engineers run engineering companies and a PhD in engineering basically is a PhD in engineering AND an MBA all at once. I know Ive learned more about business doing my PhD in Germany than Id have ever learned about how business really works in a classroom. Also this way engineers make the management decisions for engineers, they end up doing the same BS powerpoint presentation collage crap as managers in the US, they just have a much stronger technical background to go with it.

Lastly, any MBA program worth its salt wont take you without 3-5 years of experience. So what you should do is go ahead and take a GRE and the GMAT, knock those out, the scores are valid for 5 years, then go work and figure out who you get along with better. After that you will know what grad school is for you.

[This message has been edited by Randy03 (edited 8/24/2009 2:38p).]

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I looked around at doing a lot of stuff after undergrad and just didnt feel like US business students even at the grad level were on a technical level where I could discuss things with them.

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What were you wanting to discuss...? EM theory? I can think of very little in a generic MBA environment where I had to use my EE knowledge. Even working in the A&D and high tech world, my BS has served me just fine in every technical discussion I have ever had

Have I run across things I didn't completely understand? Yup. But any PhD engineer who doesn't have the same problem in a technical environment is overestimating their knowledge.

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Also this way engineers make the management decisions for engineers, they end up doing the same BS powerpoint presentation collage crap as managers in the US, they just have a much stronger technical background to go with it.

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Hey... if it makes you feel better that the guy who is giving the presentation has a PhD after his name, more power to ya... but I've run across many a company run into the ground by engineers that get caught up in technical details and never bother managing simple business problems. Just because they are a trained PhD engineer doesn't mean they have common sense.

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Lastly, any MBA program worth its salt wont take you without 3-5 years of experience. So what you should do is go ahead and take a GRE and the GMAT, knock those out, the scores are valid for 5 years, then go work and figure out who you get along with better. After that you will know what grad school is for you.

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This!

100% Agree about the head in the ground engineers. However, as I said getting a PhD in Germany is a lot different, technical decisions are never made without their business implications.

That was the biggest enlightenment about taking MBA/entrepreneurship courses (I also took one from BMEN) was that you need to always ask the questions, "Is there a market, what is my market, where is the pain and what are people willing to pay to fix it." Sometimes engineers get so caught up in what they "think" the problem is, that they dont really look at where the pain is and how much people are willing to pay to remedy this problem. You can have a really nice perfectly working technical widget, but if you priced yourself out of your segment it really doesnt matter if it works or not and you wasted a lot of time and money on development.

Also, for the OP. Why I said to take the tests now is because you are in school mode and you will be able to do better, easier on the tests now than you would be able to later. It will be harder to find the time and motivation to study for the two exams (GRE and GMAT) when you are working a job. Secondly, when you are working that job and you are serious about getting a 2nd degree, DONT get yourself into long term committments that you cant get out of, such as fancy car payments or a fancy woman that cant/wont relocate. If you are sure that you want to achieve something, then you have to be focused on your goal, otherwise there are always things to get you off your path in life.

Best of luck

This is a good thread with people that actually have higher education under their belts!


I have a top MBA to go with my undergrad A&M biz degree and wanted to point a few things out.



1. Getting into b-school is harder than graduating. my applications took months.

2. The difficulty of a bschool is how the grading scale is determined. Most of them grade students vs students and this makes it hard considering you are in classes with extremely motivated people with Ivy undergrads, WE in MC/IB, and have test taking skills that are in the top 99%tile. Lastly, if you have heard that MBA students do not study...think again. I put in at least 6-8 hours a day and was not trying to get a 4.0... several of my 700+ GMAT friends were putting in over 12 hours a day and only getting 3.5s.


I have to go, but will post again later.


***Randy - how did you take an MBA course at A&M??? B/C when i talked to them out of undergrad they only offered MBA only courses...it has been this way since before 2004. The only way you were in class with MBAs is if you took a Master's course and an MBA was there for an elective.

12 hours a day? Hogwash. Plain and simple.

you must not have prepared many case stuides

b/c crown cork and seal is very easy if you only look at it for one hour...take a closer more in depth look and you'll be there for several hours.

Yeah... if you have professors that like to cold call going over 3 to 6 HBS cases a day, it can get to be pretty time consuming.

You don't want to be the guy that either

a) doesn't prepare enough and/or
b) looks stupid

because people will write you off and avoid you for team assignments. This is even before worrying about how you are perceived 3 years down the road as you try to reach back into your network...

the thing about Randy is the incredible modesty.

I agree with aeroag and the like, that in general, MBA classes are not that hard.

HOWEVER

There is a MAJOR difference in the difficulty of a top (Harvard, Chicago, Wharton) program vs a TAMU / SMU type program.

If you attend a top school, your classmates will be some of the smartest and most motivated people in the world. In order to not look like an idiot, you must make sure that are really on top of things. As someone had mentioned previously, studying 8-12 hours a day is definitely not out of the question.

Hope that helps to answer your question.

I certainly hope you are not implying that getting into the Mays business school at TAMU is tougher than getting into the Dwight Look College of Engineering???

Your application may have taken months because of the overwhelming number of applicants. Not many of those kids even bother TRYING to get into the engineering school... knowing that they probably will not be admitted, or that the school is too difficult for them, or both.

Once admitted, have you seen the CBK course list these days? Take a look at the grades AND the drop rates. Many of the aspiring engineers never make it through year 1 before droppping. The course work, semester loads, and time required to succeed causes many others to drop the following year.

While I understand that ANY degree at A&M is worthwhile, and the Mays business school is tougher than many other public business schools... comparing it to Dwight Look difficulty-wise is a stretch.

I believe he is referring to getting into an mba program, not undergrad.

getting into a school like mays (or better) as an mba =/ getting in as an undergrad.

And yes, it is indeed harder to get in as an M.B.A. than it is to get into undergrad engineering. That just makes sense, and isn't a knock on engineering...

I did both. They are very different experiences and the relative difficulty is highly subjective. I personally found engineering to be more difficult. MBA was certainly more rewarding.

i think you will find the actual course material is more difficult in engineering, but there will be a cut-throat atmosphere at most mba programs where you will have to work really hard. (no mba yet, but worked with plenty of them while i was at mays.)

What is this crown cork and seal thing yall dread?

Just curious, they were a client of my dad's at one point.


Also my 2 cents.

My sister did biomedical engr as undergrad (tenn) and breezed through law school. (pepperdine). She said that engineering material was more difficult, but you had to devote more time to law school. Quality vs quantity, if that makes sense.

it is a harvard case study that is considered to be standard with all b-schools.

my old roommate was in the mba school at a&m and did his undergrad engineeing at a&m, he was a really big pothead, smoked everyday and was at ng every weekend, he said the mba progam wasnt bad

Engineering undergrad classes were much more difficult.

Oh, and from my experience, the best people to work with (while getting you MBA) are engineers. Their ability to process and grasp new concepts were much better and faster than others. Has to do with the whole "learning to think like an engineer."

engineering must be really tough. those guys still cant figure out how to keep water from puddling on campus sidewalks every time it sprinkles. and its not just old construction... go wade over to the brand new giant ring by the association after a decent shower.

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engineering must be really tough. those guys still cant figure out how to keep water from puddling on campus sidewalks every time it sprinkles. and its not just old construction... go wade over to the brand new giant ring by the association after a decent shower.

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engineering =/= construction contractors

Great thread! Despite a some slight bias, everyone on here seems to have accurate and insightful points. In that tradition, I will add some slightly biased and hopefully insightful points of my own. As a point of reference, I was an engineering undergrad at A&M and am getting my MBA from Columbia right now after working first as an actuary then in internal strategy consulting.

The first response was a great summary, but misses a few major points.

a) Yes, I would say that engineering undergrad classes are, in general, less technically rigorous. The major exceptions I would note are deep financial theory and economic modeling.

b) At a high-level observation, I would say that a top 5 (can we consider Columbia top 5 for the sake of this argument? I am not here to get into that debate) does not have significantly more difficult curriculum than Mays. However, I would not sell short the impact of fellow students and faculty because, really that is THE difference that drives the quality of any school. I have classmates that have done more before they started their MBA than most of us will do with our entire career. Many have already started and sold their own businesses, others sit on boards of directors, over 40% of my class is international, many have already made (and lost?) millions in the finance sector. As for professors, they are outstanding - and if they're not, students will tell administration and they won't last long. Do you think the textbooks are any different between A&M's engineering program and Tech's? No, it's the students and the faculty... not to mention reputation and recruiting. Which brings me to the most important thing about business school.

So, I would take a long hard look at what you want to get out of grad school before making any decision. That means:
- What interests you?
- What experience do you want during school?
- What career do you want after school?

I learned the hard way that while I am capable and interested in deep technical analysis, what I really enjoy is the abstract problem solving then communicating the answer to executives in a way that can be understood and implemented. Believe it or not, there can be a lot of overlap with the skills you get from engineering - but applied much differently.

Also, I love my experience at CBS. I am gone from my apartment from 6 am to midnight (or later) almost every day and I love it. Some days I'm in class/library all day, some days I'm at recruiting events all day, some days I'm "networking" (that's business school talk for "drinking like I'm 18 again" all day. Usually it's a combination of all 3. Business school is a work-hard/ play-hard experience all the way. Don't be fooled, it is extremely competitive, just fun at the same time.

Why so competitive? To get the "dream job". So, what do you want to do with your life?!? There are many industries and companies that only hire from a handful of schools. If you want to work for them, you better go to the right school. Even companies that hire broadly are very focused - they might hire 2 people from McCombs and NYU Stern; 50 from HBS and 40 from Columbia and Wharton (totally making those numbers up, but it is the truth). So, in addition to the rankings, etc. be sure to look at what companies actually hire from each school. That should be a huge driver as to what school you go to, in addition to location and where you get accepted.

It's been said enough on here, but don't even think about applying to a top school without some legit work experience.

Sorry for the biased rant, but I am in the middle of it right now and can honestly say that it is one of the best experiences of my life because I know what I want to do with it. If I just got my MBA because the classes were easier than engineering undergrad, I would be missing out on a lot.

h20poloag,

What kind of work experience did you have when you applied for the MBA program? What engineering were you here at A&M and how were your grades/ GRE?

aw08 - Ok, I feel a little awkward but here's most of what you asked for, plus a little perspective on the application process. Keep in mind that it is a crap shoot with admissions, as I was waitlisted at Columbia and believe I ended up getting in by taking some "personal touch" approaches like getting about 5 alumni and current students (even a couple Aggies) to speak to admissions or write an email. The schools want to be sure that if they accept you that you will enroll. Don't fool yourself, MBA applications is a game that goes far beyond your numbers. The numbers are just a pre-requisite. You also need a bullet proof story and that something extra. Some get in without playing the game, but I needed to jump through hoops.

Major at A&M: Industrial Engineering with minors in Math and Business

Work Exp: 3.5 yrs as pension actuary in Dallas; 1.5 yrs as internal strategy consultant at a major insurance company in NYC (btw, there is a large east coast bias for many top schools)

GPA: I feel a little weird, so I'll just say that it was above 3.50 and below 3.75

GMAT (you don't take the GRE for MBA) : Again, a little weird giving a score, so I'll just say that it was 99th percentile.

b) Harvard is not harder. (Neither is Stanford or Wharton). I know PLENTY of grads from all 3.

A handful of schools have taken the strategy of working their MBA's harder to improve their program's ranking. Those are the "hard" MBA's. Darden comes to mind.

As an TAMU engineering grad, you won't find any MBA program hard.

Good summary H20.

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Yes, I would say that engineering undergrad classes are, in general, less technically rigorous. The major exceptions I would note are deep financial theory and economic modeling.

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True. The in-depth theory courses are typically elective though.

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So, I would take a long hard look at what you want to get out of grad school before making any decision. That means:
- What interests you?
- What experience do you want during school?
- What career do you want after school?

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I agree completely!

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Why so competitive? To get the "dream job". So, what do you want to do with your life?!? There are many industries and companies that only hire from a handful of schools. If you want to work for them, you better go to the right school. Even companies that hire broadly are very focused - they might hire 2 people from McCombs and NYU Stern; 50 from HBS and 40 from Columbia and Wharton (totally making those numbers up, but it is the truth). So, in addition to the rankings, etc. be sure to look at what companies actually hire from each school. That should be a huge driver as to what school you go to, in addition to location and where you get accepted.

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This is very true... yet at the same time it ruffles my feathers a bit. Companies focus on the top schools because they are a target rich environment. The side effect is that there is a serious smugness that is created within the student body (and the public at large). They often think way too highly of themselves and their future profession.

The number of top 10 MBAs I've run into that thought they were going to set the world on fire because they were "special" is staggering. Were they talented...? Sometimes. The catch is that the name is only good enough to get you in the door.

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btw, there is a large east coast bias for many top schools

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As someone who has been at a client in New England for the past 15 months... I agree completely. Their preconceived notions about Texas are unbelievable. My only saving grace is that I have my MBA from a semi-recognizable (west coast) school.

[This message has been edited by AeroAg2003 (edited 10/27/2009 2:49p).]

Aero, it ruffles my feathers too. I'd like to think I've figured out the loophole in the game, but I may be accused of a "can't beat them, join them" attitude. Bottom line is that there is a bias regionally and among specific schools. We see that in every aspect of life, and it comes down to staying true to yourself and not getting caught up in the hype. I may be considered the over-proud Texan up here - wearing cowboy boots, etc. - but whatever. It's better than being aloof.

Very true. There is something to be said for the saying... "If you can't beat them, join them." I went down the same path as you but managed to work my way back to Texas without completely abandoning my post-MBA goals. I got lucky I suppose...

BTW, I'll take CA an their hippies over NE elites any day of the week!

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can we consider Columbia top 5 for the sake of this argument?

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no! just kidding



The competition at a top 3, 7, or 20 business school is nothing to turn a shoulder at like many posters on this thread have. At a top bschool you will be competing against the sons/daughter of people that are often considered the brains of America.

H20,

Would you be willing to shoot me an e-mail? I have some questions and have a very similary background...IE with math and business minors, similar GPA, very similar GMAT, and I am looking at MBA programs right now. I would like to get some outside advice from somebody that has gone through the process. If so, please shoot me an e-mail...

[This message has been edited by stonana (edited 2/10/2012 12:38a).]