“You don’t understand, I have an MBA”

A couple of my co-workers were teasing me yesterday about the FedEx ad which came out a few years back. It features an MBA graduate on his first day in the office. A supervisor asked him to help her with mailing out packages and when he explained that he had an MBA, she responded by saying “well in that case, I will have to show you how to do it.”

 

The ad illustrates the expectations that many MBA students have about their future jobs and their summer internships. When I started my internship, I had similar expectations and remember commenting to someone during my first week that I was surprised at how little MBA skills my internship involved. I have since gathered from further conversations with others that, with the exception of finance jobs, many MBA jobs do not involve a heavy utilization of concepts learned in the classroom.

This surprises me even though it shouldn’t. When I was at AOL, I did not do anything that required using anything I have learned in college. The closest I came to applying microeconomics concepts in the office was using the efficient market theory to explain to a co-worker why guys flock to certain bars (they tend to flock to bars that have a favorable ratio of girls, thus immediately extinguishing the very opportunity they set out to exploit). I even remember the most popular professor at UVA telling a story in class about him doing consulting at a law firm and an attorney saying to him “a high school graduate can do what I do.” The attorney went on to tell him that the only reason a high school graduate could not get hired for his job (which was to read contracts) was because the high school graduate would not take it seriously enough.

I am beginning to understand that most of higher education is not about what you learn but getting the appropriate letters stamped onto your resume so that you can be taken seriously in the job market. As one Kenan-Flagler alum told me at a happy hour at Tyler’s Taproom in Durham two weeks ago when I brought up this topic, an MBA is “the dues you pay to join the club.”

Tags: MBA experience, MBA stereotypes, UVA, economics